One of the biggest events of the weekend has been the opening of the concert season at our local venue, with the first act playing here being the Zac Brown Band. That they're playing here for four nights straight also makes the crowds larger as many of their fans will attend two or more performances. If nothing else it's made both vehicular and air traffic around our local airport pretty busy. (The venue, Meadowbrook Farm, is next to the Laconia Airport.)
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One task I had hoped to accomplish either prior or during this long weekend was launching the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, aka The Boat. However, between an emergency job at one of the local farms (their computer system for their point-of-sales system crashed big time), it taking longer for me to take care of the final clean up of The Boat and loading all of the gear on board, a missing anchor (which I found just a short while ago), and nary a mooring line in any kind of shape to be found anywhere, it didn't get done.
Hopefully I can swing by one of the various ships stores at a local marina and pick up some new mooring lines and a new anchor rode for one of our secondary anchors some time tomorrow or Tuesday. Then we'll see about launching The Boat some time Wednesday and get it to its summer berth.
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It does not surprise me that all it takes for the Left to push for Trump's impeachment are unsubstantiated allegations and outright rumors that Trump has [fill in the blank for the allegedly 'treasonous act' du jour]. Considering much of those allegations seem to come from one of two sources, the New York Times or Washington Post, one should take anything coming from either one of those formerly prestigious publications with a huge grain of salt. So far they've been exactly wrong on just about everything they've claimed that Trump has done that was supposedly against the law. Or worse, they've tried to claim he doesn't have the power to do what he's done even though the US Constitution delineates that he can or that law and/or prior court decisions say a president does have the power to do what Trump has done. (The Left conveniently ignores Obama's forays into this area, even when he did things that weren't constitutional or allowed by law.)
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You know PC has gone over the edge into full blown lunacy when the PC Police decide that cultural appropriation is verboten. It doesn't matter to them that cultural appropriation is a natural course of action, that all cultures incorporate bits and pieces from other cultures and have always done so. Instead, they want to pigeonhole the various cultures and punish anyone who tries to get out of those PC defined pigeonholes. In other words, they want to Balkanize culture,making sure no one can ever 'leave' their culture. They want to keep things static, to never change.
The one thing I learned in school (and in life) is that stasis is death. They don't want to 'preserve' the various cultures (as they define them). They want to kill them off. Oh, they will say that isn't their intent, and it may not be, but it will be the result. Every stagnant culture dies, as history has shown us.
The latest lunacy: 'shaming' restaurants because white people own and run restaurants that serve Asian, Latin, African, or Indian cuisine.
I recall reading a piece about a pair of women in Portland, Oregon who were attacked on social media because they ran a food truck and restaurant that made some of the best burritos. The problem? They weren't Mexican. How dare they make and serve Mexican food considering they were white? (As a side note, burritos aren't Mexican. They come from Texas originally. The only places in Mexico that serve burritos are tourist areas that cater to people from El Norte, meaning Americans.) So what happened?
The restaurant closed.
Some of the SJW's claimed these women 'stole' business from the women in Mexico who should have made money from making burritos. OK, fine. But where were those women? Back in Mexico. So the two politically incorrect white women making and serving burritos in Portland didn't steal anything from anyone, claims by the oh-so-PC SJW's to the contrary.
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Bill Whittle deconstructs the 'science' of Bill Nye, The Science Guy (who isn't really a scientist, by the way).
Indeed.
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Ben Carson is back in the limelight, this time for speaking an obvious truth about poverty, after which “the moonbats went ballistic”.
Mr. Carson, who oversees a department that handles housing for millions of low-income Americans, made the comments during a radio interview on Tuesday with Armstrong Williams, a friend and conservative media personality. During the talk, Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, said he thought some people were poor because of their outlook on life.It is human nature that some will consistently make the wrong choices, sending them down the wrong path. No matter how much help you give them, they won't stop making those choices. And to top it off, they'll hate you for all the help you give, and then demand even more. Carson knows this as he grew up poor, saw what happened to those who made the wrong choices, and wanted nothing to do with it.
“I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview that was released on Wednesday. “You take somebody that has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.”
He added that helping people may not better their lives.
“You take somebody with the wrong mind-set, you can give them everything in the world — they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom,” he said.
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It's interesting to see what happens to indoctrinated college students when they are tricked into rejecting a socialist ideal – redistribution of wealth.
Many students at Davidson College recently responded in anguish and outrage after some conservative students filmed a video asking people on campus if they would sign a petition to redistribute GPAs for the sake of “education equality.”It's interesting to see how their viewpoint changes when it's their 'wealth' – be it grades or money – is being redistributed. It's supposed to be someone else's wealth being taken from them and given to the less deserving...as decided by those same indoctrinated college students.
Many students refused to sign the petition, saying it wasn’t fair for a variety of reasons, including that people who earned their As should keep their As, and that students who are given good grades without hard work might not be inspired to improve.
But after students discovered later the petition was a hoax played on them by conservative students in an attempt to illustrate the unfairness of wealth distribution, they hastily called a teach-in at the campus union at which they denounced the effort and vented their frustration.
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Is this the New Puritanism? Or is it a perverse and bizarre mirror image of the original Puritanism? Of the two choices, I'd have to say it's the latter.
What we are observing is a bizarre form of Puritanism. The visceral yet denied fixation on sexual expression and behavior that we associate with the Puritan sensibility, especially as it manifested in the Salem witch trials, has morphed into its opposite, namely, a lubricious fixation that has become publicly endorsed and applauded. The gender mavens of our time are as prurient as the witch hunters of old.Eventually that is going to come back to bite them, hard. The “normal is abnormal and perverted and must be stamped out” movement will come to and end after the rest of us have had enough and turn on them to stop such foolishness. Hopefully it won't be violent and bloody when it happens, but I have my doubts.
They are the Puritans of the modern age who see sex under every stone while at the same time unleashing a campaign against all that is normal and fruitful in the relation between men and women. The delusion in which they have invested -- that sex and gender are conceptually unrelated and the latter trumps the former -- is not only an affront to common sense but leads by unrelenting increments to the displacement of the usages and conventions on which normative life and societal flourishing depend.
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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we got two out three days of good Memorial Day weekend weather, the cash registers are ringing up sales, and where boating commences anon.