Thoughts On A Sunday

During the summer traffic around here tends to be heavy and a little bit crazy on weekends. It's even heavier and crazier on those weekends when there's some kind of event going on in the area. This weekend it's been Soulfest at the Gunstock Resort just up the road from The Manse. That has driven the traffic flow and craziness up a few notches, with many of the out-of-towners doing incredibly dumb stuff on the road like making left turns that require cutting across two lanes of stopped traffic or pulling off to the side of a road to wait for someone at a place where two cars can barely pass by each other without scraping paint. It's like they disconnected the parts of their brain that controls driving and driving decisions.

I couldn't get back home fast enough.

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The New York Times has sold the Boston Globe for less than the cost of a Boston Red Sox outfielder.

The NYT paid over $1 billion for the paper 20 years ago and sold it for a little over 6% of what it paid for it.

Yeah, that was a great investment.

Tom Bowler also comments on the Globe sale and the recent sale of a local New Hampshire newspaper he'd stopped subscribing to some time ago because of its slanted coverage. Since the sale of the Nashua Telegraph it has shifted more towards right-of-center, something Tom hopes will continue. He also hopes that the Boston Globe will do likewise under its new owner, otherwise it may be doomed.

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Something cool I came across at Instapundit: J.K Rowling's accounts of what happened to Harry Potter et al after The Deathly Hallows.

I have been a Harry Potter fan from the beginning and was pleased how well the books translated to the big screen. Though the epilogue gave us a glimpse of characters' futures, Rowling's accounts helped assuage the curiosity so many of us had about them all. Of course this opens the door to stories about the next generation in the Harry Potter universe, doesn't it?

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By way of my dear brother over at Dean's World comes this time line view of the rapid pace of modern life put into perspective.

Heh.

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I've been saying this since 2008:

President Obama hasn't a clue about how economies actually work.

The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.

Because he does not understand rudimentary economics, he relies on anecdotes to make his argument.

Unfortunately, our President rules out deregulation or lower taxes as a way to unleash productive forces in the country. Indeed, he is unable to grasp the simple point that the only engine of economic prosperity is an active market in which all parties benefit from voluntary exchange. Both taxes and regulation disrupt those exchanges, causing fewer exchanges to take place—and those which do occur have generated smaller gains than they should.

We already know what his primary focus is in regards to the economy: fairness. But the problem is that he has never defined 'fairness', though I and others suspect that it has something to do with sharing misery and poverty equally and nothing to do with actually restoring the economy to vigor.

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If we need even more evidence that the Obama Administration doesn't understand economics and better than Obama himself, there's the $500 million of taxpayer money wasted on training for “green” jobs that don't exist and aren't likely to exist any time in the near future. Call it the Solyndra of jobs training programs. My only question is where did that money actually go?

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Here's a racial crime that should make it to the big media...NOT.

Three black teens savagely beat a younger white student as he was trying to get off a school bus. There's even video of the incident.

Yet who is facing possible prosecution after this incident?

The bus driver. While it's true he did little to intervene other than calling for help on the radio, he isn't the one who brutally beat the 13-year old boy. The teens in question (all 15-year olds) were arrested and charged with aggravated assault and unarmed robbery, then released from police custody.

If the races of the victim and perpetrators were reversed, there would be a universal outcry at the brutal hate crime. But because the victim was white and the perpetrators were black, there's been nary a peep from the national media.

Welcome to Racist America.

(H/T Pirate's Cove)

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July was a crappy month for Bogie. It got even worse towards the end of the month when she had to put down one of her beloved dogs.

Earlier in the month she lost her aunt as well as another beloved pet, Shadow.

Hopefully August will be better for her and her family.

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Dr. Mercury gets into the dollar coin versus dollar bill debate.

I've believed the time was long overdue to make the switch to the coin, but Congress, as usual, effed it up by not doing away with the bill once the coins were introduced. That's why previous efforts failed.

The argument has been made that vending machines won't be capable of handling the coins (that can be changed) and that cash registers don't have a place for the coins. Both arguments are specious. In regards to the latter, once the dollar bills are gone the slot that normally holds them can be used for the coins.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where fall-like weather has moved in, the traffic is crazy, and my weed-whacker is still broken.