Our Thanksgiving gathering at the youngest WP Sister’s place went off without a hitch. Though it wasn’t the largest gathering we’ve had by any means, we still had a good portion of the WP clan in attendance.
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OK, folks, I think we have to agree that Hollywood has run out of ideas and has been resurrecting old movies and TV series. The next TV series to be raised from the dead?
Northern Exposure.
While I liked the show, goodness knows it was a quirky show with a lot of appeal, I’m not sure how well it will do. Should the project go forward, I can see where the first episode would garner a lot of viewers. Most of those viewers are likely to be fans of the original (like me), but if the resurrected version does not retain the quirkiness and, dare I say ‘fun’ of the original, it won’t survive.
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Oh, this is embarrassing!
One group of special operations undercover police officers in one Detroit precinct acting as dope dealers were targeted for arrest by another group of special operation undercover police officers from another precinct acting as buyers.
Don’t these special operations groups talk with each other?
As amusing as this sounds, this kind of mistake could have ended up with cop-on-cop shootings. Somebody needs to be fired.
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Coyote Blog has a suggestion when it comes to government involvement with health care: Have the government focus on the one thing it does best and keep it away from the rest. What is that “one thing”?
…the one thing the government is really, really good at is being an insurer of last resort -- they have the deep pockets and the fiat money power to do this better than anyone else -- that is why they are the insurer of last resort of bank deposits and for flood insurance (I am not saying that there are not moral hazards in these or unintended consequences, but the insurance works). So there is the clear opportunity -- what people need most is catastrophic insurance even when the private market won't provide it and the government does really well is provide catastrophic insurance as a last resort.Keep it away from everything else. As Coyote states, the government is awful at things like cost control and service effectiveness. Goodness knows there are enough examples to prove these two points, including things like Medicaid and Medicare.
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The Perpetually Offended Social Justice Warrior Snowflakes have cost yet another college administrator his job. His offense?
Asking questions that needed to be asked about those accusing then SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault that had the snowflakes swooning onto their fainting couches.
While the administrator himself was not fired, he was suspended by the college and he later tendered his resignation.
I have one message for these snowflakes: Grow up!
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This is something anyone with even a smattering of economic smarts has known right from the beginning: Green energy is a disastrous flop.
“Green” energy is expensive, even with government subsidies, is not dispatchable (not readily available when needed), and tends to displace inexpensive and reliable energy sources because they take priority.
Green energy is a loser and the sooner people realize it the sooner we can get back to sane, fact-based energy policies.
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I’m with Skip Murphy on this one: Stop Premature Christmas Decorating!
It seems Christmas decorations go up in stores earlier every year. I have seen them while Halloween decorations are still up!
As a kid I remember that Christmas decorations in stores didn’t go up until after Thanksgiving. There was no ‘Black Friday’. No endless TV commercials hawking unidentifiable presents. Our Christmas decorations didn’t go up into about a week before Christmas and came down on New Year’s Day.
I figure it’s only a matter of time before the Christmas decorations start going up even as the flashes and booms of Fourth of July fireworks are fading away.
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Are we an ungrateful nation?
Unfortunately, the answer is mostly “yes”.
According to Pew Research from 2015, when it comes to standard of living, "The U.S. stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world. More than half (56 percent) of Americans were high income by the global standard ... and 2 percent were poor."I know I am. I have managed to spend time in 40-some countries over the past 40+ years, and not as a tourist. A few have been wonderful places. More than a few of the others have been nightmares best forgotten. And the rest lie somewhere in between those extremes. Yet none of them measured up to the US. None of them.
Fantastic products are cheaper than ever. Human Progress investigated the amount of time Americans must spend to earn enough money to buy key products and found that since 1979, the amount of time spent to earn a refrigerator had dropped 52 percent, 95 percent for microwaves, 65 percent for gas ranges and 61 percent for dishwashers. Between the mid-1960s and 2007, Americans were able to work less and leisure more: They worked nearly eight hours fewer per week, according to The Heritage Foundation. The wage gap is almost entirely a myth: Women who work the same jobs as men for the same number of hours, and have the same work history and same education as men make the same as men. The chief obstacles to income mobility in the United States are related to personal decision-making, not racial discrimination: As the Brookings Institution points out, of the people who finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children, nearly 75 percent join the middle class, and just 2 percent remain in poverty.
What of freedom? In America, people of all religions practice freely, so long as the government isn't attempting to cram social justice down on them. People are free to speak, so long as government actors aren't utilizing the heckler's veto. We are free to use the press, free to associate and free to protest.
All of this is the result of the greatest governmental philosophy ever committed to paper: God-given individual rights protected by limited government. We haven't always lived up to that philosophy -- in some areas, we've progressed mightily, and in others, we've regressed. But the overall success of the United States should be ringing proof that at the very least, we should be grateful and proud to live here.
Of course I realize that it is my bias speaking, but it is a well-earned bias and one to which I am unapologetic.
We take so much for granted, have so much, and yet some of us are unhappy and ungrateful. For some, the answer seems to be to unmake America and turn it into a Third World s**thole as some kind of atonement for our success. They believe we are guilty of some kind of sin and must flail ourselves in punishment, and if we don’t do it voluntarily they’ll force us to even if it means tearing America apart to do so. What a bunch of ungrateful morons.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where warmer weather has returned for a few days, where the snow is melting as a result, and where the stress of upcoming Christmas is ramping up.