Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s very dry up here in northern New England as we haven’t seen any appreciable rainfall for almost two months. We’ve seen so-called ‘Red Flag’ warnings posted for the first time in a long time and no burn permits have been issued. We had a local resident decide he didn’t need to get a permit to burn and despite the high fire danger lit his burn pile. The local FD and police showed up, put out his burn pile which was on the verge of spreading, and cited him for ignoring the warnings. It’s a good thing the fire department was able to prevent any spread because if his burn pile flames had spread he would have been liable for the costs of extinguishing the brush fire he ignited. He would have also been facing jail time, too.

Some folks just don’t get it. Some folks just don’t care.

On top of that we still have a lot of leaves that have fallen and piled up as well as a lot of deadfall that was the result of last April’s Nor’easter which dropped heavy snow that damaged or brought down a lot of trees. That’s a lot of fuel just waiting for something or someone to ignite it. So far we’ve been fortunate and haven’t seen too many brush fires here in New Hampshire. It also looks like we’re in store for a couple of days of soaking rains towards the late part of this week.

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Steve MacDonald over at Granite Grok asks an important question, that being if not voting for Kamala is racist and misogynist.

If you can stand the sound of their voices or the inane things those voices say, there is a collective message to America coming from the left. If you didn’t vote for Kamala, it wasn’t because she was a lousy candidate (one of the worst ever). It isn’t her open embrace of the misery you are experiencing or the potential promise of more of that. You are a racist, a bigot, and perhaps even a misogynist.

I have a quick question for the Left and any Democrat who apes this narrative. Explain the 2020 race for me, please.

In a crowd of twenty-seven aspirants, there were six people of color. One Asian (whom you probably labeled as white), three black men, one Hispanic (not light-skinned), and Kamala Harris. The rest were white men, plus Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, and Lizard Warren (post-admission that she was less of a Native American than you are).

Before the smoke cleared, Democrats picked the oldest, whitest guy on the list. Joe Biden.

Racist? Misogynist? Bigoted?

The Democrats claiming racism and misogyny are pointing to the folks on the Right...but are forgetting the one finger they are pointing towards those they blame is being countered by the three fingers point back at them. There are none so blind as those will not see the faults in themselves and their beliefs.

Kamala was an awful candidate, period. When she ran for president back in 2020 she garnered support of less than 3% of likely Democrat voters and folded her campaign before the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primaries. Nothing really changed between then and 2024 other than her becoming a “poison pill” VP. She was just as vacuous in 2024 as she was in 2020...and even prior to that.

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Is Great Britain returning to Victorian era levels of poverty and hygiene?

Yes. Yes it is and it’s all being done on purpose in the name of the impossible to attain “Net Zero” energy policies.

People can live with wearing smelly, unwashed clothes and bad hygiene – our ancestors lived this way for centuries. But you cannot live without adequate warmth.

Thanks to Net Zero’s skyrocketing energy prices, Britain appears to be well on the way to establishing Victorian England levels of poverty in some communities. The poorest people in Britain have been forced to make a choice, between the humiliation of sending their kids to school in unwashed clothes, or risking their health in even worse ways by providing inadequate food and warmth.

In some ways it is worse today than it was in the late 1800s during Queen Victoria’s reign. At least the Victorian poor were allowed to burn scrap wood for warmth. Most homes in Victorian times had some kind of fireplace or hearth where people could burn wood or whatever else they could get their hands on to stay warm.

Too bad that they are no longer allowed to do so because burning wood is against the UK’s Net Zero policies. Renewable energy was sold on the basis that it was cheaper than ‘regular’ energy. However, the reality has shown that it is anything but. It also isn’t reliable, isn’t dispatchable, and is very weather dependent. Yet the UK has gone heavily into renewables and dialed back on abundant and reliable ‘regular’ energy and it is the poor residents there who are paying the price. This makes me wonder if some faceless and nameless bureaucrat, knowing that it is possible people will die because of this, is thinking like Scrooge that “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

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Is there a nuclear renaissance taking place in New Hampshire? If Governor-elect Kelly Ayotte has her way, the answer is yes.

Goodness knows we need it, particularly in a state that has some of the highest electricity rates in the US, particularly during the winter months.

