4/28/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was an uneventful weekend here at The Gulch with just routine chores to take up our time. The only exception was dinner with my dear brother and his wife. We went to one of our favorite restaurants, knowing it would be one of the last we’d be eating there until after the summer season.

Some of the seasonal restaurants have opened their doors starting this weekend and will be open only on weekends until Memorial Day weekend. Other seasonal businesses have opened this weekend or will be opening next weekend, including some of the local farm stands.

It’s hard to believe that the unofficial start of summer is only a month away. But with that in mind I have already made arrangements for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, aka The Boat to be prepared for launching and hope to get it into the water some time in the next two weeks.

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This isn’t something I would expect to hear in the second decade of the 21st century.

A professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College has come to the conclusion that “the mere presence of a gun, especially if one makes physical contact with it, can transform a good person into a bad one.”

Does this academic truly believe in magic, most particularly the Law of Contagion? It certainly appears to be the case. He’s certainly implying that the occult has some power over the fate of people near guns.

Is this what passes for serious academic research these days? If so, we are doomed.

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I knew the human feces issue in San Francisco had become a real problem, but that it has required the creation of a “poop” map to keep people in San Francisco informed of where human waste has been piling up shows just how bad it’s become. The same problem has been appearing in New York City, where the derelicts see no issue with dropping trou and defecating on the sidewalks and walkways.

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It has become evident the anti-vaxxers are starting to reap the rewards of what they have sowed through their willful ignorance and belief in pseudoscience. Measles, a disease once vanquished here in North America, has returned and done so with a vengeance. Measles is easily prevented through vaccination, but difficult to treat once it has established itself. It is one of the most contagious diseases known. Yet the anti-vaxxers have chosen to not have their children vaccinated based upon a fraudulent study, since withdrawn. Now the bill for having done this has come due and it is their children who suffer. Some will be damaged. Some will die. And all of it was preventable.

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What happens to your business when you intentionally insult and piss off half of your potential customer base?

You go out of business, and rightfully so.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the last vestiges of winter have melted away, tress are budding, and boats are appearing at docks around the lake.

4/21/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

Between the warm temperatures and heavy rain we’ve experienced over the past few days much of the snow and ice that was still surviving in piles and shadowed areas has disappeared. Not that it’s all gone by any means as there are still sheets of ice out on portions of Lake Winnipesaukee. Ice out has not been declared yet. (Ice out is defined when the MS Mount Washington cruise ship can make all five ports of call.)

Thoughts of time out on the lake in a boat have been becoming far more frequent as the weather have been increasing every day.

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A rather heated discussion about President Trump took place between me and the oldest of the WP Sisters yesterday.

She made it perfectly clear that she believed that Trump was an awful president, not because he wasn’t getting things done, but because of his “rude and crude” tweets.

I did remind her that Trump is not a politician, at least not in the traditional sense, and that he speaks his mind. I also reminded her that his public persona is not his real persona. It’s a suit of clothing he’s put on whenever he’s doing business, and that’s the one that so many see. He knows how to get things done behind the scenes. It’s that ability that makes him effective as a president.

A metaphor I have used on more than one occasion is that Trump is a stage magician, showing everyone the shiny object with one hand while performing the trick with his hidden hand. That’s how he’s managed to get so much done with little MSM/DNC attention. Business-killing Obama era regulations have been eliminated one by one, reducing the regulatory burdens by billions of dollars for American businesses, big and small. There are still more he regulations he is working to eliminate, many which were out in place to more tightly constrain business with no real justification for doing so other than proving that the government was in charge. (I have never understood how anyone can believe more and heavier business regulation has ever improved economic performance. I couldn’t find any instances where that’s been true.)

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This is an idea I can get behind>

President Trump has considered relocating illegal immigrants awaiting deportation/amnesty hearings to sanctuary cities, something that had many of those ‘sanctuary’ cities crying foul because in effect Trump is calling their bluff and trying to make them live up to their rules. Now one mayor of a sanctuary city – Burlington, Vermont’s Mayor Miro Weinberger – has challenged Trump to send as many illegal immigrants as he wanted to send.

I’m sure the mayor’s constituents will just love having all of those illegal immigrants from Central and South America flooding northern Vermont and will welcome them and everything they bring with them with open arms.

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Speaking of Burlington, Vermont, it’s former mayor and now US Senator Bernie Sanders is proving once again that facts need not apply when it comes things like renewable energy, nuclear power, and CO2 because his uninformed opinion is much more believable than actual numbers from both the feddle gummint, Vermont state agencies, and independent organizations.

Then again, socialists and communist don’t like being confused by reality, otherwise they wouldn’t be socialists or communists, would they?

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Oh, yeah!

Do you want to Make America Great Again? Then let’s Make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Bartend Again!

One thing that might cement AOC’s One-And-Done time as a member of the US House is the accompanying video satire pulled of by an eight-year old.

