Much of the snow around The Manse has melted away, including some of the snow banks left behind when BeezleBub plowed out the driveway.
We'll be back into warmer temperatures tomorrow, maybe into the 50's, but it's going to be very breezy.
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I, for one, will not be watching the Academy Awards tonight. If I want to hear ignorant political rhetoric I'll go watch a political rally.
Why these celebrities think that their political viewpoints mean anything to anyone outside of Hollywood baffles me. Do they think their words carry more weight than anyone else's? Obviously they do. Too bad they live in a bubble, hearing nothing but voices that agree with them, those voices being no more in touch with the real world than the celebrities themselves.
Frankly, I'll find more entertainment and enlightenment watching the Daytona 500 later today.
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The Barrister laments the decay of his beloved Connecticut, seeing it turn from a frugal and wealthy state – it used to have the highest per capita income in the US – into a Blue State with high taxes, debt in the billions, cities that are now hellholes, and businesses and wealthy residents fleeing for greener pastures.
For a century, this conservative Protestant state, the "Land of Steady Habits," was a state of tough Yankee self-reliance and no faith in or expectations from government of any sort. It had no income tax until recent years (damn that Republican jerk Gov. Lowell Weicker who put in the tax and fled the state to avoid his taxes as soon as he was out of office).I remember Connecticut fondly.
Weicker swore that the state income tax would solve all the problems. It was the opposite, with deeper and deeper debt and higher and higher taxes ever since. Did I mention that, since Weicker, the state has been basically bankrupt?
Under the Blue Model, jobs have fled, manufacturing has fled, the cities are in the ICU and run by various union, ethnic, or other mobsters and predators, and the government unions control the levers of government. Catastrophe. Few remember that in the 1960s Hartford was the most desirable small city in America according to Time magazine. Now it is a dangerous (at night) shithole of degeneracy, dependency, and hugely-expensive and failing government schools.
I grew up summers there, spending every summer in the coastal town of Madison. When the WP Parents retired, they moved to our family's beach house, expecting to spend the rest of their lives there. But 13 years ago they had to leave a town and a home they loved because they had been taxed so heavily it was rapidly draining their retirement funds.
That beach house had been in our family for almost 60 years. It had been built by my maternal grandfather, a machinist. They were forced to sell it and move away because the Blue State that is Connecticut decided they they could use my parents' retirement funds better than they could. (It didn't help that a lot of Pretentious Yuppie Scumbags from New York moved into town and drove a town spending spree that had property taxes doubling in short order. A lot of families that had lived in Madison for generations were driven out.)
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Speaking of Connecticut's downfall, there is something called the Connecticut Exodus driven by high taxes, rapidly rising crime rates, and a collapsing economy. People and businesses are leaving in large numbers. More would leave, but they can't sell their homes. Those that can leave cite the lack of jobs, overbearing business regulations, and confiscatory taxes as just some of the reasons for fleeing. What makes it even worse is that Governor Malloy keeps doubling down on stupid, squeezing businesses and residents for more tax money. It's gotten so bad that even corporate giants like General Electric have pulled up stakes.
Will the last Progressive leaving Connecticut please turn off the lights?
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Looking a little farther south, in this case Philadelphia, we're seeing yet another example of Democrat ignorance about economics playing out in real life.
In this case, the soda tax imposed by the city is having major unintended consequences, the primary one being the expected revenues from the tax have fallen far short of projections. That the city planned on using those revenues to help support the city's schools has left a hole in their budget.
Another unintended consequence has been the loss of jobs as both distributors and stores start laying off employees who are no longer needed because of the fall off of sales, which has been estimated to be between 30 and 50 percent.
I expect that any day now some representative of the City of Philadelphia will claim the layoffs will in some way be a positive thing. Tell that to the people who no longer have jobs.
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I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but this bears repeating.
Just when I thought they couldn't get any stupider....
Nothing that goes on in California surprises me any more.
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This is how you respond to SJWs, particularly the more ignorant than usual ones.
Hmm. Maybe I'm being too generous. I've found that every SJW I've encountered so far is egregiously ignorant, and proud of it.
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Cap'n Teach shows us yet another lesson in economics, in this case when a company like Starbucks goes SJW and announces it will hire 10,000 refugees over the next 5 years.
You can't tell me that won't negatively affect their bottom line.
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It should be no surprise to anyone paying attention to CPAC 2017 that there's a move afoot to draft Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke to run for the US Senate in 2018.
Clarke is an outspoken critic of feelgood policing, welfare, and government policies put forth by the state of Wisconsin as well as the federal government. He sees first hand the destructive effects of such policies and knows what works and what doesn't.
He'd be running against incumbent US Senator Tammy Baldwin, a not very popular Democrat who barely squeaked by during her last election. That the tide has turned against many of the out-of-touch Progressive Democrats is another factor that should hopefully prompt Clarke to run against her next year.
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Some retailers are learning the hard way that there's a price to pay for going political when it comes to which goods they will or will not sell. It is particularly true when the SJWs threaten boycotts and the retailers cave. Or worse, when they use in-your-face displays that offend the very people they depend upon to stay in business.
On the other hand many of the rest of us sane folks turn calls for boycotts from the SJWs into 'buycotts', taking our business to the very people being boycotted by the fragile SJW snowflakes as a not so subtle “Up Yours!”
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It is time for the police to get back to policing, particularly when it comes to quelling violent protests and riots. If they do not, the protests/riots will become all to common because the so-called protesters will know there will be little or no repercussions from their actions and people will die.
At the Berkeley protest/riot against Milo Yiannapoulos, the campus and city police did nothing to quell the violence and looting. The police have sent the message that rioting is perfectly acceptable as a means of silencing someone the 'protesters' don't like. (Of course I also know that quite a few of those rioters didn't care one way or the other about Milo. They just wanted to break up and burn stuff that belonged to other people.)
If the police had broken it up as they were duty bound to do, the chances of follow on 'protests' would diminish.
The BLM bulls**t has got to stop. BLM doesn't give a rat's ass about black lives. If they did they would be working hard to stop the black on black murders in their neighborhoods which far outweigh the minuscule numbers of police-on-black killings by orders of magnitude. BLM is an excuse to sanction the killing of cops, rioting, looting, and more block-on-black crimes. It's time for the police to stop being afraid of offending the permanently offended and to do their jobs.
As a side note, one has to wonder just how many of those types of riots would take place in a city where many residents and business owners carry guns? If I had to guess, I'd say none.
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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is very up and down temperature-wise, a lot of the snow has disappeared, and where the wood pile is shrinking a lot slower than expected.