Ten legislators, including two from the Concord area – Sen. Howard Pearl and Rep. Jose Cambrils – signed on to a piece of preliminary legislation “declaring the development of advanced nuclear energy technology to be in the best interest of the state of New Hamp shire and the United States.”

Ayotte, now the governor-elect, could have a chance to make strides toward nuclear energy with a newly expanded Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a supermajority in the Senate.

“This isn't an immediate play, right?” Ayotte told the Monitor in August. “But we have to position New Hampshire for these new technologies. If we don't think ahead and think forward, then we'll be behind as these newer technologies continue to develop.”

Nuclear power has emerged as a potential option to aid the energy transition; experts say it doesn’t directly produce carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas emissions. During her campaign, Ayotte proposed adding a small-modular nuclear reactor in the North Country, which she said would create jobs and stimulate the region’s economy. New Hampshire currently has one nuclear plant, in Seabrook.

While we do receive more than half of our electricity from Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, the rest comes from a mix of natural gas, hydro, biomass, and coal, in descending order. The natural gas plants have an advantage since they can be brought online quickly, either for peak load handling or for base load. But natural gas is expensive in New England because during the cooler months much of it comes from foreign sources, primarily Trinidad & Tobago, shipped into the natural gas terminal in the Boston area. Rather than being able to use cheap domestic natural gas, New England has to use foreign natural gas because the natural gas pipeline into New England has nowhere near the capacity needed.

What makes things worse is that the one new pipeline project that would have increased the amount of natural gas needed was killed after a well organized opposition movement stopped it. The same happened when not one, not two, but three powerline projects that would have brought clean, renewable, and cheap hydropower into New England from Quebec were also killed. Ironically, many of the same people who protested against all of these projects were the first to complain about how much they’re paying for electricity. I guess they weren’t able to make the connection between their actions and their higher electricity bills. Then again, they rarely connect their actions with outcomes.

Such it is with ‘true believers’ of the climate cult.

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Is Whoopi Goldberg getting a taste of karma?

It seems the bakery on Staten Island Whoopi accused of refusing her service because of her political views did no such thing.

...Whoopi Goldberg suddenly went missing from The View today after the owners of Holtermann’s Bakery on Staten Island came out to tell their side of the story.. They didn’t “refuse” service to Goldberg because of her politics, they had a boiler break down and couldn’t make anything… Holtermann’s has been in business on Staten Island for over 145 years. I seriously doubt they would refuse service to ANYONE as that would not be a type of business model that keeps you in business since the 1800s.

If I were Holtermann’s I would sue Whoopi for defamation and take her for every penny they could get. She let her political beliefs cloud her judgment and either she read something into Holtermann’s not being able to take her order that wasn’t there, or she saw an opportunity to ‘punish’ someone she thought richly deserved it. I would like to think it was the former and not the latter. Or she’s slid so deeply down the Leftist slope that she’s seeing things that aren’t there and ignoring things that go against her viewpoint.

In either case, I lost respect for her a long time ago.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s very dry and we desperately need rain, the nice sunny and (relatively) warm weather continues, and where Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away.

History Is Repeating Itself

We’ve heard this said a number of ways –

“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana

“A generation that ignores history has no past...and no future.” – Robert Heinlein

“History doesn’t repeat itself. It rhymes.” – Albert Einstein

It seems too many today are ignoring a dark period in our history and by doing so are seeing a repeat of a part of that dark history. What am I referring to?

Kristallnacht.

We have seen anti-semitism growing in places it should never see the light of day. It’s in our college campuses. It’s seen at protests by our ignorant Progressive youth. It’s seen in public when mobs of Hamas supporters attack Jews in Amsterdam. It’s seen in Washington DC when the modern day version of ‘Nazis’ smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant on the anniversary of Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass – which took place in Nazi Germany in 1936. It was the start of the pogrom that would see over 6 million Jews methodically murdered in places like Bergen-Belson, Sobibor, Dachau, and Auschwitz, just to name a few of the German death camps. It was the Holocaust.

It seems too many people today are headed towards recreating that hateful time on our history.

On the week of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, rabid pro-Hamas radicals in Amsterdam and the USA are proving that too many Westerners do not know even recent history and are terrifyingly repeating it.

