9/24/2017

Thoughts On A Sunday

Here it is, late September, but we're seeing mid-summer weather, with sunny skies, temps in the upper 80's and lower 90's, and higher humidity. This is the type of weather I expected for August. (August was more like September this summer.) So maybe Mother Nature is making up for the cool August temperatures by gracing us with August weather now. I'm certainly not complaining.

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I've been a fan of the NFL for most of my life. My two favorite teams are the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. But I have to admit that I have seen my enthusiasm for the NFL has been waning the league has made changes the fans don't like all, but particularly because the SJW disease has been infecting the league, all with the tacit approval of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodel. It appears I am not the only one with such growing dislike of the NFL.

But even if I hook up the old satellite dish again here in my rural New England community, I still wouldn't watch pro football now that the NFL and some of its players have injected racial politics into a sport that, more than any other, pioneered on-field integration and got white America cheering for black athletes.

Now they're making the NFL politically unpalatable. I don't know about you, but if I want to be preached to, I go to church. If I want to hear political opinion/points of view I watch TV or go to rallies or protests. I don't expect anyone at my place of work to do either, nor would I do that where I work. That's what these athletes are doing – protesting at their place of work and doing so on my dime (and that of all the other fans). I don't care what they do once they're off the field or the court.

For more backlash against the now politicized NFL, read these reactions left on Twitter.

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Legal Insurrection posts about the trend of blue-staters moving to red states and slowly converting them to blue states.

I've certainly seen that here in New Hampshire, where folks from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York move here to get away from all of the high taxes and government overreach, then start pushing for the same things here as back where they came from. They don't understand (or worse, don't care) that all of these things are what created the very conditions they came here to flee.

One of my neighbors, a dyed-in-the-wool Massachusetts Democrat who moved up here a few years ago, decried the lack of sidewalks and paved bike trails in our little rural town. So I asked him who would pay for all of those sidewalks and bike trails? His answer: Either state should pony up the cash or we should raise property taxes to pay for them.

Who would be the first to complain about the rising property taxes if he got his way? Exactly! There was a big disconnect between the 'nice-to-haves' and the means to pay for them. This is something too many of the folks “from away” have in common.

We do have sidewalks in one section of our town, that being the historical district. Those were paid for with private funds raised by the kids of our elementary school as a project. The sidewalks made it safer for the school kids to walk to and from schools and to the library, historical society, community fields, and the village general store. Not a penny of state money was involved. The town's Department of Public Works did some of the engineering and oversaw the project, but that was the limit of the town government's involvement.

While the post and one or two of the comments show New Hampshire being a Blue State, I have to disagree. It is more purple at the moment, with a GOP majority in the NH House, Senate, Executive Council, and Governor. While our congressional delegation are all Democrats, one of them – Senator Maggie Hassan – won by only 432 votes and there were questions about possible voter fraud in the town of Durham, which houses the University of New Hampshire. A lot of out-of-state students registered to vote on election day but never legally established residency, meaning their votes could have been considered fraudulent. Regardless, I have a feeling that our next set of elections in 2018 may see the balance of the congressional delegation shift from 4 Democrats, to 3 Republicans and 1 Democrat. Would we still be considered a Blue State at that point?

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It's not often one hears from the First Lady, but her address the UN General Assembly hit the nail right on the head.

“Show me the loving bonds between your families today and I will show you the patriotism and moral clarity of your nation tomorrow. Our choices on how we raise and educate our children in fact provide the blueprint for the next generation. If we do not advocate a love of country to our children and generations to come, then why would our children grow up to fight for their countries?”

Indeed.

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One more link from GraniteGrok, this being a perfect example of life after an EMP attack, the example being Puerto Rico after first Irma and then Maria devastated the island.

No power for between 4 and 6 months. Infrastructure all but useless without it. Few means to deal with the crisis.

Not a pretty picture.

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At the opening of the New England Patriots-Houston Texans game a dozen Patriots players knelt during the national anthem. What's worse is that Bob Kraft, owner of the Patriots, excused this behavior in a statement while not seeing the hypocrisy in his statement about “sports bringing people together while politics divides them.” Yet politics were there right on the field.

On the other side of the field all of the Houston Texans stood for the anthem, linked arm in arm.

Either Kraft or Belichik should suspend or fire the players that knelt. Goodness knows if something like that happened while Vince Lombardi coached the Green Bay Packers, he would have marched into the locker room, emptied the offending players' belongings from their lockers, and fired them on the spot.

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And speaking of politics, here's a story from Adrienne's Corner that highlights a woman who loses it because a veteran's service dog is in a restaurant.

A U.S. military veteran brought his service dog into a Delaware City, Del., restaurant last week, and Ciara Miller was one patron who wasn’t having it. She was caught on camera screaming and swearing at the veteran and the restaurant establishment for allowing the service dog to be inside the eatery. 

The dog was wearing an official service jacket which read, “PTSD Service Dog,” and bore service animal emblems of the U.S. military.“I’m leaving because the food is nasty and there’s a dog!” Miller screamed while being filmed.

An restaurant employee can be heard in the video telling the woman that the man she was disrespecting is a veteran who “fought for our country.” 

“Congratulations!” Miller screams. “My husband’s dad did, too. What’s your point? My husband’s dad fought for the f***ing country! So what? It’s still nasty to me! I don’t care!”

As if her father-in-law's service somehow brought gravitas in her rant. Some people just don't get it. Certainly this selfish harridan doesn't. Hopefully she'll never darken that restaurant's doorway again as the don't need customers like that.

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Stuart Schneiderman delves into the issue of marriage, and specifically in regards to one specific woman. As he asks as part of his post, “Do you want to be a wife?” As Schneiderman writes in regards to the young woman in question:

Of course, GA does not understand marriage. Self-love, the kind of narcissistic self-absorption that the therapy culture is doling out in dollops is precisely what you should not bring into a marriage.

And yet, in our deviant culture, more and more people, infused with the gospel of self-esteem, think that marriage should be a therapeutic journey toward self-actualization.

As any of us older people know, marriage is not “ a therapeutic journey toward self-actualization.” It is much more. Continues Schneiderman:

Getting married means becoming a wife and functioning as same. If GA and her friends do not understand that the role comes with rules and obligations, duties and responsibilities to other people, they will inevitably fail at marriage. Their failures will breed resentment and that, in and of itself, will throw a damp blanket over their desire.

Back in the day, when women consulted with me because they wanted to get married, I used to ask them a simple question: Do you want to be a wife? Often enough, they were horrified by the question. They took grievous offense. Their looks seemed to say, What kind of woman do you think I am?

Today’s younger generation, having imbibed the dual elixirs of psycho self-esteem and of feminist ideology, has gotten marriage wrong. Young women are acting like mistresses within a context that requires them to be wives.

I have overheard many a conversation amongst young women talking about relationships and marriage and just about every one of them I've overheard had either no concept what marriage was or had unrealistic expectations about the role they would be filling. In a lot of cases they weren't really looking for a husband, but for a sugar-daddy with deep pockets. (Most of these conversations I overheard took places in metropolitan areas – in airports, convention centers, train stations, and restaurants as well as on planes, trains, and buses.) Few of them truly seemed to understand what marriage was all about.

They were setting themselves up for disappointment and unhappiness.

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And that's the news from toasty and humid Lake Winnipesaukee, where the boating weather is just perfect, the summerfolk are mostly gone, and only we fortunate enough to live here continue to enjoy the lake now that we have it for ourselves.