Thoughts On A Sunday

I wish I could say it was a quiet weekend here around The Manse, but between trying to get more chores done in preparation for putting The Manse on the market, helping the WP Mom shop for a new car, and making an attempt to repair some yard equipment, it hasn't been quiet or restful by any means. The wet weather hasn't helped either, meaning some outside chores had to be postponed for a few more days.

All in all, getting a house ready to sell is taking a lot more time (and money) than we had originally expected. It has also eaten into what little time off I usually have, meaning much of my weekend posting tends to be shorter than what I am used to posting.

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I find it both amusing and disturbing that many of Trump's Democrat detractors seem to have very short memories and a distorted sense of time. They act as if the so-called illegal immigrant crisis at the border is something that only now has come into being. That it has been going on for years, well before President Trump even thought about running for office, is somehow his fault? Worse, some of the photos used to prove the 'crisis' is real were misleading, showing young children separated from their parents by an unfeeling US government when their parents were really just off camera, and in many cases, others showing children in 'cages' were taken during the Obama Administration. Yet somehow it's all the fault of the Trump Administration.

I think too many of these folks going out of their minds about this non-crisis have been off their meds.

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Discussions I've had with the token Progressive at work have covered a wide range of topics. The latest has been the pending trade war because Trump's threatened imposition of tariffs to match those imposed upon US goods. More than once I told him that the move was strategic, getting those nations to the negotiation table. He saw it as the opening shots in a lengthy and costly trade war.

Apparently has has had no problem with the lopsided application of tariffs, seeing it as a way to make us pay for our sins (though he never has told me what these supposed 'sins' are).

Surprise surprise when the nations threatened with tariffs suddenly decide that maybe talking things through and perhaps even lifting the tariffs might be an idea whose time has come.

The other nations really don't want a trade war because they know it will likely hurt them as much if not more so than it will hurt us. They want trade to continue, so reducing or removing tariffs suddenly seems like a good idea.

Gee, it's almost like Trump knows what he's doing.

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I honestly have no words to describe my reaction to this story.

Really. None.

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I love it when the local media get something so wrong that there's no way they can explain it away. In this case the story about an 18-wheeler accident, with the truck hauling a load of liquid nitrogen. According to the news report, a half-mile area around the tanker was evacuated due to the risk of a tank explosion.

Anyone who remembers their basic high school chemistry knows that nitrogen is not flammable. There would have been no danger of a tank explosion. On the other hand a tank rupture was a possibility, something that would have spilled thousands of gallons of liquid nitrogen, something that would immediately freeze anything it came into contact with, making it as brittle as glass. That in itself is one heck of a hazard and is a more likely explanation for evacuation of the local area.

They can't even get a story like that straight? Even if the authorities had made that claim, one would think that there was someone at the station that might have realized the explanation was bogus. But maybe that's too much to hope for these days as most journalists tend to be woefully ignorant about how things actually work.

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How do you get more Trump? This is how:

“The Resistance simply is against everything President Trump does. He figured out more than a year ago how to work this to his advantage. The Resistance now opposes tax cuts, a booming economy, and peace in Korea. The Resistance also now supports MS-13, open borders, and Kim Jong Un.”

Do they honestly think they have a winning platform for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race with the above? It's obvious that they do, not understanding that most of America doesn't agree with them. Do they think that people really want to return to the Bad Old Days?

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And that is the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather was wettish, the indoor activities took precedence, and where we're hoping to get some dry weather over next weekend.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The last day of Motorcycle week is upon us as the visiting bikers get in some of the last activities of the festival and many make their way home. Some will linger for another day or two, but most will have departed by early evening today.

The large influx of motorcycles gave me the perfect excuse to not travel, giving me plenty of time to work around The Manse in preparation for putting it on the market. Yesterday and today was spent stripping the decks with a pressure washer (mostly to remove dirt, grime, and loose paint, not strip all of the paint off) in preparation for repainting them some time over the next few days. Some of the yard work was also done, though it is nowhere near being finished. (Then again, it never really is, is it?)

