One of the issues with the high winds has been downed tree limbs and power outages. Power was out here at The Manse this past Thursday for a couple of hours, caused by the winds dropping one of those aforementioned tree limbs onto power lines nearby.
Another issue has been spotty Internet access. It started a few weeks ago and it wasn't until recently I was able to figure out that we kept losing connection to the 'Net every time it was windy out. That tells me there's some kind of problem outside The Manse, likely a loose or bad connector either on the side of The Manse our out at the pole.
I have had this problem once before when I resided at the Official Weekend Pundit Lakeside Manse some years ago. It took a while for the local cable company to figure out it was a bad connector on a splitter box out on the street. The cable guy is supposed to be here first thing Tuesday morning (just ahead of the storm) to fix the problem...I hope. Until then posting will be problematic. (I couldn't post anything last night because I had little or no connectivity most of the day.)
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I found it interesting that The New Republic has propose a so-called Bluexit to separate the Blue States from the Red States. It reads a little tongue-in-cheek, but I do have one complaint about the premise, that being that they included New Hampshire as a Blue State. We are not.
While our congressional delegation is all Democrat, something that happens now and then in our contrarian state, our state legislature, executive counsel, and governor are Republican. Our legislature recently passed Constitutional Carry and our governor happily signed it. The governor is working hard to trim back if not eliminate some of our corporate taxes as well as do away with our Interest and Dividend taxes. (New Hampshire has no income tax on wages but it does tax the interest and dividends paid out to residents. If it goes away then no income by an individual would taxed by the state. So far there's heavy support for the measure.)
While our previous governor, Maggie Hassan - now one of our two US senators - tried hard to make New Hampshire a carbon copy of the People's Republic of Massachusetts, the legislature dismantled many of her proposals and they never saw the light of day. She did manage, however, to create a huge budget deficit at one point, cooking the numbers on projected revenues including some from casino licensing. One problem – casino gambling is not legal in New Hampshire and I hope it never will be.
How does any of that make New Hampshire a Blue State? It must be wishful thinking on the part of The New Republic.
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Frankly, I'm expecting a civil war in California.
How could it not happen when California's Democrats in the Golden State have been waging war on the poor and middle class for years?
California Democrats frequently bloviate about helping the poor and downtrodden, yet two recent examples — a campaign by the nation’s second-largest public-school district to crush charter alternatives and new state legislation that will boost the cost of housing development — demonstrate how liberal policies can be a direct assault on the financial prospects of the state’s lowest-income residents.Some of the sore losers on the Left Coast talk about #Calexit, but I think they'll find that most of the counties and communities away from the coast will fight that tooth and nail, knowing that if #Calexit became a reality most of them would be relegated to the status of serfs (as if they aren't already). It would be The Hunger Games brought to reality.
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So it's come to this.
The USDA threatens to shut down a farm for opposing gay marriage.
How is it the USDA has any say in the matter? How is it it can violate the First Amendment rights of the farm owner with impunity?
Oh, that's right. I forgot. The USDA isn't bound by the law because it believes in administrative law rather than constitutional law. It makes up its own rules and laws as it sees fit.
I see a class action suit in the future. Or may President Trump can issue an Executive Order overturning the USDA's stand and fire the bureaucrats behind this debacle.
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Talk about irony!
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Nancy Pelosi wants to know what's in a bill before it's passed.
Where was that concern when she was Speaker of the House and pushed that gawdawful ObamaCare bill? As we know, it was nowhere.
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I covered the subject of China'[s so-called 'Ghost Cities' in the past. One would think that by know there would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people now living in them, but you'd be wrong.
When I covered this issue, there were maybe a dozen such ghost cities. Now there are at least 50.
It looks like the trend is accelerating with even more cities planned to be built.
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Want to see the negative effects of gender feminism? Then just look here at the Before and After photos of these poor women who don't realize they've been lied to.
While some out there may say am merely projecting my patriarchal definition of beauty on these womyn, I can say that I am not. I just don't like seeing people purposely mutilating themselves in order to meet someone else's definition of what's acceptable. (See, it works both ways. My definition of what is acceptable versus someone else's definition. Which one is right? I don't really care, but at least I don't expect women to mutilate themselves in order to 'fit it' unlike those who want women to meet the gender feminist ideal.)
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Listening to the bleating from the LSM-DNC, one would think that a new president has never fired US Attorneys appointed by their predecessor.
Bill Clinton fired every sitting US Attorney, some 90+ of them, after he took office and there wasn't a peep out of the media other than reporting that it took place. But Trump asks for the resignation of 46 of them and it's 'unprecedented' or 'purely political' or 'illegal', particularly after one of them balks and Trump fires him.
The LSM ignores the fact that they serve at the pleasure of the President, period. Appointments to these positions are political and always have been. But the fact that a bunch of very liberal US Attorneys have been told their services are no longer required is now seen as wrong. To quote The Won, “Elections have consequences.”
Indeed they do.
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I liked the title of this op-ed piece in the NYT Sunday magazine: The Dangerous Safety of College Campuses.
The moral of the recent melee at Middlebury College, where students shouted down and chased away a controversial social scientist, isn’t just about free speech, though that’s the rubric under which the ugly incident has been tucked. It’s about emotional coddling. It’s about intellectual impoverishment.Indeed. Coddling these fragile snowflakes helps no one, leaves them crippled and unable to deal with real life, and pushes them down a destructive path that will lead to something far worse than what they've been 'protesting' against.
Somewhere along the way, those young men and women — our future leaders, perhaps — got the idea that they should be able to purge their world of perspectives offensive to them. They came to believe that it’s morally dignified and politically constructive to scream rather than to reason, to hurl slurs in place of arguments.
They have been done a terrible disservice. All of us have, and we need to reacquaint ourselves with what education really means and what colleges do and don’t owe their charges.
Physical safety? Absolutely. A smooth, validating passage across the ocean of ideas? No. If anything, colleges owe students turbulence, because it’s from a contest of perspectives and an assault on presumptions that truth emerges — and, with it, true confidence.
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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where winter weather is returning with a vengeance, dreams of spring have retreated, and where we're keeping the woodstove well stoked.