5/15/2011

Thoughts On A Sunday

All outside work has stopped at The Manse for the time being. With rain since yesterday early evening and forecasts saying we'll have rain all week, the chances to do much of anything outside has dwindled to almost zero.

But even if there were no rain, the black flies are out in force this spring, making it uncomfortable to be outdoors for any great length of time. Those little bloodsuckers bite and it hurts like heck. What's worse is that their bites can easily get infected and trouble you for days afterwards. Even Deep Woods Off doesn't keep them away for long.

It's been a wet spring and that means there's plenty of running water, which black flies need to reproduce, unlike mosquitoes which require stagnant water. I expect we'll also see a bumper crop of mosquitoes as well once the rains clear out.

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As if we weren't expecting this.

Eric the Viking links to and comments upon reports that both Medicare and Social Security will go broke sooner than the government's original projections.

I always thought their predictions were optimistic at best, ignoring the increasing imbalance between those paying into the system and those collecting benefits. Of course if the government hadn't 'borrowed' the Social Security funds to pay for all kinds of other government spending back in the 60's and 70's, replacing them with worthless IOU's, Social Security wouldn't be in the position it is now.

It's times like this that make me wish I could find a replacement flux capacitor to fix my WAYBAC machine so I could go back in time and tell those Congressional morons to leave the funds alone.

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Oh, I wish I had the bal..uhh...stones to say something like this to the TSA jerks at the airport security checkpoints!

(H/T Scary Yankee Chick)

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David Starr has a breakdown of the $4 billion oil industry tax break, showing it isn't what Obama and his Congressional hacks say it is. And from what little reading I've done on the matter, it isn't something companies like Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, or other big oil firms receive in any case.

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This just in: Osama bin Laden is still dead.

Other reports say he had a rather large porn stash at his hideout as well.

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Cubachi tells us Herman Cain is taking a different tack that Obama, claiming “Being number 2 is not in our DNA.”

The more I listen to Cain and read about him, the more I like the guy.

I prefer to think of him as the anti-Obama.

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My second favorite Texan, Kathleen McKinley, points us to an article about this perpetual war we find ourselves in.

As Kathleen writes:

While reading it, I realized that both sides have their own reasons for going to war or intervening around the world. Since the internet, we now get a real sense of what people are going through in other countries. I know I have been riveted on twitter to tweets from Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya.

--snip--

What does this mean for us? Will we continue to war over all the world’s conflicts? Even those that do not affect us? It’s a question we need to ask.

Indeed.

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While some folks struggle with trying to convince us global warming is All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans, there are others hoping that it is indeed true the world is warming because it will make their homeland more livable, just as it was a thousand years ago.

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First, they go after Boeing and the state of South Carolina. Now they're going after the state of Arizona and a not-yet enforced law that guarantees secret ballots for unionization votes. “They” are, of course, the NLRB.

As one commenter from Arizona put it, “We need to eliminate the NLRB. It’s become nothing more than a taxpayer-funded litigation arm of big unions.”

It smells more and more like the old Mob protection rackets institutionalized into government working at the behest of and to the advantage of the union bosses.

(H/T Instapundit)

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Is conservative talk radio dead? It is if you believe John Avlon. However, Dan Riehl disagrees and proves his point with real ratings numbers.

(H/T Pirate's Cove)

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Want to cut a few billion in wasteful government spending from the budget? Then a good place to start is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has left a trail of stalled or abandoned projects in its wake.

These days a HUD grant is a license to steal taxpayer dollars.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rains continue to fall, the black flies are thriving, and where summerfolk were in short supply this weekend.