5/31/2015

Thoughts On A Sunday

We finally got the rain we've needed for some time, keeping this May from being the driest on record. Saturday was nice, bing sunny and quite warm. The rain moved in over night and is expected to continue through Tuesday at least.

No yard work was done, but not from lack of trying. There were just too many other things needing to get done and the yard work could wait.

***************

One has to wonder about former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley's announcement that he's running for President. While I am glad Hillary is getting more competitors, I don't see O'Malley as a good candidate. All one has to do is look what he did for Maryland and figure he'll try to do the same to the rest of the country.

***************

I knew Nancy Pelosi was off her rocker, but to claim Marco Rubio is a “bad catholic” because he supports traditional marriage shows us the depths of her madness. Then again, her home district is San Francisco/Berkeley which certain explains why she's so out of touch with reality.

Then again, she's never really given a damn for any of the traditional American social mores.

***************

Ian McEwan delves into the issue of First Amendment rights during his commencement speech at Dickinson College and pulls no punches.

[F]ree speech was, is and always will be, under attack – from the political right, the left, the center. It will come from under your feet, from the extremes of religion as well as from unreligious ideologies. It’s never convenient, especially for entrenched power, to have a lot of free speech flying around….

It’s worth remembering this: freedom of expression sustains all the other freedoms we enjoy. Without free speech, democracy is a sham. Every freedom we possess or wish to possess (of habeas corpus and due process, of universal franchise and of assembly, union representation, sexual equality, of sexual preference, of the rights of children, of animals – the list goes on) has had to be freely thought and talked and written into existence.

And never has free speech been under attack here in America as it is today, with the call by many of the arrogant elite in academia and politics calling for curbing speech with which they disagree, trying to minimize it by calling it “hate speech” and therefore trying to delegitimize it.

***************

The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler opines on the hypocrisy of the labor unions in regards to LA's vote to increase the minimum wage there to $15.

Frankly, none of this surprises me as unions lost their moral center a long time ago.

***************

Cap'n Teach tells us about Obama's continuing efforts to disarm the American public by trying to push through ever more restrictive regulations to make it difficult, if not impossible for Americans to keep their guns.

Then again, the states could just tell Obama and the rest of the federal bureaucrats to “piss off” and refuse to enforce them in any way, shape or form. It's time for the states to exercise their rights under the Tenth Amendment and remind The One that he is not a king and that the federal government has no right to curtail any of the rest of our rights.

***************

Noah Rothman slams the present-day Cassandras of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Writes Rothman:

The latest fad that has come to dominate the attentions of our would-be Cassandras is the matter of climate change, and specifically the immediate threat this phenomenon poses to American national security. Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell is the latest to submit a classic example of partisan agitation disguised as dispassionate analysis related to this vogue subject on Thursday. She contended in that essay that the Republican 2016 presidential field, one primarily composed of various breeds of hawks, are so blinkered by their ideology that they have thus far refused to address at least one glaring national security threat: That posed by global temperature fluctuations and the chaotic weather patterns the result.

I've heard a number of acquaintances and even a few family members blithely mouthing the words of those Cassandras without once thinking about whether they are accurate or merely rhetoric meant to push an agenda that will neither “save the Earth” nor serve anyone any good in any way.

***************

No one really needed to tell me this: Bernie Sanders' ideas about economics and market forces stink, literally.

He's mouthing phrases and ideas right out of Marxist economic theory, not understanding that freedom to choose among many different items from competitors is what keeps the cost of goods down. When on limits such choices, particularly when government does so, the cost of those goods goes up even as the supply shrinks. We certainly saw that during the bad old days of the Soviet Union and now unrepentant socialist Bernie Sanders wants to make us suffer under the same unworkable and bankrupting economic system.

Someone should by Bernie a book about the rise and fall of the USSR and its bankrupt ideology and economic system.

***************

And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rains have arrived, the summerfolk have left early, and where the call of summer is getting louder.