I headed out from The Gulch at 9:30 yesterday morning to run errands – take care of some banking, get a haircut, meet the ex for brunch, stop off at Ocean State Job Lots – and return home. From the moment I left The Gulch I knew things weren’t going to go well. I could go into a lengthy diatribe about all of the traffic craziness I experienced, but I’ll save you the boredom and just list them, sort of:
-Someone couldn’t decide which lane they wanted to be in so straddled the line between two lanes until they were forced to make a decision.There were a few more incidents before I traveled the last 5 miles home. This had to be one of the worst (and stupidest) day for traffic that I have ever seen. It was one stupid or mindless thing after another. Thank goodness I didn’t have to run any errands today except for my usual pre-church Walmart run, and I did that at 7:30 this morning.
-Another motorist pulled into the entrance of our local shopping center...then stopped dead in the middle of the entrance, preventing any other vehicles from entering or exiting, until the driver decided where they wanted to go. By that time traffic was backed up both in the parking lot and the main road.
-Driving to the barber shop I had to deal with a driver who decided traffic lights, lane markings, speed limits, and turn signals were inconveniences to be ignored. I guess he was in a big hurry as worked his way through traffic, forcing his way into lines of traffic, running a couple of red lights, crossing over into oncoming traffic...right until one of the cars he went head to head with turned out to be a local police cruiser.
-After my haircut I headed to the nearby entrance to the local Interstate and headed north on my way to pick up my ex for brunch. A few miles up traffic dropped from 70mph to a complete stop, then continued at a slow crawl for the next 4 miles. What caused the traffic jam? A State Trooper writing a ticket, probably for speeding. I guess many of the motorists had never seen a Statie write a speeding ticket before, so they slowed to a crawl to take a look.
-At a stoplight near the ex’s place the fellow at the front of the line waiting for left turn light to turn green did not move once the left arrow changed to green. Or the second time it turned green. (No, his truck was running and wasn’t broken down.) The third time was the charm and when the light yet again changed to green he finally made the left turn. As he did so I could see the smartphone in his left hand and could see just enough of the display to realize he’d been texting.
-On the way home after brunch I was getting ready to go through one of the local roundabouts. Traffic was backed up coming from the opposite direction. There was a classic car show going on nearby and everyone seemed to be going there. One fellow waiting at the roundabout lost his patience and decided he was going to force his way through...and blocked all traffic trying to get through. Nothing moved for almost 10 minutes until a couple of local police showed up and helped get things untangled. One of the officers was having words with the miscreant who created the traffic block and I guess he said something stupid as I saw the officer’s hand go to the grip of his service pistol. Just then traffic going the direction I was headed started moving, so I didn’t see the outcome of that particular incident. One thing I did notice is that plate on the miscreant’s car was from out-of-state.
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James Lileks rightfully fisks yet another willfully ignorant and clueless socialist about the realities of the world, including how socialism doesn’t work, has never worked, and will never work.
One would think that after 400-some years of trying to make it work and failing miserably Every. Single. Time. that the Socialists would get the message, right? But like any addict, those addicted to an idea that has poisoned the minds of hundreds of millions and broken the spirit and bodies of billions over the ages is not something easy to give up. Despite generations of data and evidence showing just how awful socialism is, the addicts can’t give it up. What’s worse is that they addict others to this amoral and unethical political system.
It needs to be thrown upon the ash heap of history, permanently, not brought back again and again like another episode of The Walking Dead.
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You know it’s getting bad for the DNC when even lifelong Democrats are abandoning the party because it has shifted so far to the left. The change they were promised is not the change they are seeing, and it disturbs them deeply.
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What is it with all these conservative Republicans refusing to get vaccinated? Don’t they realize they are putting others at risk by not being vaccinated?
Wait...what? They aren’t the ones refusing vaccination? If it isn’t them, then who is it?
The Biden administration, stung by missing its vaccine targets and the rising COVID-19 cases, has decided to blame Republicans. That’s not surprising. But it’s traditionally Democratic groups – minorities and the young – who aren’t getting vaccinated, and it’s leftists who are the most influential anti-vaxxers on the planet.So it isn’t along political lines this divide lies, but ethnic lines. Yes, there are certainly political aspects to this, but not the ones being sold to everyone. For the White House and the DNC-MSM to lay the blame entirely at the feet of Republicans is disingenuous at best, and purposely deceptive at worst. Then again, we have come to expect that from WRBA, Pelosi, Schumer, and the Communist faction of the DNC.
As Politico reported recently, “the Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its COVID-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme.”
The administration points to state immunization rates as proof that anti-vaxxers on the right are to blame for the problem. “State vaccine rates fall along red, blue divide,” is how The Hill reported it.
But wait a minute. The states with low vaccination rates also tend to have larger minority populations. And blacks are the least likely racial or ethnic group to have been vaccinated, with Hispanics the second least likely, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
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So, now MLB is going politically correct, changing the name of the Cleveland Indians to the Cleveland Guardians, are they?
How stupid.
One has to wonder if any of the morons pushing the change have any understanding of where the name “Indians” came from? Probably not. If they did, I doubt they would be so quick to push changing the name.
All one needs to do is look up the name Louis Francis Sockalexis. Of course this late 19th/early 20th Century member of the Penobscot tribe in Maine must be erased from history because he is inconvenient to the 21st Century ‘sensibilities’ of today’s woke a**holes.
They are erasing our history one person at a time and doing it on purpose, feeling smug about it every time they succeed.
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I know it’s likely you have already read this somewhere, but you know Facebook has gone full “stupid” when it censors the name of a garden tool – a hoe – because they think it is a derogatory term for a prostitute, which is spelled “H”-“O”, short for “wh*re”. Apparently their filtering algorithm is incapable of spelling.
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Anyone paying attention knows that Biden’s so-called “Infrastructure Plan” has little to do with actually building any infrastructure.
This is just another version of Obama’s $878 billion ‘stimulus’, of which only $55 billion actually went to infrastructure. The rest of the money was used as payoffs to political patrons and cronies. This one won’t be any different, with even a smaller percentage (0.8% versus Obama’s 6.3%) going to actual infrastructure.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been pretty good (except for some rain this morning), The Boat has a full tank of gas, and where I’m heading out onto the lake to enjoy a couple of hours.