4/16/2017

Thoughts On A Sunday

It is Easter Sunday and we've been blessed with excellent weather – warm, breezy, and sunshine with temps in the upper 70's.

One of the WP Sisters made the trip up from the People's Republic of Massachusetts for the weekend, allowing a mini-WP Clan gathering.

All in all, it's been a good weekend.

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Why doesn't this surprise me in the least?

Twenty-one arrested as hundreds of Trump supporters and counter protesters clash at Berkeley rally.

As one tweet stated, “The utterly predictable consequence of 'punching Nazis' as a strategy.” This is particularly true when the so-called “Nazi punchers” are themselves the Nazis despite their claim to be antifascist. It seems most of the antifascists seen running away in the distance are dressed in black.

Kind of ironic, eh?

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This is what can only be termed Nuclear Grade Stupidity.

Do these people actually believe that the very teachers, diplomats, 'culture', and aid they're demanding to be sent will turn ISIS or the Taliban away from their jihad? It is far more likely the teachers will be killed or sold into slavery, the diplomats will be gruesomely executed (seen on HD video), the 'culture' will be destroyed as “un-Islamic” and the aid will be taken by the jihadis and used for their purposes, that being buying more weapons.

The one thing that I find that is true about many of the people who believe that all that's needed to fix things in ISIS or Taliban held areas are those teachers, diplomats, 'culture' and aid have never been out of the US and their only exposure to other cultures is a visit to one of their local ethnic food restaurants.

Then again, for them it's all about feelz and not real life. They believe that everyone else, including those working so hard to destroy Western Civilization, believe exactly the same things they do. Too bad for the rest of us that it just isn't true.

(H/T Pirate's Cove)

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I've seen this before and I expect I'll see it again and again.

Some Times It's You.

I recall once having lunch with a female colleague who was complaining vociferously for the millionth time about not advancing fast enough in the corporation. Her boss was a misogynist, he was always giving the best projects to the men in her department – who only had engineering degrees while she held both an engineering degree and a law degree – both from the University of Michigan!

She had embraced the sisterhood of the traveling victims society long before it was so lucrative. Apparently mistaking me for a member of her sisterhood she seethed on and on about all the unfair exclusionary behavior her boss and male colleagues practiced, including never inviting her to join them for lunch. This was not a problem I encountered in my own department; not to boast, but I was a pretty popular lunch companion and in fact had passed up an invite to our Friday staff lunch in order to honor my prior commitment to Ms. Wendy of the Unwavering Whine.

So perhaps her complaint about never being invited to join the boys reminded me that I was missing the beer, pizza, jokes and good natured camaraderie that comprised Friday lunches back in the day. Whatever the reason, her complaint drew a rather direct (and, I acknowledge, probably insensitive) response: I heard myself saying to her  “maybe it’s nothing as pernicious as misogyny, maybe they just don’t like you.”  I can still see the stunned look on her face; she was a beautiful woman and quite smart but totally tone deaf to anyone other than herself. As a result she was quite lacking in the social graces.  I suspect nobody had ever spoken to her so bluntly in her entire life.

I once had a co-worker much like that. All she did was complain about how things were done differently where she had worked previously, that we were doing it (whatever 'it' was) wrong, that her co-workers weren't friendly, that it seemed all we wanted to do was work (while at work, something we were being paid handsomely to do), and that no one wanted to hang out with her outside of work. Like the aforementioned Ms. Wendy of the Unwavering Whine, the problem wasn't our employer or our co-workers, it was her. She was one of those toxic personalities that set everyone else on edge, was a total buzzkill in social settings, and did nothing but complain.

Her supervisor eventually suggested that she seek employment elsewhere and sent her on her way...just like voters this past November sent Hillary on her way.

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North Korea suffered a failed launch of yet another one of their ballistic missiles.

The Norks keep telling us they'll rain nuclear fire on the US, but one has to wonder it's merely bluster of if they believe their own propaganda.

Assuming they were able to launch a few nukes towards the US, do they think we wouldn't retaliate ten-fold or a hundred-fold and reduce North Korea to a radioactive wasteland? We wouldn't even need to launch missiles from the US mainland. A single US SSBN sitting somewhere in the Pacific Ocean could do that.

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It is said in the Bible that the 'Wages of Sin are Death.” But what are the wages of someone whose minimum wage job are raised to $15/hour? That's easy:

ZERO.

Not long after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law that will raise New York's minimum wage to $15 and 12 weeks of paid family leave, all of the food workers at one of the SUNY community colleges were laid off and were being replaced by food dispensing machines as a cost savings measure.

Call it yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play to bite the Progressive Policymakers in the ass.

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#Calexit is still a topic in California, with the Progressive coastal elite pushing for secession from the US.

However, before that happens it is likely some parts of the Golden State are working to separate themselves from California because they are sick and tired of being unrepresented in Sacramento and bullied by the ultra-Left Progressives in coastal California.

Efforts have been underway since before World War II to break off more than a dozen rural counties and combine them with a chunk of southern Oregon to form Jefferson, the nation’s 51st state.

The impetus is the same that drives backers of secession: the notion of a far-off government (in this case, Sacramento) ignoring local sentiments and a sense of being outnumbered and outvoted by a population whose social and political views are at odds with the prevailing (in this instance, conservative) culture. The proposed flag — a pair of Xs, or double cross — captures the animating sentiment.

“We really don’t have fair representation,” said Terry Rapoza, 67, a leader of the Jefferson movement in Shasta County...

He cited recent passage of a 10-year, $52-billion road repair and transportation bill; the hike in gas taxes, he said, will have much less impact in urban California than in rural stretches, where people might drive 20 miles to the grocery store, or a dozen miles to pick up their mail.

The rural areas of California, including much of the state's interior, have been marginalized by the Democrat's grip on the state Assembly and Senate for decades. Initiatives to remove dams in northern California may have sounded great to the tree-huggers in San Francisco, but caused havoc to people who needed the water in the northern parts of the state. Irrigation and process water was no longer available. Instead, it flowed into the ocean unimpeded. Taxes and fees that the coastal denizens shrug off cause hardship for those living inland. Laws that have little impact on urban areas generate even greater hardships in the rural area, but for no good reason other than some dimwitted Progressive thought it might make them feel better for having “Done Something” even though there was no 'something' that needed doing.

Better to break up California first, then let the coastal elite have their way with their remaining enclaves. Somehow I doubt we'll miss them all that much.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the warm weather has returned, boats are being shorn of their winter covers, and where Monday has once again returned all too soon.