The weather cooperated, with temps in the low 70’s/mid 60’s throughout the day. It was mostly partly cloudy most of the day which helped make for a comfortable day, something that was a big contrast to days earlier in the week when we had day after day with temps in the upper 80’s and lower 90’s with very high humidity.
There were fireworks in the evening and I have to say I agree with some of my fellow townsfolk to say they were better than the Fourth of July fireworks many of us saw around the lake this summer.
All in all it was a great day.
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I have to admit to becoming burned out regarding Biden’s Afghanistan Bug-Out Debacle.
The endless comparisons between Saigon an Kabul have become no less true. But with each bit of news about what’s happening and the actions (or inactions) by the * Administration come to light, the situation looks increasingly dire. It’s like this whole debacle was planned to cause as much death and destruction as possible, despite Jen Psaki’s claims to the contrary.
That the * Administration handed over a list of Americans in Afghanistan and Afghans working for the US shows the moral depravity of WRBA. It is, to all intents and purposes, a hit list. What WRBA thinks they are accomplishing by helping the Taliban collect hostages and kill Afghans who don’t like the Taliban escapes me. Perhaps they want to somehow use it to blame Trump for everything that happened s part of the 2022 Midterm election campaign. (If that is indeed the case, they may find it will backfire upon them.)
That field commanders have lost confidence in command staff is increasingly evident. They certainly have no confidence in their increasingly senile Commander-in-Chief. Then again, nobody does. Even the DNC-MSM has abandoned him.
As bad as things are in Afghanistan, I (and many others) expect things to get worse...before they get even worse.
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To show you just how insane wokeness on college campuses have become, a “colorblind study” is now racist.
I guess when your entire raison d’etre is to combat racism, then every problem and every action is defined as racist.
This is what happens when most of society’s problems have been solved: take something that is minor, even non-existent, blow it all out of proportion so that it is now a ‘crisis’ and make it your cause. Anyone questioning your cause is labeled as a fascist/racist/whateverist. Is it delusion? Is it a form of malignant narcissism? Is it a form of schizophrenia?
Whatever it is, it is time to point out these ‘woke’ causes for what they are - absolute delusional nonsense – and end them. They serve no useful purpose and solve nothing. All many of them do is create division, hatred, and in the end, violence.
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Speaking of nonsense, it seems a number of doctors are ‘sick and tired’ of treating patients who aren’t vaccinated against Covid. That raises another disturbing question:
“I cannot and will not force anyone to take the vaccine,” Dr. Jason Valentine of Mobile, Alabama, wrote. “I also cannot continue to watch my patients suffer and die from an eminently preventable disease.”Heh.TM
In other words, only healthy people deserve medical treatment, which exists to cure people who aren’t healthy.
Will Valentine treat people who are obese? What about those suffering complications from drug addiction? Smokers? STDs? HIV? Diabetes 2? Liver disease? Mouth cancer? Lung cancer? Hepatitis? An aggressively healthy lifestyle can prevent all of the above. When reached for comment, Valentine’s office simply hung up.
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What, if any, lessons were learned from Katrina 16 years ago? If only one needed to be learned, it was this: the governor shouldn’t wait to ask for federal assistance.
What lessons have actually been learned?
Only time will tell.
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How many times have we seen or read that what our Progressive political elites are really trying to build is not some kind of socialist utopia, but a society with them cast as the new nobles and the rest of us as the serfs whose only reason to exist is to meet their every need, fulfill every whim, and follow every order without question...or be beaten or killed for failing to do so.
They want to create a modern medieval society.
The Taliban's takeover in Afghanistan is just one illustration of a seventh-century ideology overcoming the power of the neo-liberal world. Autocracies have arisen in countries which once seemed candidates for liberal democracy from Russia and Turkey to Iran. Arguably the most powerful person in the world is now China's all-but Emperor, Xi Jinping, who has presided over the mass detention and forced sterilization of a Muslim minority, the silencing of Hong Kong's free press and the arrest and prosecution of protestors (sic) and dissidents.This is what our elites are pining for. They want control over the lives of their serfs, law by fiat, i.e. droit du seigneur, knowledge held tightly by those in power and kept from the serfs, who must be kept ignorant of that knowledge because they might become ‘uppity’ were they to learn that secret knowledge. They have no problem deceiving their adherents, no problem selling them on ‘woke’ ideas that have no basis in reality, but do help dismantle and weaken modern society and make it easier to bring about their desired result – modern medievalism.
But the West, too, has fallen prey to encroaching illiberalism. America's intellectual, political, and corporate establishment may not share the ideology of ill-educated Central Asian religious fanatics, but they echo the Taliban by embracing an increasingly medieval dogmatism and—crucial—an ideology that similarly scorns reason and debate. As historian J. B. Bury put it in 1913, the Middle Ages were a time when "a large field was covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and reason was warned off the ground."
Where does our own medieval lurch come from? Developments akin to what followed the fall of classical civilization: growing concentrations of political and economic power, a shrinking middle class, increasing intellectual dogmatism and a global pattern of pessimism about humanity's prospects. We are also living through a relentless effort to supplant any remaining reverence for the ideals that historically have held our civilization together, and this, too, parallels the experience of the Middle Ages, a period in which, as Belgian historian Henri Pirenne noted, "the very mind of man was going through degeneration."
I keep thinking the time is soon coming where we will need to make a decision about whether we let this descent into a new Dark Ages continue, fight it and stamp it out, or find a means to get off-planet as a means of maintaining a modern liberal society off-world (the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, perhaps one or more of the Jovian moons).
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has cooled off...for now, hot and humid weather is on the way, and where Labor Day is eight days away.