Pogroms in the streets. “Wanted posters” of Jewish intellectuals. Windows shattered on Jewish businesses. Mass protests calling for the genocide of Jews. These are not only scenes from Nazi territories and the Holocaust in the 20th century but from modern-day America and the Netherlands, as well as too many other Western countries. Within living memory of the horrific Nazi Kristallnacht pogroms, we are seeing the same organized antisemitism that led to genocide unfolding before our eyes.

--snip--

Even more dangerously, both before, during, and after the Kristallnacht anniversary, the Netherlands — once a scene of mass arrests and killings of Jews by Nazis — has made international headlines as Muslim migrants and other pro-Hamas rioters launched anti-Jewish attacks. The violence, which began last week with attacks that injured dozens of Israeli soccer fans, grew so horrible in Amsterdam with “Jew hunts” and genocidal chants that they were labeled “pogroms.”

--snip--

Speaking of Westerners who support genocidal jihad, too many U.S. college campi continue to be hotbeds of hatred not only against Israel specifically, but against all Jews. At the New York University of Rochester, pro-Hamas radicals put up “wanted” posters featuring the pictures of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother and other Jewish faculty, according to The Times of Israel on Nov. 13.

One thing that many of the pro-Hamas supporters choose to ignore is that the present Hamas-Israeli war was not started by Israel. It was started by Hamas. They killed over 1700 Israeli citizens on the first day and kidnapped hundreds of others, many who were later murdered by their Hamas captors. Once Hamas realized they were likely to lose they started playing the sympathy card, making sure to show as many casualties as possible, even with Hamas ensuring there were casualties by using so many people ruled by them as human shields to increase the number of dead and wounded. This is a tactic Hamas has used on the past to good effect.

If Hamas wants the war with Israel to end there is an easy way to do that.

Surrender.

But as long as they have the support of the modern version of Nazis, they won’t. The war and hatred will continue.

And history will repeat itself.

Friday Funny (on Saturday) - Anesthesia Truth

I cannot believe I did it yet again. I put the post together, got everything together...and forgot to click on 'Publish'. Imagine my surprise when I opened my Blogger web page and saw it showed my Friday post was in 'Draft' status.

So here goes:

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a quiet weekend, even with the older WP Sister and my Dear Brother up visiting today. We did dine out after church, but even with that it’s been an uneventful weekend. About the only ‘exciting’ thing that took place was the Patriots-Bears game today.

One thing that needs to be done around The Gulch is removal of all of the leaves. They have piled up and even with the efforts of yours truly and my neighbors, there are still far too many to pick up. We do have a landscaper that is supposed to be here with leaf blowers and leaf vacuums to pick up the above average crop of leaves, but so far they haven’t made an appearance. I just hope they’ll get things cleaned up before the first snowfall.

An upcoming event that will help prepare for winter is the trusty RAM 1500’s trip to the body shop. I am trying to stay ahead of the rust, hence the trip to the body shop. This time it will be for two new front fenders as the body shop owners said they could repair them, but that I’d be back in a couple of years to have it done again. While a little more expensive to have them replaced, they should be good for another 10 years. Next year it will be some body work at the rear of the truck next to the tail gate. That should do it for rust.

After its trip to the body shop it will be going to have its annual undercoating taken care of to help hold the rust at bay. I am hoping to get another 10 years out of the pickup. At least it is in good mechanical shape, but then I have been staying on top of the maintenance. About the only thing that will need to be replaced any time in the next few years will be the tires...I hope.

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As a follow up to yesterday’s post there’s this from Ed Driscoll: We Need A Mental Health Checkup On Millions Of American Leftists.

Is something I thought was a send up actually a reflection of reality? Just how many on the Left have had a mental meltdown over the results of the November 5th election?

If this is for real then we have a bigger problem than I thought. What’s worse is that we may not have the mental health resources to deal with it.

==+++==

In light of the blatant and violent antisemitism shown in Amsterdam, I have to agree with Datechguy: This is why we need the 2nd Amendment.

This morning I woke to the news that there were folks in Amsterdam who used the excuse of a soccer match to start a pogrom against Jews:

They’re beaten, kicked, run over, thrown in the river. In one instance, a fan was reportedly held against his will until he said ‘Free Palestine’. When terrorist sympathizers chant globalize the intifada, this is what it looks like. Every one of these are anti-Jewish hate crimes, plain and simple.