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It seems that New York State has had a problem with state tax revenues falling by $3.7 billion.

While state officials have tried hard to lay the blame at bookkeeping changes and/or the limiting of State And Local Tax (SALT) deductions on federal tax returns to $10,000, the truth is more likely that taxes and fees have reached the point of diminishing returns. One has to wonder if the New York State tax-and-spenders will learn the lesson being learned by neighboring state Connecticut where successive tax-and-spend/regulate-to-death legislatures and governors have so damaged the state that cities are verging on bankruptcy and both major corporations and wealthy taxpayers are leaving in increasing numbers to escape the now hostile business environment.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee this Easter Sunday, where church services were well attended, Easter dinners were eagerly consumed, and where almost all of the ice is gone from the lake.

4/14/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

The weather was beautiful up here in central New Hampshire yesterday, with temps just missing 70°F. I opened a few windows here at The Gulch to air things out a bit, something the feline contingent here enjoyed. It was almost as warm today, but with a little bit of rain now and again.

Still, it wasn’t a bad weekend weather-wise. However the lake is still iced over though we are seeing some open water here and there.

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From the “Just When I thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this howler from Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

In true tax-and-tax-and-tax-and-spend fashion, Wyden has put forth the idea to tax unrealized capital gains on an annual basis, meaning rather than taxing capital gains when finally paid out, he would have the government tax them every year whether or not they are paid out. In other words, you wouldn’t have to sell off your stocks in order for the government to tax your theoretical capital gains, and they would do it every year. That the idea is unworkable, unwieldy, and would be expensive as hell to implement and maintain hasn’t crossed the Senator’s mind. Oor if it has he really doesn’t care because it’s not about collecting more revenue, but about punishing investors. (That investors include things like pension funds and retirement accounts seems to have escaped the Senator’s notice.)

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Another item from the “Just When I thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department is AOC’s unthinking slam against Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s (R-TX) tweet in regards to Ilhan Omar’s diminishment of the actions of Muslim terrorists on 9-11. Then again, most of what AOC does is unthinking, driven by feels and her Marxist indoctrination. Is it any wonder she’s known as Occasional Cortex?

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Paul Craig Roberts opines that America is no longer a nation.

The America in which I grew up and lived my early adult life was a nation. Over the course of my life I have watched my country turn into a Tower of Babel. Homogeneity and shared values permitted us to understand one another. This doesn’t mean that there was uniformity or that things were perfect. A Baptist wasn’t a Catholic. A WASP was not a black laborer. A female was not a male. Blacks and poor whites had a hard time becoming middle class, but it could be done. It was possible for middle class people to become “well off,” but difficult to become rich. Immigration was controlled, and the reduction of inflows had helped the Irish and Italians to integrate into society.

Police were helpful and didn’t burst into homes with guns blazing or rough you up on traffic stops. On important issues, compromises could be reached and reforms implemented. English was the language. If you telephoned a service provider, utility, or bank, you quickly were connected to a real person capable of handling every aspect of whatever you were calling about. Today you wait through the Spanish language option for the robo-voice listing the options that might have something to do with the reason for your call. The companies save money and make profits by imposing their service costs on customers.

Technology seems to have worsened the functionality of society. Diversity and multiculturalism definitely have. It used to be that taking or giving offense was something that good manners prevented. Today members of those groups that are entitled to be offended are ready to take offense at any excuse. Today it is easy for a white person and a male to give offense without intending or even knowing that what he did or said was offensive.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

(H/T Knuckledraggin’ My Life Away)

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I thought the possibility that President Trump would consider having illegal immigrants dropped off in sanctuary cities would be poetic justice. (It’s so much better than ‘social justice’ which has absolutely nothing to do with actual justice.)

When then-Senator Harry Reid exercised the ‘nuclear’ option in the US Senate, the Democrats chose to ignore that the rules change he made would some under the sway of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Now that so many blue cities have decided they wouldn’t help ICE by detaining illegal aliens if they were arrested for other crimes, and in some cases worked against ICE by obstructing them in the performance of their duties, it seems only fitting that they now be made to live by the rules they themselves have created. They may also come under the sway of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It would serve them right if all the illegals seeking asylum were dropped of in all of those nice sanctuary cities. Let them take care of them if they care so much about them.

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Despite the fact that this is about a year old, it lessen the message: What White Privilege Lessons Did To My High School.

The story boils down to this: students were called into a mandatory assembly, topic unknown. A ‘panel’ of experts spent time talking to them about diversity and the evils of white privilege. At the beginning of the ‘indoctrination’ the kids were a group of high school students. At the end they were no longer high school students, but oppressors and the oppressed. Unity amongst the student body no longer existed. It was whites oppressing everyone else. Comradery was replaced by anger, recriminations, and incipient hatred.

All these ‘diversity’ experts managed to do was divide students, foster anger and hatred, and then leave, feeling they had “done something” even though that something was damaging and racially charged. No one came away better off from that indoctrination. No one. And these assholes see this as a positive.

