Today we took the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water. It was a little chilly – about 50ºF – though certainly nowhere near the coldest it’s been when we’ve trailered the boat to haul it to winter storage. The engine was fogged before shutting it down, the bilge plug pulled, and the drain plugs removed from the engine block and exhaust manifolds to allow the water to drain.
All of the gear was removed and stored away before the boat was hauled to one of the local boatyards for winterization and storage. It was one of the last boats pulled from the lake will be one of the firsts to go back in next spring.
I have no complaints about this year’s boating season other than it wasn’t long enough. (It never is.)
A lot of good memories were made this year on our boat. We made some new friends. We watched a number of great sunsets. We did a lot of swimming off the transom when anchored at some of our favorite places on the lake. There was a lot of family time.
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From the new “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Crazier” Department comes this from Duke University.
According to Duke University cultural anthropologist Christine Folch, the reason white female professors have been impersonation women of color is male privilege.
My first response to this was an immediate and rather vocal “What The F**k?”
“And at the root I think what we see is a competition for scarce resources on the part of those who are not the hegemonic ideal in academia, which remains white male.”Umm, no. Not buying it. Could it be because these ethnic impostors saw an advantage to not being white? I doubt male privilege had anything to do with it and rather it was the hostile academic atmosphere towards white men and women on college campuses is the main reason.
In other words, she said, there’s a competition for inclusion among the historically excluded in academe. And “strategic use and appropriation of brownness” becomes a way to “accumulate more power, more legitimacy, grants, coolness points.”
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Is anyone out there laying odds on the possibility there will be post-election rioting should Trump win?
Seeing what has already been happening in the Blue-run cities with the tacit approval of the Democrat city governments, unless Trump wins overwhelmingly, I expect there will be mostly violent protests (or partially peaceful protests for those who don’t believe anyone could possibly be violent during a protest). If there are, I would like to think the rioters will be given no latitude, meaning they won’t be allowed to commit arson or to loot. Attacks on citizens and police will be quashed. Rioters will be arrested and tried, not kicked loose by bought and paid for prosecutors.
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It’s amazing (though not surprising) that a number of recent polls show a major shift in the Presidential race, with Trump catching, if not passing Biden in a number of states, and narrowing the gap in other states with the differences in some of them being well within the margin of error.
Does this mean there’s been an actual shift among likely voters, better polling methodology and data, or are likely voters now voicing their real choice now that we’re so close to election day?
The most important poll will be taking place this coming Tuesday and pollsters will be looking at the election results and comparing them to their poll results. Some will be thinking they did a decent job while others will be wondering how they could have gotten their numbers so wrong.
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Compare and contrast:
Democrat-Run Hellholes Prepping for Election-Night Violence Because Of Course versus No One Is Boarding Up Their Stores Because of These People.
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This past Friday I ran across our Town Clerk and asked her how many absentee ballots had been received so far. Her answer surprised me.
Two thousand.
While it may not sound like a lot for some towns and cities, it is about one-third of the total registered voters in our town. A third. In a town that has a very high percentage of its eligible residents registered to vote, that is a significant number. (We have around 6,100 registered voters in a town of around 7,200 year-round residents. That means just about every eligible resident 18 years and older in our town is registered to vote.)
I’m betting we’ll see above 90% voter turnout on Tuesday.
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How often have we heard the willfully ignorant among us utter “All cultures are equally valid/valuable”?
I’ve lost count over the years, but I have heard it too often. This usually comes from someone who has never experienced living within another culture. (Sorry, but eating Thai or Indian food doesn’t count as having experienced life in another culture. Nor does spending Spring Break at one of the many Caribbean tourist resorts or watching movies and streaming TV series taking place someplace else qualify.)
As such, those making such pronouncements have nothing against which to make a comparison. They are taking the word of someone else who has also had no experience living within another culture. (These also tend be a lot of the same folks who complain about “cultural appropriation”, seeing it as some form of genocide if someone wants to try making a meal using food from another culture even if the meal itself is a modified version of the original, or horror upon horrors, creating music that fuses many different types of music from different places into a new form.)
I don’t buy the “equally valid/valuable” trope.
There are cultures that are superior to others, that offer more and help their people become greater than they already are. There others that offer less, but are no less valuable. There some that with the removal of some old barbaric cultural customs could become so much better than they are. Then there are others that should be wiped from the face of the earth because they are so barbaric they should no longer exist. I am not referring to those of isolated tribes hidden away in deep rain forests, but modern cultures that have carried a host of their barbaric traditions with them and practice them to this day.
Those cultures are so abhorrent, between the way they treat people outside their culture, and worse, how they treat people inside of it, they should fade away into the shadows of history much like other abhorrent cultures have.
Are there any ‘perfect’ cultures? No, of course not. I doubt there ever will be. Somehow I think a ‘perfect’ culture would be as boring as heck and, in the end, would be likely to die away because it would become static. Static cultures die.
Vibrant cultures grow, many times by borrowing from other cultures and adding those borrowed aspects to their own. This is the dreaded “cultural appropriation” so many of the willfully ignorant rail against. They don’t realize they are trying to impose cultural stasis, something that will kill the very cultures they say they are trying to preserve.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the number of boats plying the waters have dropped to almost zero, preparations are being finalized for Election Day, and where we’ll all be happy when it’s Wednesday.