The Dutch authorities apparently no longer having the courage or those who fought the Nazis or Michiel de Ruyter are apparently sitting this one out…

I’ve heard some people state “That could never happen here”. They’re wrong. We’ve already seen examples of blatant institutional antisemitism in our colleges and universities. It isn’t all that far for that antisemitism turn into violence, to become another pogrom.

Self defense against such violence is a must and why we must preserve, if not strengthen the 2nd Amendment. The Jews in Amsterdam have no such means to protect themselves. Jews in America do.

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Oh, this is going to work out well...NOT!

Reverse-Discrimination and DEI Now Part of NY State Constitution as Proposition 1 Passes.

The Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) was the first to sound the alarm about Part B of Proposition 1 in NY State, the misleadingly-named Equal Rights Amendment. Under the guise of protecting abortion in NY State — which was not threatened — the Democrat legislature added not only a wide swath of new protected categories such as ‘gender expression’ giving rise to concerns about parents’ rights and girls sports (Part A), but also a completely new Part B that embedded core concepts of reverse-discrimination and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into the constitution.

That someone thought codifying reverse-discrimination and adding the racist concepts of DEI into a state constitution seemed like a good idea completely baffles me. Do the proponents of New York’s Proposition 1 (Part B) think that SCOTUS will let something like that stand considering it is so blatantly unconstitutional? If I had to guess, those supporting Proposition 1 were mostly in the Metro NYC area and along the I-87 corridor to Albany. Those opposing it were mostly outside that area.

As history has shown us, reverse-discrimination does not solve the problem of discrimination. You don’t solve racism by committing reverse-racism. You stop it by not being racist, period. You stop discrimination by not discriminating.

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And this is the (abbreviated) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the leaves are piling up...even more, the last few boats are being pulled from the water, and where I’m still recovering from the long long day of Election Day.

Over The Top?

I have to admit some of the reactions to Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump caught me by surprise. I expected the more usual responses such as disappointment, dismay, some sadness, even some anger. But some reactions I’ve seen go beyond the pale. It makes me wonder if some of them are purposely over-the-top as if to make it seem that we have a dearth of fainting couches. This one in particular had me wondering if the reactions were real or were made just for TikTok.

The first one had me looking for a tranquilizer gun as she appeared to be on the verge of going Hulk, turning green and smashing everything in sight. Some of the others had me watching them again and again to see if their tears were genuine or non-existent.

I’m still not sure.

Some may claim I am not being empathetic to their feelings, but are their feelings real or are they playing it up? If their reactions are real, something I have to question, then they need some help. Seriously. I don’t remember seeing people reacting like this to election results, ever. Is it a new phenomenon or have I been missing people reacting like this over the past 60 years or so?

Friday Funny - Sam Kinison Sings

Thoughts On A Sunday

What a difference a day makes.

Friday was warm and in the 70’s. Yesterday was cool and in the 40’s. This morning it was 31ºF here at The Gulch, the first morning below freezing since this past spring and it will reach the mid 40’s in the afternoon.

It was breezy over the past three days so we saw a lot of leaf fall. Most of the trees have shed their leaves and they are piled up all around The Gulch and the neighborhood. Now that the winds have died down raking will be taking place.

One thing I have done to help with leaf removal, at least from the front rain gutters on The Gulch and a neighbor’s home is purchase a set of ‘leaf grabbers’ that makes it easy to clean out those gutters from the ground, no ladder required. While not perfect for the job, they should suffice for those days when ‘old’ leaves (mostly oak leaves) have clogged the gutters during mid-fall and early/mid spring.

I have also been moving Sterilite containers from my rental storage unit into my garage attic, a few at a time, all in an effort to make the rental unit unnecessary. Hopefully I will have it emptied out before the end of the year. I am expecting to make a big dent in this effort over the Thanksgiving holiday.

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We have left Daylight Savings Time and ‘fallen back’ to Standard Time, something I have come to dislike intensely. Living on the eastern extreme of the Eastern Time Zone means there are days during winter when I start and finish work in the dark. I would prefer to stay on Daylight Savings Time as it works better for us up here in New Hampshire and Maine.

It’s ironic that Standard Time lasts for a little more than 4 months while Daylight Savings lasts 8 months, so why not just stay on DST year round?

Of course there is one group that cares nothing for time zones or time changes, that group being the feline contingent here at The Gulch and elsewhere. They know breakfast time, dinner time, and snack time, none of which have anything to with the time on the clock. I have no doubt the same is true of those with canine members in their households.

