10/06/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

The fall foliage color is getting closer to peak here in central New Hampshire. I figure it will reach peak just before the upcoming Columbus Day weekend.

We are seeing more leaf peepers making the rounds here as the colors move south. I figure we’ll see a lot of foliage tourists here next weekend, filling the restaurants and factory outlets, one last gasp of the summer tourist season. The last of the seasonal businesses still operating will be closing their doors after Columbus Day, not reopening until late spring.

Ski areas have already started prepping for the upcoming winter, servicing and testing their lift equipment, snowmaking gear, and snowcats even as they dismantle and store all of the summer equipment and winterize their summer attractions.

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Oh, this will go over well with those who love their Big Macs.

A small number of Muslim activists are demanding McDonald’s change their menus to meet halal standards.

The company makes burgers, and earns billions of dollars in the process. Now, activists want them to change their business model to appease a small percent of the population.

When asked why their London branch did not serve food that met Halal standards, McDonald’s simply responded that it didn’t make financial sense to change things up…

Turn their supply chain and menus upside down to meet the demands of a very small percentage of their customer base? Yeah, that’ll work…and McDonald’s will fade away as the rest of their customer base dwindles away.

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The city government of San Francisco did everything it could to make it comfortable for the chronically homeless. The end result has been a huge increase in homelessness and drug use. (Link may be paywalled.)

This city has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

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The city sends the message relentlessly that drug use is not only acceptable but expected. The Health Department distributes 4.5 million syringes a year, along with alcohol swabs, vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, and instructions on how to tie one’s arm for a hit. Officials have installed 17 needle-disposal boxes and kiosks throughout the city, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.

They subsidize the homeless and get more homeless. They subsidize drug abuse and they get more drug addicts. Don’t they see any connection between what they’re doing and what they’re getting in return? Obviously not. They keep talking about spending even more money to solve the problem they themselves have created and they’ll only make it worse.

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First they went after Uber and Lyft. Then they went after Juul pods. Now New York City is going after food delivery services.

Their excuse? Food delivery is bad for the city’s restaurants.

Hmm. I thought food delivery service like GrubHub delivered food for restaurants of all kinds. They aren’t part of any restaurant chain like Domino’s or Pizza Hut. They deliver for just about everyone. It’s true they charge a premium for doing so, but so what? If people are willing to pay it, why should the city care? If they aren’t, then they won’t use one of the delivery services, will they?

Does the city council think that such a service will keep people from going to restaurants? It appears it does. I’m not sure I understand their reasoning. Between a $15/hour minimum wage decimating the restaurants viability and trying to rein in food delivery services that provide them with more customers, one would think they’re trying hard to kill of New York’s restaurant businesses entirely.

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Democrats are trying very hard to ignore the debacle of the video of Joe Biden coming right out and saying he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to the Ukrainian government unless they fired the prosecutor investigating dirty dealings by his son in Ukraine. What they’re doing by ignoring it is telling everyone that it’s OK for Democrats to demand a quid pro quo from foreign governments, but fake quid pro quo demands from Republicans are illegal.

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

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Another note to the congressional Democrats: It’s perfectly legal to ask foreign governments to help in criminal investigations. It’s done all the time, and done so under the terms of treaties ratified by the Senate.

There’s no ‘there’ there.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the fall colors are getting brighter, the nights are getting colder, and boating season will soon be ending.