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This is something I think more college kids should be doing. For that fact, so should adults from the Blue urban areas.

On a blustery afternoon in April, I filed into a van along with 10 students from Harvard. We had just spent the last two days in Chicopee, Mass., where we had chatted with the police chief and his force, the mayor and his staff, small-business owners, waitresses and firemen about their struggles living in small-town America.

The undergrads were buzzing with their impressions. Chicopee is about 90 miles west of their prestigious university in Cambridge, but when it comes to shared experience, it might as well have been 1,000 light years away.

As they settled in, I looked at them.

“So,” I said, “who do you think most of the people you just got to know voted for president?”

None of the students had an answer. It hadn’t come up in their conversations and they didn’t know I had privately asked each person who they’d voted for.

So, I let a minute pass and told them.

“Nearly every one of them voted for Trump.”

My students looked stunned, at first. But then a recognition crossed their faces.

We were only a few days into a new course I had developed with Harvard’s Institute of Politics, called the Main Street Project, where students are immersed in small-town America. Even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, our journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course, as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time. And this was their opening lesson.

Too many kids in college these days, particularly attending one of the Ivies, have little exposure to rural America, so-called “flyover country”. The only thing they know about the people living there is what they've been told in their classes or by the media, and just about everything they've been told is wrong. But they won't know that unless they experience small town America first hand.

The Main Street Project is but one small step to correcting the many misconceptions people have about small town America.

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While the idea of renewable energy sounds great and billions have been spent on promoting and building renewables, the actual fraction of power that comes from those sources really hasn't grown all that much.

I could dig deep on why this is so (as I have done in the past), but a lot of it still boils down to the cost of renewable energy being very high, even with government subsidies. The rest deals with dispatchability, meaning they generally cannot supply power on demand, they are highly susceptible to weather conditions, and they take up a lot of land area compared to the more traditional coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants.

Until those other issues are solved, renewables aren't really a viable alternative to the other sources of power.

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There's nothing I can add to this. Nothing at all.

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Yeah, this worked out so well the last time that they decided to try it again.

The Left has called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A because the corporate owners don't support gay marriage.

In case you don't remember, the last time the Left called for a boycott of this restaurant chain, just the opposite occurred – a buycott. Chick-fil-A saw more customers coming through its doors and buying their chicken sandwiches than before the announced boycott. How much do you want to it will have a similar effect this time as well?

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People complain about how bad the air pollution is here in the US. Most of those making that claim weren't alive in the 60's and early 70's when both the air and water were quite polluted. Since then we have cleaned up the air and water to the point were much of the pollution can be measured in parts per billion or parts per trillion, not parts per thousand or parts per million. In fact, a lot of the air pollution to which we are exposed is not generated here but comes from overseas, specifically China. Yet we have people who fervently believe that we must be punished for the pollution caused by other countries, hence their support of things like the old Kyoto Protocols and the Paris Accord, neither of which really did anything other than demand a lot of money from the US.

But do we hear much about the horrendous air pollution in places like China or India? Of course not.

One tends, as a matter of course, to inveigh against pollution in China. The world has never seen a quicker leap into industrialization than what has happened in China over the past four decades. But, we also know that industrialization is the enemy of the pristine purity of nature. And we are well aware of the fact that China sports an authoritarian government, one that keeps its hold on power by poisoning its people.

We keep those facts and beliefs firmly in mind when we examine the state of today’s largest democracy. That would be India. How is democratic India doing with air pollution? We note the said pollution is not the same as the greenhouse gases that our environmentalists hate so much. Those latter include large quantities of carbon dioxide, aka, plant food. Pollution in India is of another order.

Anyway, India is not doing so well on the pollution scoreboard. If you think that toxic masculinity is a problem, wait until you get a whiff of toxic smog.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the roar of motorcycle engines are fading away until next year, the vendors are counting cash stuffing their cash register drawers, and where peace and quite is returning even if it is on a Monday.