That whirring sound you hear? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spinning in his grave now that all of his work is being undone all in the name of ‘equality’.

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If the media didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.

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I always thought nonconformity was a paradox. This is why.

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformists who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform to with nonconformity. – Eric Hoffer

I was something of a nonconformist nonconformist during my high school years. Everyone had long hair and wore bellbottom jeans. My hair was quite short, and I wore what are now called boot cut jeans, and either work boots or ‘cowboy’ boots. I had more than a few of my fellow students comment about my “giving in to the Man” and I usually countered with something along the line of “So you want me to be different, same as you?” They usually didn’t know what to make of that and that was fine by me.

(H/T Moonbattery)

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One would think that state Democrats would learn the lesson from previous years and not go for ‘crazy’, but you’d be wrong. In this case the New Hampshire Democrat majority legislature decided they absolutely needed to increase state spending by a whopping 13% and boost state taxes and fees by almost 17%, ignoring the facts that closely controlled state spending increases and tax cuts have done more to help the economy of my home state recover quickly from the Obama years and have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the entire nation. But they felt the uncontrollable urge to undo all of that and try to bring back the bad old days of the Obama economy, and smiling while they sabotaged the New Hampshire Advantage.

The question is whether or not our GOP governor will wield his veto pen and kill off the Democrats plans to damage our economy and more heavily burden the taxpayers of our state in order to make themselves feel better about themselves for having done “something”. That kind of something we don’t need.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice is thinning, work on getting boats ready for the summer has started, and where I’m hoping the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout will be on the lake in 4 weeks.

4/07/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

I got a little bit of a late start on this week’s TOAS as I am still revering from my day trip down to Washington, DC late this past week. I can say that I did the appropriate precautions, mainly making sure that I had my Beltway Mind Alteration Force Field Protection Shield (i.e. tinfoil hat) in place before entering the Beltway environs. I know it was working because as I got closer to Washington, my shield became warmer.

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One thing I noticed from my single day down in Washington is that TDS is quite prevalent. About the only place I didn’t witness TDS was at the customer site I was visiting, techies like myself (but not like those seen in Silly Cones Valley).

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Bernie Sanders is still getting it wrong, just as he always has. In this case he is lambasting the “right-wing authoritarians backed by a network of billionaire oligarchs,” while ignoring the left-wing totalitarians backed by a network of billionaire oligarchs, totalitarians who would have no problem eliminating Bernie once he was longer of any use to them.

It doesn’t help things that Bernie’s definition of ‘democracy’ is different from most other folks. Why he would want to inflict that kind of democracy on people proves to me that he really doesn’t like people because he certainly is doing his best to make sure everyone is going to be equally miserable, equally fearful, and equally disposable by The State.

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If we need more evidence that even state level Democrats are totally effin’ clueless when it comes to guns and violence, all one needs to do is look to New Hampshire, where the Democrat-majority legislature has pushed legislation that will make schools and school-owned property “Gun Free” zones. The legislation is so broad that an otherwise law abiding citizen carrying a gun would be in violation of the proposed law if they passed a school bus out on the road. Anyone paying attention knows that Gun Free Zones are merely feelgood actions. They provide no security (other than a false sense of security), signal pissed off people with a grudge that there are plenty of free fire zones available to vent their rage.

The legislators have been acting as if gun violence is epidemic in New Hampshire, but New Hampshire is one of the safest states in the nation with a very low violent crime rate. It is a constitutional carry state and a large percentage of its citizens carry concealed. The only shootouts that have taken place in recent memory is one between a notoriously violent drug dealer and local and state police. The drug dealer didn’t survive, though he killed two fellow drug dealers and wounded two police officers before he was brought down by police.

Would Gun Free Zones have made any difference in this event? Of course not, but that wouldn’t stop our anti-gun legislators and their supporters from making a claim to the contrary. They don’t let data, facts, or statistics get in the way of their beliefs.

These ‘beliefs’ have also extended into other legislative areas as well, such as so-called ‘Red Flag’ laws that will violate due process for law abiding gun owners, increased fines and fees, increases in rooms and meal taxes, adding new licensing requirements for occupations that have not required them before, as well as downshifting more state costs to towns (something inherently unconstitutional) and trying to impose a stealth income tax by calling it a family leave fee to fund family leave for workers that do not already have such perks or insurance coverage. (Everyone knows the Democrats will then expand that ‘fee’ to pay for all kinds of nice-to-haves they deem as need-to-haves as a means staying in power.

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When is property tax relief not property tax relief? When Democrats (again in New Hampshire) raise taxes and fees by $417 million and then return $12 million (a measly 0.3%) of the taxes collected to the towns. I see that as an excuse to increase taxes, not the actual reason.

It’s the old bait-and-switch.

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And that the abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice still covers the lake, snow is predicted for Monday, and everyone is prepping for summer.