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After all the back and forth with people claiming Trump was saying Liz Cheney should be executed, there’s this from someone who doesn’t like Trump at all:

Folks, Trump didn't threaten to execute Liz Cheney. He actually was calling her a chickenhawk, something liberals said about her for ages.

Look at the context — Trump is talking about giving her a weapon. Typically, people put in front of firing squads aren't armed.

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained in her face.”

“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right in the mouth of the enemy,’” he added.

That’s quite a bit different from what the MSM, the DNC, and the rest of The Usual Suspects have been trying to sell to the electorate. But then what’s new about that?

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This is a comment I posted to this Instapundit post about missing mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania:

As best I have been able to determine, we are one of the only nations using mail-in voting. Other countries used it and abandoned it because there was too much fraud. Why anyone thought this was a good idea baffles me...unless of course that what The Powers That Be in the DNC wanted and are using it to generate massive distrust of the voting system so they can get rid of voting altogether.

One of the other commenters added this:

France banned mail-in voting in 1975 – due to fraud.

Mexico banned mail-in voting in 1992 – due to fraud.

Belgium banned mail-in voting in 2018 – due to fraud.

Sweden does not permit mail-in voting.

Italy does not permit mail-in voting.

Ukraine does not permit mail-in voting.

Russia does not permit mail-in voting.

Japan does not permit mail-in voting.

No Middle Eastern country permits mail-in voting.

No Latin country permits mail-in voting.

So why is the US using mail-in voting when we know it’s biggest ‘plus’ is that it makes it easier to commit voting fraud? It makes no sense to me...unless one of the major political parties wants it so they can commit voter fraud as needed in order to ensure they remain in power.

Mail-in voting isn’t legal in my home state. It was used once, illegally, when the New Hampshire Secretary of State ‘allowed’ it during Covid even though he had no such power to do so. Only our legislature, with the consent of the governor, can do so and that isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

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Yeah, I’d say this is a sure bet.

If Trump wins the popular vote watch the Left suddenly sour on the National Popular Vote Compact.

I have been arguing for an awful lot of years that the National Popular Vote Compact is an attempt to disenfranchises votes of individual states so that elections can be fixed on a national level.

The left has pooh poohed this and deep blue states like California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, New York, Illinois, Vermont, Connecticut and yes disgracefully my state of Massachusetts went along and signed this idiocy sure and secure in the knowledge that no Republican would every be popular enough and no Democrat so unpalatable enough that it would bite them in the ass.

--snip--

Now I still maintain that this disenfranchises individual states but I have a feeling if the Kamala collapse continues I will suddenly find a lot of leftists from an awful lot of blue states and a ton of media will suddenly have my back and rush to the Supreme Court to have all of these laws stuck down. The irony of course is that I expect all three liberal judges will be with me on this one at the very least.

Now with Kamala collapsing so badly that the Washington Post and LA Times won’t endorse her it might be moot so I don’t know if this will be the result but if it is, it will be glorious!

If it doesn’t work for them then why would they want to keep pushing it. The Founders understood about the dangers of democracy, of the tyranny of the majority, and set up Congress and the Electoral College to keep the big states from dominating the small states.

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From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any More Desperate” Department comes this gem from New York Governor Kathy Hochul (Clueless – NY):

New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently appeared on MSNBC and said that if you vote Republican, you’re anti-woman and anti-American.

It has been amazing in this election cycle, how Democrats have become so comfortable insulting and degrading their fellow Americans for the crime of disagreeing with them.

Their deranged rhetoric makes them look very desperate, like they know they’re losing.

This from someone who believes in lawfare, doesn’t believe in the Constitution, and thinks that if we don’t vote for someone based purely on their race or sex that we’re racists and/or sexists...and anti-American?

What an idjit…

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where boats are still being pulled out of the water, and where I’ll be spending all day Tuesday working at the polls.

Are The October Jobs Numbers A Death Knell For The Harris Campaign?

Remember the job numbers for September the Harris campaign touted to show just how well Bidenomics is working? My first thought was “How much will those job numbers be revised downwards?” Jobs number revisions usually occur about 2 months after the release, so we can look forward to the September jobs number revision in December. However, we may not need to wait that long considering the dismal October job numbers that were released yesterday.

