7/23/2017

Thoughts On A Sunday

No post last night as it was a busy day and I realized I hadn’t written anything just as I was heading up the stairs to bed. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen now and then. This was one of those times.

Part of the day included a trip to the WP In-Laws as it had been a while since I had seen them, having been laid up over the winter and early spring. The trip also allowed me to show off the new Ram 1500. (‘New’ is a relative term as the truck is a 2014 model. The last time I bought a new vehicle was in 1995. Every one since then has been a used vehicle.)

Between my regular Saturday chores and the three-hour round trip for my visit little time was left to do anything other than feed the feline contingent here at The Manse and go to bed.

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Oh, yeah, this will play well in West.

North Korea has opened a tourism website. As the news article posits, what’s their catch phrase for the tourist trade?

“You’ll never want to leave — and may not be able to.”

I expect our Progressive brethren to sign up in droves so they can get first had experience in running a Stalinist state. The only problem I can see they might have is resolving the paradox of totalitarian rule that suppresses all religion and their support for a religion that is all about suppressing freedom, particularly the rights of women, believes in slavery, and has no problem killing anyone (including Progressives) because they are infidels.

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This observation by Ed Driscoll is spot on:

“You condemn yourself to a life of misery when you make politics your religion.”

This quote is in relation to an article he linked about how Trump’s election victory ruined a bisexual wedding.

The woman in the article needs and intervention, or maybe some time in her local mental institution to help her reconnect with reality.

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A friend at work slammed President Trump about wasting time and being so caught up in the Russia controversy that he hasn’t kept any of his campaign promises or accomplished anything. Not that he’s a supporter of Trump. He’s anything but, being an almost-progressive stooge. (I have been working with him and showing him alternative media outlets that don’t play to the line the DNC-MSM has been putting forth for over a year.)

I did mention to him that the whole “Russia controversy” is something only the DNC-MSM has been pushing and that most Americans are more concerned about health care. Russia isn’t even number two on their list.

But now I can point him to Trump’s actual accomplishments that the DNC-MSM outlets he usually peruses doesn’t (and won’t) cover. I will warn him that it comes by way of Fox News, but I can also point him to government websites that cover proposed and passed/signed legislation and executive orders that aren’t beholden to any news media.

President Trump has signed more than 40 bills and nearly 40 executive orders on everything from health care to energy, infrastructure and more.

While the previous administration turned to federal agencies to enact its agenda, President Trump has signed more laws to slash through federal red tape than any president in American history and has saved businesses up to $18 billion a year in costs.

A lot of those businesses mentioned above aren’t big conglomerates, but small businesses that were being buried under increasingly burdensome (and costly) regulations, eating deeply into profit margins and threatening their very existence. Most of those regulations don’t actually do anything except allow the government to intrude more deeply into business. They serve no real or needed purpose. (I can speak from experience as the small business Deb and I owned in the past became more troublesome to run because we had to spend increasing amounts of time and money dealing with government regulations paperwork. That meant we had less time to actually operate our business even as we saw our profits being eaten up by the costs of complying with all of those nonsensical regulations.)

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Due out in August: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and later, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps why they are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

With interactions becoming more electronic and less face-to-face, is it all that surprising that ‘iGen’ is suffering from the aforementioned anxiety, depression, and loneliness?

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First, the over-the-top municipal bureaucrats work to kill off kids’ lemonade stands, something kids have been doing for generations.

Now they’re making pet sitting illegal in New York City.

This is one of those “WTF?” moments. This is yet another example of government overregulation. Thanks goodness that type of asinine sickness hasn’t reached too far outside of the urban areas. (Yes, I know some suburban areas are doing the same stupid things, but most of them are located next to Big Blue Cities.) Were something that stupid happen here we’d see a major change in the makeup of the state legislature and a new occupant in the governor’s office.

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As David Starr asks, “A Jaguar SUV?”

My comment to his post dealt with the “British ‘movie bad guy’” and that they won’t use a black Escalade. Why not a Jaguar SUV?

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Despite all of the temperature data tweaking and ‘fixes’ to the climate models, none of them track what has actually been happening or been able to “reproduce even the most fundamental cycles.”

Under those circumstances how can anyone use to them to predict what the climate will be like 83 years from now. On top of that how can anyone in good conscience base policies and regulations upon those same defective climate models? Or are the warmists using the much abused Precautionary Principle as an excuse to push draconian measures ‘just in case’?

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I find the claim that 22 million Americans will lose their health insurance if the GOP health care reform plan passes to be disingenuous at best. But of course the media and pro-ObamaCare folks are playing it up to the max.

But one thing you never hear about are the millions of Americans who are paying through the nose for health insurance they cannot use. A family member is in that boat, paying $12,000 a year for insurance and a huge deductible ($6,000, if I recall correctly), meaning the family member has to shell out $18,000 before their health insurance kicks in. That’s thousands of dollars more than they had to pay prior to ObamaCare kicking in. Please remind me, what was the promise of ObamaCare again? Something about saving $2500 a year in premiums?

What has really happened is the 22 million Americans receiving health insurance through ObamaCare are having their insurance coverage paid for by Americans like my family member. They pay and pay and get nothing in return. In effect, they lost their health insurance but still have to pay. How many are doing so? If I had to guess, at least 22 million Americans.

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Vigilantism, California-style.

Heavy rains caused potholes in Santa Cruz County, CA – potholes which the local government doesn’t have the funds to fix. The local government officials told the residents to “be patient” and have said the repairs could take more than a year to finish.

Residents got tired of the delay and the lack of solid answers so they decided to fix the potholes themselves.

Of course, the citizen led solution doesn’t sit well with government officials.

Of course not. The dysfunctional county government can’t fix the potholes because they don’t have the money. The roads are deteriorating faster than the county can repair them. The citizens are tired of seeing their cars and trucks being damaged by the unrepaired roads yet have been told by the county that they won’t be fixed any time soon. The citizens go out and fix them themselves. The county goes apoplectic and complains that “We can’t have people running out into traffic and filling up potholes by themselves. It just could end up impeding our efforts to actually fill more potholes if we end up getting sued because we’re letting people do this.”

They’re going to get sued if they don’t fix the roads, particularly if someone gets hurt or killed because they roads haven’t been fixed. The people are performing functions the county government can no longer perform and the people are being slammed for it.

This is a form of vigilantism I can get behind.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been glorious, the boating has been great, and where we’ll be assaulted by yet another Monday.