Thoughts On A Sunday

Motorcycle Week has returned to central New Hampshire! The roar of motorcycles has ramped up since Friday evening and bikes galore have been on all of the roads. Some people hear the noise of the bike engines. Others hear the ringing of cash registers all over the state.

While in the past most of the focus of Bike Week was here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, it has since spread out to other areas around the state. That has given the mistaken impression that not as many bikers have been coming up for the festivities because the not quite as many people congregate around Weirs Beach, the 'HQ' of Bike Week. But looking at the tourism dollars rolling in and full hotels and campgrounds, it is obvious that just the opposite is true.

At least this year's Bike Week looks to have great weather all week, with only a chance of thundershowers sometime on Thursday.

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Much has been made of the increasing suicide rate in the US, with a 25% increase seen across the nation over the past few years.

There are all kinds of theories as to why this is occurring running the gamut of the decay of the nation's moral fabric, the attacks on religiosity, readily available abortion which cheapens the value placed upon life, the war against men (most suicides are male, with the number rising alarmingly amongst middle aged men), the jungle that is social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), and one of my favorites, the rapid increase in the use of SSRIs, a class of drug used as an anti-depressant. Considering one of the side effects in children and young adults can be suicide ideation, is it any surprise that all of these factors are contributing to the rising suicide rate?

I doubt there is one factor that we can point to and say “Aha! Here's the problem!”

What's the solution? Frankly, I have no idea. But I do have on suggestion that I think many should consider, that being to “drop out' of social media. Take a break from it all. Don't log in to any of your electronic addictions. Wean yourself off of the electronic fentanyl, or better yet, go cold turkey for a while. Also consider staying away from all of the so-called news websites and apps. You might be surprised just how much better you feel after a week or so away. You'll likely also come to realize just how much time you have been wasting on something that has no socially redeeming values and lets you get back to living life again.

Will this solve the problem? Again, I have no idea. But it doesn't take any time or money to give it a try and you just might find yourself enjoying the real world again.

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How many times over the past few years have we heard about some busybody bureaucrat shutting down a kid's lemonade stand? Call it the height of asininity and government overreach spuured on mby the Left's need to control every aspect of our lives.

But now folks are fighting back against that crap, specifically the men and women of Country Time Lemonade. They've started a legal defense fund to help entrepreneurial kids fight the bureaucrats and run their pop-up lemonade stands, just like we did when we were kids. Call it one more fight against those who seem to think they know how we should live our lives better than we do.

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As if we had any doubt that 'comedian' Bill Maher is a douchebag, he proves it to us yet again by wishing the economy would tank and hurt millions of Americans just so he and his cohorts can get rid of Trump. Of course HE wouldn't be hurt by such a slump because he is, after all, wealthy. But the rest of us would have to suffer just so he can feel better about who's president?

And then there's his whole 'losing democracy' shtick which makes us realize he doesn't understand that America is not a democracy, but a constitutional republic.

Then again, the elite don't need to understand these things because everything is about the 'feelz', not the facts.

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For a change of pace (and a palate cleanser), how about a documentary about Mister Rogers?

Apparently it is quite good and confirms many of the good things I've heard about him over the years.

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Apparently even the people living in Massachusetts hate Massachusetts because they are refusing to have kids there. The Pay State has the lowest fertility rate in the nation, has seen its influence in Congress withering away as its population grows slowly (if at all) and other states with higher fertility and immigration (from other states) grow more rapidly, taking away their House seats in Congress.

While not quite a one-party state like California, it does have way too many Democrats spending the taxpayers' money on useless and stupid things. While it's taxes aren't quite as bad as those in neighboring Connecticut, it's still known by many as 'Taxachusetts' as there is little its legislature won't tax.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the roar of engines is expected to get louder over the next 7 days, cash registers will be ringing up sales from visiting bikers, and where for once I have no issue with Monday's imminent arrival.

Where Did All The Time Go? It's Been 16 Years!!

It's hard to believe that this blog has been around for sixteen years, but it has.

My dear brother made the first post 16 years ago today, our former website – World Domination, Inc – having become too cumbersome to maintain. (Our motto was and still is Subjugating Humanity, One Individual At A Time.) His first post can be found here. Just scroll down to the bottom.