US hiring slowed significantly last month, in what marked the weakest jobs growth reported under President Joe Biden.

Friday’s downbeat employment update, released just days before the US election, revealed just 12,000 non-farming jobs were added in October, down from 223,000 a month earlier.

This marked the slowest rate of growth since late 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analysts blamed the impact of hurricanes and strike action at Boeing.

While hiring slowed, America’s unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.1pc.

The closely watched report will be sure to draw scrutiny from both presidential candidates before next Thursday’s election, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump battle to convince voters of their ability to improve the economy.

The administration was expecting job growth to be around 121,000 new jobs, but the preliminary numbers for October are a tenth of that. Kamala Harris is going to have a tough time explaining those numbers away and certainly can’t blame Trump for them. They certainly won’t be revised until January, two months after the election is in the history books. But I figure the Harris campaign will do its best to lay the blame on Trump somehow since it looks like its attempted smear of Trump regarding his comments about Liz Cheney has backfired big time.

One has to wonder what the Harris campaign will try next considering the election is three days away. Considering the crap that was thrown at Trump in 2016 and 2020, nothing would really surprise me.

Friday Funny - Dysfunctional Family

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s more like real fall weather around here, or so it’s been for the past few days and will be for the next couple of days. We might actually see overnight temps below freezing on Monday and Tuesday. However, it will warm up again and we’ll be back into temps in the upper 60’s. The foliage is well past peak, with the reds, oranges, and yellows turning brown. The leaves have been falling in increasing numbers, both the streets and our rain gutters filling with the those leaves. (I had to empty the gutters both at The Gulch and at a neighbor’s home. I both cases it was just the front gutters as the rear gutters are above the second floor, not readily reachable, and are covered with leaf guards to prevent leaves from filling them.)

Will we be seeing snow here soon? That doesn’t seem to be the case, at least here at the lake. But up north there may be some, but not enough that will accumulate or cause traffic issues. That’s fine with me. We’ll be seeing snow soon enough.

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Two downsides to the cooler temperatures have been the need to turn on the heat – mostly to take the chill off in the morning – and the tire pressure monitors on cars and trucks tripping because tire pressures have dropped. (The latter happened to both the WP Mom’s car and the trusty RAM 1500, requiring me break out the Official Weekend Pundit Air Compressor and Official Weekend Pundit Tire Pressure Gauge this morning.)

Heating season has started thought it’s going to be on-and-off for the next month or so. One of the things I like about The Gulch is that it is pretty efficient when it comes to heating and cooling. It costs a lot less to heat than The Manse, even with higher fuel prices and the fact that quite a bit of the heat for The Manse was coming from a woodstove. There are a couple of things I need to do to make The Gulch even more efficient – replacing two casement windows on the second floor and replacing the slider leading out to the porch with something better.

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Now this is just weird: Japanese village struggling with low population creates life-sized dolls to mimic feeling of bustling society.

To paraphrase what was written on Instapundit, it sounds like something out of a Twilight Zone episode.

The hamlet of Ichinono, which has less than 60 residents and only one child, is trying to fill the void with stuffed mannequins, which they dress up and place around the community — and even pose on swings and bicycles.

“We’re probably outnumbered by puppets,” 88-year-old resident Hisayo Yamazaki told AFP.

Yamazaki explained that although older inhabitants there had children, they encouraged them to attend college away from the tiny community about an hour northwest of Kyoto.

“We were afraid they would become unmarriageable if they remained stuck in a remote place like this,” she told the outlet.

“Out they went, and they never came back, getting jobs elsewhere. We’re now paying the price.”

Is this a preview of what we might experience in the US in the future as our birthrate is collapsing, already below the so-called replacement rate and heading downwards? Will this happen in our towns in the future or will we merely add to the number of ghost towns and depopulated sections of cities like Detroit?

Twilight Zone indeed.

==++++==

Is the Left blocking access to early voting sites as a means of suppressing voters in a deep red area? It appears so.

The havoc wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina brought disaster to homes and families, but that has not stopped Democrats from blocking the approval of emergency early voting sites in the heavily Republican area. The refusal to act forced the GOP-led state legislature to intervene.

