Ice Out is defined as when all five ports of call for the Mount Washington cruise ship are free of ice. It was declared at 11:15AM Friday morning, the first time it has been declared while it is still winter. However that hasn't really been a surprise up here as Ice In wasn't declared until one month before, one of the latest dates it's been seen.
Some are claiming it's global warming, mostly made by those who are too young to remember previous El Niño years. Most years when we experience an El Niño cycle we have warmer temperatures, less snow and more rain though the winter months. This El Niño was a very strong one, so our relatively mild winter was not a surprise by any means.
What does this early Ice Out mean for us? An earlier start to the boating season!
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I like Sultan Knish's take on adulthood.Adulthood means doing things you don't want to do and discovering that they can make you the person you want to be. That's how virtue is born. Perpetual childhood prevents virtue from ever forming. Instead public life is cluttered with oversized children who have the language skills, resources and political power of adults, but none of the virtues that come with maturity.I've had to deal with an increasing number of these “oversized children” and it makes me doubt our nation or society will survive if the trend of extending adolescence by a couple of decades or so isn't overturned. We're certainly seeing the outcome of this trend on college campuses where the fragile snowflakes we've created are incapable of dealing with the harsh realities of life and try to force the institutions of higher learning to coddle them and “make all the bad mens go away!”
There's only one piece of advice I can offer these big crybullies: “Grow up, dammit!”
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I agree with Skip wholeheartedly on this one.In a lot of cases, yes, the Federal Government should be emasculated – it is too large, too powerful, too intrusive. The problem is, however, is that it sticks itself into areas into which it has no Constitutional authorization to do. For instance, where in the Constitution does it say it should be in charge of school breakfasts? Is that one of the enumerated Powers listed? And if so, please show me where it is?I'd also like to see where it says the government can tell us what we should eat, what we should drive, where we should live, and what we can do with our own land.
'Nuff said.
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If you want to get rid of the annoying Get Windows 10 popup and prevent it from installing on your Windows 7 or 8 computer without your permission, just follow the instructions on this webpage.For almost a year the Get Windows 10 popup has been bugging us to update. Now it's become far more insistent, telling us it's a recommended 'update'. Some people have found their computers updated to Windows 10 without their consent, in some cases bricking their computers and in others rendering some of their software inoperable. Updates that do that should be actionable items, meaning the affected computer owners should be in that position should sue the bejeezus out of Microsoft, particularly if the affected computer was used for their business.
Just when I thought Microsoft couldn't get more arrogant, they prove me wrong.
Call this an echo of the Microsoft Windows Vista debacle when people found out that much of the software they already owned and used for business wouldn't run on Vista and that Vista-capable software wasn't available. The big corporate customers told Microsoft to “piss off” when they tried to get them to upgrade to Vista and it was forced to continue supporting Windows XP until just 2 years ago (2014). By then most of the corporate systems had upgraded to Windows 7.
Why Microsoft believes they can force customers to upgrade to a new OS every couple of years is beyond me, and particularly trying to do that to their corporate customers. A lot of them can afford neither the time or money to do that, Corporate IT departments want long term stability, meaning a decade between OS upgrades. That's also true of much of the software they use, specifically productivity software that covers design, sales, production scheduling, inventory control, and so on. They don't have the time or the personnel bandwidth to be constantly retraining employees every year or so when the latest greatest software upgrade comes along.
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Glenn Reynolds delves into the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, explaining why it is David Brooks is wrong and why he has the support and the present momentum that might propel him into the White House. It can be explained thusly:“Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.”If you keep denigrating and trying to marginalize a large percentage of the American public – those of us in 'flyover' country – this is the result. Anyone with half a brain could see this was coming. However the GOP establishment, the Democrats, the coastal “elites”, and the MSM refused to even consider there would be a backlash, and now that it's here they don't have a clue about how to handle it other than to double down, believing that will solve the problem.
The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.
It won't.
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Oh, I loved this!“Let's play another exciting round of Who Said It – Hillary or Trump?”
This shows you just how uninformed potential voters are, in particular Democrat voters.
(H/T Pirate's Cove)
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Powerline illustrates yet another piece of federal government overreach, in this case the Department of Justice warning states and municipalities to not 'burden' the poor with fines.Huh?
The DOJ’s letter notes that poor people endure hardship as a result of being fined. When they steadfastly refuse to pay fines, the amount escalates. Eventually, an arrest warrant may issue. In the case of traffic and parking offenses, offenders eventually may have their driver’s license suspended.Call this yet another Progressive directive that will not ease the burden on the poor, but show them laws may be ignored with impunity. If there is no penalty, then the law means nothing. Why bather having laws at all under those circumstances.
The hardship is easily avoided, however. First, poor people can comply with the law — e.g. not speed, not park illegally, not disturb the peace. Second, if they violate an ordinance, they can pay the fine.
Anyone who can afford to buy or rent a car and pay for the gas can afford to pay a traffic ticket. People who refuse to do so aren’t refusing because they don’t have the $40 (say). They are refusing because they would rather not pay.
It sounds like they're setting up the states and municipalities to fail, see crime increase dramatically, and then step in to “restore” order. Or it means they really have no understanding of human nature and are basing their directive upon feelz. I'm not sure which one scares me the most.
Am I being paranoid? Wrong question. The question is am I being paranoid enough? Since when can the DOJ dictate to the states what laws they can and cannot enforce, particularly when those laws are local? It doesn't have that power. There is no federal law that (falsely) gives them that power. The Constitution certainly doesn't support it. Call it yet another example of the rot infesting Washington caused by The One's disdain of the law and the Constitution. As the saying goes, a fish rots from the head down.
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I'm sorry, but I feel little sympathy for this idiot.His first mistake was going to North Korea.
His second mistake was thinking he could get away with things there that he might get away with here. Did he really think our laws and customs would apply in North Korea?
Now he gets to spend the next 15 years as a guest of the State.