This blog started on Blogger, then moved to Blogmosis (long defunct), then Nexcess, and finally back to Blogger. There have been thousands of posts, some lost (when Blogmosis went under), and the rest here at Blogger. The topics covered are too numerous to list, but most of them dealt with the Left, the Wrong (basically the same thing), the Constitution, and just plain tomfoolery of all stripes.

While life has intruded, making blogging much more difficult, I have managed to post on weekends. (I guess that makes the blog title accurate, eh?)

Some have asked if I will eventually give this up. The honest answer is I don't know. All I can say for sure is that if I do it won't be any time soon. It could be I might move my blogging to another well established blog. I might go back to almost daily blogging here. Only time will tell.

I any case, here's to 16 years on the blogosphere, and hopefully many more to come.

Thoughts On A Sunday

This is going to be a somewhat abbreviated post as I literally just got back from some time out on the lake. I hadn't figured I'd be out so late, but family was visiting from Nevada so BeezleBub and I took them out for a tour of the lake.

Frankly, between going out on the lake or working on a post, I'd choose time on the lake every single time.

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The whole dust up about whether or not Robert Mueller can subpoena the President is telling me that Mueller hasn't got squat after over a year of 'investigation' of any collusion with the Russians. There's been plenty of proof that the Clinton campaign had plenty of contact with the Russians, but has any time been spent looking into that? Not from what I can see.

This has been a fishing expedition/witch hunt from the very beginning, pushed hard by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Millions have been spent and there isn't a damn thing to show for it. If there were we'd be hearing it from the DOJ and the MSM every minute of every day. But what are we hearing instead? Lots of conjecture and innuendo, but outside of that, crickets.

This is one heck of a nothingburger that the DNC cannot stomach.

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When I read the story about a Benghazi survivor, and Army Ranger, 'shooting down' David Hogg's take on gun control, I found myself agreeing with the man.

I honestly don't remember reports of school shootings of the type we've been experiencing since Columbine during the time I was in school – the 60's and 70's. It's only been since Hogg's generation came into being that we've seen this spate of school shootings.

Says former Army Ranger Kris Paronto, “I remember, it was before your generation started shooting up the schools David, even though we still had guns," Paronto tweeted. "Thank you for confirming..again...that it’s not the gun, it’s person, and in particular you & your peers millennial culture.”

With the wall-to-wall coverage given by the media whenever these types of shootings take place, sensationalizing the event and making a 'celebrity' out of the shooter, is it any wonder that there have been such school shootings? Even while reporting on the tragedy, they glamorize the shooter as if it were all part of some first person shooter game and this guy had the high score.

Just how twisted is that?

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Is that they don't care or that they really don't understand that they are shooting the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs? Of the two, I'd have to say it's the second because it appears that they could that stupid.

To what do I refer?

The alleged plan by some of the NFL players to strike back against the league's kneeling ban by boycotting games.

I wrote 'alleged' because the report about this plan comes from notoriously unreliable Shaun King. If players actually decided to do something that stupid, I would expect them to be kicked out of the league and replacement players put in their place. Of course I would expect those same ex-players to file a lawsuit against the NFL, thought I doubt they could claim breach of contract because it would have been them breaching their contract with the NFL, not the other way around.

Are NFL players that stupid? On the whole, I'd say probably not. But that doesn't mean that one or two of them have so convinced themselves that they are indispensable that they would do something that stupid.

Only time will tell.

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I think it's time for Bernie Sanders to throw in the towel and retire. After all he can't seem to tell the difference between the people in his home state of Vermont and those in California.

Then again, he also doesn't know how economics works which is why he keeps pushing the free college and free s**t for everyone. He doesn't seem to understand that there is no such thing as free anything. Someone somewhere has to pay for it and that eventually he will run out of those other people's money.

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And that's the abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the warm dry weather will be gone for the next few days, school will be out for the summer soon, and where Motorcycle Week starts next weekend!