Democrat-run local elections boards in McDowell and Henderson counties have failed to approve additional early voting sites in the disaster-stricken area, despite increasing calls for more access to voting. Both counties voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

“Ensuring the right to vote is upheld for western NC citizens devastated by Hurricane Helene should be a non-partisan issue,” western North Carolina native Clay McCreary said, according to The Carolina Journal. McReary is North Carolina political director of Restoration of America, an organization that has been advocating for additional voting opportunities in the disaster area. “We simply cannot allow the people of western North Carolina who have lost so much to lose their voice in the political process.”

Ironically, in adjacent deep-blue counties Democrats have already taken measures to ensure there are new voting locations to replace the ones damaged by Hurricane Helene. Seems like a double standard to me.

==++++==

In a related post it appears Democrats are also trying to intimidate black voters. A Democrat Super PAC is running ads in cities with large black populations warning them that “their voter files are public.”

One of the ads, funded by Future Forward PAC, gives the false impression that it is aired by a government agency called the "National Voter Report." The ad begins with an "election alert" with the words "Who you vote for is private, but IF you vote is public information. After this election, your voter record will be updated, and your friends and family will be able to see how often you vote."

There is no federal or state law that compels U.S. citizens to vote. Although states keep a record of which elections individual voters participated in, such information is often difficult or confusing for the average person to access.

The more-than-$500,000 ad campaign appears to be targeted exclusively at various metropolitan areas, according to data obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The bulk of the ads are airing in the Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee markets.

It’s interesting that the ads are running in cities in swing states. Are these ads a means of forcing black voters to the polls even if they don’t want to vote? Is there a subtext to these ads, that subtext being “We’ll also know how you voted and if you don’t cast a vote for the correct candidates we’ll make sure everyone knows it”?

Charming.

==++++==

Every Republican President is Hitler.

Who knew?

==++++==

November 5th is ten days away and I’ll be glad when all of this campaign madness is over. I have a feeling a lot of people agree with me.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the leaves are falling in increasing numbers, almost all of the boats are now out of the water, and where Monday is returning...yet again.

I'm Getting Tired Of It All. How About You?

I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait for November 5th to come and go. I am sick to death of the increasingly hostile and violent rhetoric, the purposeful ‘interpretation’ of facts to make it seem actions taken by one’s political opponent appear to be the opposite and malicious rather than benign. The political ads have devolved down to the “ ‘He/She’s a poopyhead!’ ‘No! She/He’s a poopyhead!’ ” level of intellect.

In the presidential race it has fallen to the level where the Harris campaign has resurrected and expanded the “Trump is literally Hitler!!” meme, falling prey to Godwin’s Law. If Trump was “literally Hitler”, then why didn’t he do Hitler-like things during his Presidential term? It’s only now that it looks like Harris’s campaign in trouble that she goes that route. If her campaign is in trouble, then her hopes to turn the US into a Stalinesque state by doing away with the U.S. Constitution, starting with the First and Second Amendments, is also in trouble. (Yes, the previous is political rhetoric...but it doesn’t mean there’s not a bit of truth in there somewhere.)

A similar problem exists at lower level races. I know I see it at the Congressional level, Gubernatorial level, State Legislature – House and Senate – level, and County level. It is particularly hot in the Governor’s race with the campaigns going at each other “hammer and thong”, having devolved to the “ ‘She’s a poopyhead!’ ‘No! She’s a poopyhead!’ ” level. Surprisingly the race for New Hampshire’s two seats in the House of Representatives in Washington has been pretty benign. It’s pretty much the same for the State Legislature and County races.

While neither US Senate seat is up for election during this cycle, both of New Hampshire’s present US Senators, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, are former governors of our state. The GOP gubernatorial candidate, Kelly Ayotte, is a former US Senator and former New Hampshire Attorney General. There’s a certain symmetry to this.

Thank goodness November 5th is less than two weeks away.

As for me, I will be working at the polls in our town that day. We are expecting a better than 80% voter turnout. We’ve seen an approximately 85% voter turnout over the past two Presidential elections, and with this election being as contentious as it has been, I wouldn’t be surprised if see closer to 90% turning out to vote.

Friday Funny (Saturday Edition) - Explaining Golf

I didn't realize it was Friday yesterday until I woke up this morning and saw the Saturday paper waiting for me. It was a busy week and I lost track of what day it was. But better a day late than not at all, right?



About the only thing funnier was Robin Williams explaining haggis.