Thoughts On A Sunday

The March weather is continuing its schizophrenic pattern, with days of well above freezing days followed by a batch of below freezing days, thrown in with snow that falls during both the above freezing and below freezing days.

I woke yesterday morning to find a half inch of snow had fallen overnight. I thought it would melt off pretty quickly...but it didn't. The day-time temps barely broke 32 degrees and even the tire tracks on the driveway from the trusty F150 merely darkened but didn't really melt away. It's supposed to be in the upper 30's today which should help with more melting, but we have more snowfall forecast to start some time late Monday. The forecasters are saying we'll see 6 inches of heavy wet snow in this area, with a potential for up to a foot by the time the snow winds down some time Tuesday.

I have to admit that I'm just waiting for spring to arrive as I have run out of tolerance for more snow, at least for snow that heavy and deep. While the Official Weekend Pundit Snowblower is more than capable of taking care of it, I'd be happy if we didn't see any more of the heavy stuff until next winter.

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We finally joined the 21st Century by subscribing to Netflix. While I am not unfamiliar with the use of streaming video (I have used Hulu for some time now to catch up on past episodes of some of my favorite shows as well as some of their original series offerings) I haven't used a pay service.

What prompted us to join was the built-in Netflix app on Official Weekend Pundit HDTV Deb gave me for Christmas. I have wasted no time making use of its search function and adding a bunch of movies and TV shows to my queue. I've watched some classic movies like Strategic Air Command and The Glenn Miller Story with Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson; a1980 sci-fi flick called The Final Countdown with Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen. (If you're not familiar with it, it posits the question “What would happen if the modern aircraft carrier USS Nimitz were to be whisked through a time portal ending up a couple of hundred miles to the west of Hawaii on December 6, 1941?”; and I also caught Atlas Shrugged Part 1. (I have to confess that was the very first movie I watched after subscribing to Netflix. I liked it and am looking forward to Part 2.)

I have a feeling we'll become big fans of Netflix. I also have a better understanding of why more people are 'pulling the plug' on traditional cable TV.

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The New York Times spin machine is hard at work trying paint the pending takeover of bankrupt and politically corrupt Detroit by the state of Michigan as a racist plot by “mostly white Republicans.” There's nary a word about the five decades of Democrat rule that has been a showcase of political corruption, cronyism, and union thuggery and extortion that led Detroit to become a shell of its former self. (Remember, Detroit has less than a third of the population it did at its peak, with approximately 600,000 people there compared to the 2.1 million it used to have.) Somehow it's all the fault of the GOP?

From the NYT piece:

For decades, a variety of methods – from oversight boards to appointed receivers – have been used in cases where cities have fallen into financial disarray, but the arrangements are often controversial, stirring up political struggles.

In Detroit, a mostly black city led mainly by Democrats, the intervention by the state, mostly white and led by Republicans, has been viewed by some as a needless and undemocratic seizure of control.

That Detroit has been able to stay out of receivership as long as it has has been a surprise, considering that cities in California that have gone into bankruptcy were nowhere near as in a dire condition as Detroit is today. I'd say they've been given more than enough leeway and time to put their fiscal house in order and have failed miserably. The entrenched interests have made it impossible to rein in wasteful spending, patronage, and cronyism. If the city can't fix itself then someone from the outside has to, otherwise we might as well just shut off all the lights, turn off the water and sewer, and tell everyone still left in the city to get out.

This isn't a race issue, it's a systemic corruption issue that won't be solved by maintaining the status quo, no matter how much the NYT bitches about it.

If nothing else Detroit stands as an object lesson and a warning that Ayn Rand was right.

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While Google's claimed motto is “Do no evil”, their actions are proving to us that they aren't living by that motto. The latest egregious move that shows their hypocrisy?

Removing our downgrading links from searches they find either politically or ideologically 'objectionable'...to them.

This was seen when Doc Mercury did a search on Google for "your breath is a toxic gas epa". The first link that actually had any relation to the search showed up on link #137. The first link that showed any criticism for the EPA's ruling was link #228. Assuming the default 10 links per page, this link wouldn't have appeared until you hit the twenty-third page. When he did the same search on Bing, three of the links in the first ten were directly related to the search.

You cannot tell me there hasn't been some hanky-panky involved with Google's search algorithm that downplays links in searches for subjects Google considers offensive to their sensibilities.

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I think that most of us in the know understand that Democrat/Leftist tolerance is nothing but a word in their dictionary that has nothing to do with actual tolerance, particularly if you disagree with them. Instead, it is you that has to tolerate them without reciprocal tolerance, which isn't really tolerance.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the temps have gotten colder, the sap in the sugra maples is running well, and where we're expecting more snow.