1/10/2016

Thoughts On A Sunday

Time to post has been limited as of late, much of that being due to duties I took on after town elections last year. I find I spend time I would have used to craft a post being devoted to those duties. At least at this level, all transactions with the people in my town are face-to-face, something I much prefer compared to a lot of higher offices handling such interactions by way of e-mail, letters, or phone.

This time of year the time needed to perform my duties increases greatly as we approach town meeting, between budgeting, zoning amendments, requests from non-governmental agencies that provide services to the town, and concerns from my fellow residents. There's also that once-every-four-years presidential primary that also takes a lot of attention to deal with. Once past the primary and town meeting the demands on my time will diminish considerably and I'll be able to post about this, that, and the other thing more often.

And so it goes in small town America.

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Chris Muir nails it when it comes to the issue of the “rape culture” of Muslim refugees now in the EU.

Reading the comments shows that more than a few people agree that the chickens have come home to roost when it comes to denigrating “white heterosexual males” and the culture they've built. Why would any man help someone who will punish them for doing so?

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Call it yet another example of unintended consequences coming around to bite the 'compassionate' liberals in the ass. In this case the side effects of higher minimum wages are hitting employment pretty hard in the six cities that have implemented them.

It isn't like like no one warned anyone about the bad effects of such drastic increases. They were devoutly ignored by the proponents who only saw this as a means of gaining support for other political plans to make the American people even more dependent upon a government that really doesn't care.

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“A man's got to know his limitations”, or as Juliette Ochieng puts it, Stupidity and How to Recognize It.

As she writes:
Many, many people have wondered whether the Internet has made people more stupid than was so in generations prior to the Internet Age and I’ve wondered about this also. I still think that the answer is both ‘no’ and ‘yes.’

Many mistake large amounts of information for large amounts of intelligence and the Internet has provided many stupid people with the illusion of intelligence. Be advised: stupidity is not defined as limited intelligence. Stupidity consists of the limited ability to interpret information, coupled with the refusal to acknowledge the need for this ability.  Ever known an idiot who was full of hubris and arrogance about some information she has that you don’t have?

We all have experienced that on more than one occasion. If one does not have the ability to be able to separate the information wheat from the chaff, then they are nothing more than 'meat terminals' regurgitating all information available on the 'Net and add nothing to any discussion or debate other than pseudo-knowledge of questionable validity.

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I had a discussion with yet another couple of young Bernie Sanders supporters. I talked with them about Bernie's ideas and how they thought they took a fresh approach to 'problems' that they believe need to be solved.

I did politely disabuse them of the notion that Bernie's ideas are new, that they've been put forth before and tried before and didn't work. They only sounded new to them because they haven't been on this Earth long enough to have been exposed to them before or to see the harmful effects his 'solutions' to the 'problems' that aren't really problems.

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The New Housing Bubble, same as the Old Housing Bubble. This time the same folks who brought us NINJA mortgages (No Income, No Job), Interest-Only mortgages, and Sub-prime mortgages are setting their sights on high-risk immigrants.

This one will end no differently than the last one, and yet again the taxpayers will be the ones footing the bill to bail out the Too-Big-To-Fail financial institutions who buy into these things.

It's time to stop this rip-off of both vulnerable wannabe homeowners and the taxpayers. One step would be to reinstate some version of the Glass-Steagal Act that kept commercial and investment banking as two separate entities. At the moment banks can gamble with depositors' money and if they lose it all can go to the federal government for a bailout. The Privatized Profit/Socialized Loss cronyism has got to stop.

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I am the gun owner you hate.

...to the angry liberal who sat next to me on the commuter rail: I don’t hate you. I don’t have any ill feelings toward you. I don’t wish to do you harm. And I don’t regret sitting next to you. On the contrary; I feel bad for you. It must hurt carrying that much hate inside of you.

I've known more than a few folks like that, too. More than one became semi-hysterical when they caught a glimpse of my legally carried Glock .40 tucked into my holster. (No, I didn't intentionally make its presence known. They saw it as I got up from finishing my meal and putting on my coat at the former Paugus Diner.)

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the returning warm weather has also brought heavy rain, the last of the Christmas decorations are finally coming down, and where people are starting to prepare for both the New Hampshire Primary and town meeting.