12/29/2013

Thoughts On A Sunday

Here it is, the last Thoughts On A Sunday post of 2013, closing out an interesting year. (Notice I didn't say 'good' year.)

I spent yesterday down at the WP In-Laws for a belated Christmas gathering with the rest of Deb's family, hence no post from me last night.

We are also preparing for snow starting some time later this afternoon, with the Weather GuysTM predicting anywhere from 3 to 9 inches here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. This means I'll be out some time around 11PM tonight wielding the Official Weekend Pundit Snowblower in an effort to clear away the snow in anticipation of Deb's arrival home from work. (The last thing she needs is being blocked out of the driveway by a snowbank left behind by our town's highway department.)

Those same Weather GuysTM are saying we're in for more snow late on Thursday.

This makes me wonder if we're going to see a repeat of a few years ago when we had over 150” of snow fall over the winter. That winter saw very few big storms (12 inches or more of snow) but instead snowfalls of 3 to 6 inches every few days. That let us keep the roads and driveways open but left us with very little room to put the snow towards the end of winter.

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Gee, it's only taken them four generations to figure out they've been programmed from birth to vote for the very people who have been holding them back and lying to them about who was really keeping them in poverty.

All that 'free' money was nothing but a con and they've found out they sold themselves back into slavery to their supposed community leaders and congressional masters, something a lot of us have been telling them since LBJ's Great Society came into force.

(H/T Instapundit)

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Also by way of Glenn Reynolds comes this about the popularity of Gadsen Flag (Don't Tread On Me) license plates in Virginia.

Apparently they're popular in the five other states that also offer them as an alternative to the standard license plates.

I don't know if we need them here in New Hampshire as our license plates already state “Live Free Or Die”, a quote from General John Stark 's address to his men. However I could see where a Gadsen plate festooned with both the Start quote and “Don't Tread On Me” might be very popular here.

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ObamaCare continues to unravel as more people, businesses, and industries find out that they were sold a bill of goods and that it won't do most of the things promised. Instead of providing health insurance coverage to the 10-30 million without it (a number that was pretty fluid and changed constantly), it is stripping many more people than that of their health insurance they liked or could afford, or both. Replacement polices are much more expensive and don't provide the coverage the old 'inadequate' polices did. So how is that supposed to be better?

The illogic of the reasoning behind ObamaCare never ceases to amaze me.

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I like Jeff Goldstein's reply to that asshat Louis Black's diatribe against voter ID, where Black made all kinds of unsubstantiated charges and spoke outright falsehoods (OK, I'll call 'em what they are – LIES) about how voter ID will act as voter suppression.

Writes Jeff:

By propping yourself up as some sort of champion of the poor, downtrodden elderly and people of color who can’t possibly navigate the draconian (and free) maze preventing them from getting their hands on an ID card of some sort — even while they are expected to run the gamut of red tape to pick up food stamps, entitlements, tax credits, and most recently, ObamaCare, using a website (funny how the poor, elderly, and downtrodden are expected to hook up w/ Ocare through their wi-fi networks and DSL routers) — you prove yourself to be nothing more than a knee-jerk, unthinking leftwing propagandist and, even worse, a limousine liberal who attaches his name to causes he doesn’t really think through, taking positions that make no sense when view logically, socially, or even pragmatically.

That's been my argument for some time, that the ID needed to collect welfare benefits, travel on airliners, cash checks, receive medical care, and a whole host of other activities many of these 'downtrodden' partake of every day is the same ID required to vote. What is it that these knee-jerk liberals don't understand? Or is it that they do understand and they know that voter ID will short-circuit the voter fraud that too many Democrats seem to rely upon to get elected or re-elected?

(H/T Pirate's Cove)

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Here's a bit more by way of Cap'n Teach:

What? You mean there were still liberal talk radio stations on the air?

It appears that liberal talk radio shows are going off the air in three major markets in 2014. That's three major markets in deep blue cities - Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

If liberal talk radio can't survive in the bastions of liberal-think, then does that indicate that the self-important leftists have a seriously skewed idea of how many people actually agree with them? Or is it merely a matter of market saturation and the other liberal media outlets are doing a better job of it? Or could it be that it's just boring as hell and no one wants to listen to boring “Leftist Talking Point Radio”?

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Is Camille Paglia one of the few feminists that understands that the War on Men is already having negative effects on society and that if this war doesn't end that our society is in danger? From reading her latest in the Wall Street Journal I'd have to say yes. She brings up a number of trends that point to American society being in trouble.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

The softening doesn't stop there, seeing it in even more dramatic fashion on our college campuses, with the “PC gender politics thing” being very anti-male. And she says that it isn't just men being hurt by it.

Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

With the penalties for being men being manly increasingly draconian and for women to be feminine being looked down upon by the cultural elite, is it any wonder relationships between men and women, particularly younger members of both sexes, have broken down and that men are increasingly going on strike?

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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The New England Patriots pulled off a win against the Buffalo Bills in Foxborough with a score of 34-17. The win gives the Patriots a first week bye in the playoffs.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the snow is falling, 2013 is winding down, and where the woodpile is starting to look smaller.