I made a couple of stops at two of the local Big Box scores to pick up during my usual weekend shopping (Walmart and Lowe's) and I noticed that most folks were buying things like shovels, salt, and windshield scrapers/brushes. While there were quite a few folks also doing their Christmas shopping at Walmart, more than a few of them also had the aforementioned winter implements in their shopping carts as well.
I can only hope that people up here won't “go stupid” in their efforts to make it into work tomorrow morning. It always seems to take a couple or three snowstorms before winter driving skills are reasserted in some folks.
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I admit that I made a few small preparations for the coming snow, but most of them were along the lines of pulling snow shovels down from the rafters in the garage, filling a few sand buckets at our town's sand shed, moving the Official Weekend Pundit Snowblower from its storage location in the back of the garage and making sure it was in working order.
Beyond that, nothing.
I just hope I didn't miss anything.
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After seeing Mike Rowe's schooling of a woman who didn't like his pro-American flag stance, I have to wonder why Donald Trump didn't at least ask him to become Secretary of Labor. Mike Rowe knows a lot about labor, having done more than his share of...umm...dirty jobs.
While I doubt Mike would have taken the job, it certainly would have sent a message to the rest of America that Mr. Trump isn't fooling around and that he wants people who know how to get things done.
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Skip over at GraniteGrok asks the question about gun homicides.
He writes:
For the amount of time the MSM spends on gun deaths and gun control, you’d think it was the number one killer. Well, it may well be – but only if you’re an inner city gangbanger.On the accompanying graph in Skip's post showing the top ten causes of death in the US, gun homicides are nowhere to be seen.
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You know it's gotten bad when they have to open up a mental health facility in a trauma center just to deal with Millennial Snowflakes who cannot adjust to adult life.
Of course I expect someone at some point will be pointing the finger at Trump as the cause of this problem. But as the old saying goes, “When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you.”
The only ones to blame for this problem are the parents, the teachers, and the PC wackos who worked so hard to make sure the the Millennials were psychologically incapable of becoming grown ups. Now that the bill has come due for this abuse none of the parties mentioned want to pay it. How many of that generation will we lose because the only thing they are capable of is being whiny spoiled brats incapable of dealing with the word “NO”?
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You'd think they'd be capable of learning from history, wouldn't you? Oh, wait! That's right...they don't actually know any history, do they?
It appears that yet another experiment in Marxism has failed. In this case, a vegan restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan using a Marxist business plan closed its doors because, quite frankly, it was awful. It had, as one critic on Reddit wrote, "Good riddance. The concept was terrible. Hours lousy. Service unacceptable.”
Call it a nostalgic look back on the bad old days of the Soviet Union. It sounds like the restaurant operated just like those in various cities across the now-defunct USSR.
Will they learn from this experience?
I'd say probably not.
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Do you think the economy has fully recovered from the Great Recession?
Me neither.
I see too many signs that things aren't what they used to be pre-recession. The U6 unemployment rate is still way too high and is too far away from the U3 rate. Many jobs are going unfilled even though a lot of people are still out of work. The labor participation rate is still falling. Large amounts of government spending keeps growing the national debt to unheard of levels. Over-regulation and rogue federal agencies are strangling small businesses.
But to hear Obama tell it, the economy is just great. Too bad that isn't even close to being true.
For years, Americans were told that after the financial panic in 2008, the president’s policies had put us on a steady course to a strong economy. But in much of the country, people looked around them and thought, That just doesn’t seem right. Especially in those parts of the country hit the hardest by the transition from the Industrial Era to the Information Age, people asked a number of questions. If the economy is doing so great, why are my adult children not moving out? If the unemployment rate is declining, why are so many prime-age males not working? And doesn’t it matter that the quality of jobs for non-college graduates is so obviously worse than it was a generation ago? Why, instead of working, are so many people dependent on public benefits and falling prey to addiction?If the economy was doing so well, then none of the problems cited above would be much of an issue. In fact most of them wouldn't even exist except in small pockets here and there. But the problems are widespread and the Obama Administration won't take the responsibility for any o fthem.
Is it any wonder so many people who otherwise might not have voted Republican did so for Donald Trump? They knew that 4 more years of Obamanomics would likely kill any hope of true economic recovery.
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I had a discussion about carbon emissions with one of my co-workers, a true believer in the Kyoto Protocols and the Paris Accord. He thought we should have signed on to Kyoto and should adhere to the Paris Accords.
I had to burst his bubble.
After informing him that the US had reduced its carbon footprint to a level not seen since 1991, all while expanding its economy, he didn't want to believe it. He also didn't/couldn't believe that the US did better at reducing carbon emissions than every signatory of Kyoto. Every. Single. One. I even pointed him to the various reports from government sources that showed what I had told him to be accurate.
I thought his head was going to explode.
Even though he holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science, he has little experience in the real world. The level of wisdom he displays is less than I would expect for someone with his background or his age.
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Do we need more proof that Progressivism is not very progressive? Not in my experience. But then I have traveled all over the world, met a wide range of people, and have seen what works and what doesn't.
My biggest gripe about the Progressive movement is that it has nothing to do with actual progress. In fact, it is more regressive, trying to push us back to more oppressive and authoritarian days. Much of it appears based upon stirring up emotion, pushing false narratives, constructing straw man arguments, and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Its economics is based upon some poorly defined sense of 'fairness' which usually means taking away someone's hard earned money and giving it away to cronies or supporters of the Progressive cause. More often than not it destroys charities and tries to replace them with government programs that are supposed to provide the same services as the charities they've replaced, but usually fails to actually do so.
Somehow that's all considered progress. But progress towards what, exactly?
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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we're awaiting the arrival of more snow, Christmas shopping is still moving at a bustling pace, and where happiness is a hot woodstove and full wood box.