Thoughts On A Sunday

The foliage is just starting to change here at the lake, with maybe 10% of the leaves having changed here on the southern shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Up north of the White Mountains the fall foliage is at peak and the leaf peepers are evident. Cars, SUVs, and trucks with out-of-state plates from states we don’t usually see are here in large numbers. The restaurants are busy again, kind of a last shot at tourist dollars before some of them close for the season, and others will hit the pre-winter lull before winter tourism starts.

The Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout is still in the water and a brief trip out on to the lake showed how much of the foliage has changed. The difference in the color change between the north and south side of the lake is quite noticeable, with the south shore being quite a bit behind the north.

While Saturday started sunny, the clouds moved in an, believe it or not, sometimes a cloudy day shows off the brilliant fall colors better than a sunny day. That was certainly evident yesterday!

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It seems the Left Coast is now feeling the effects of vaccine mandates, with more workers refusing to be vaccinated and either leaving their jobs, being suspended, or being fired, leading to more businesses being negatively affected, with some having to cut back on services.

Let’s start in Washington state, where, notwithstanding the Left’s police defunding efforts, Seattle’s crazy citizens still depend on cops to try to save them from the hot-and-cold-running fentanyl-addled bums lining the sidewalks.

Fully one-third of the officers, nearly 300 cops, haven’t given their radical overlords their medical records proving their fealty. Come October 18 you’ll be lucky to get a cop to investigate one of the record number murders in the Emerald City.

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Those beloved Washington state ferries traverse a watery highway known as the Puget Sound, but they’ve hit choppier-than-usual waters.

Due to “crew shortages,” more than 30 ferry trips from the San Juan Islands were canceled on Thursday alone. Repairs have sidelined three large ferries already, but, suddenly, Coast Guard-approved crew have disappeared in advance of the October 18 deadline for getting a shot or losing a job.

It gets worse.

Teachers and substitute teachers are in short supply in Oregon due to their mandates. An anesthesiologist at the UCLA Med Center was literally escorted to the curb by bouncers...er...security guards because he refused to be vaccinated.

In at least one case, the draconian mandate has killed an otherwise healthy mother as her lack of vaccination was locking her out of more activities with her children. She got the shot and her reaction to it killed her.

I doubt the Progressive Powers That Be even know her name.

So let’s go to the Leftist tote board: We’re losing cops, teachers, classroom helpers, mothers, and those “frontline hero” doctors over Covid shot mandates. They have either had the disease, don’t need the shot because of their low risk, can’t have it for medical reasons, or refuse it for religious reasons.

Those used to be good reasons.

The Great Reset, The Grand Purge, Hammer Time has begun in earnest.

If they want to drive even more people from the Left Coast, this is one way to do it.

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As Lincoln Brown tells us, the Left views everything and everyone as a commodity.

It also means they see everything and everyone as disposable, expendable...including you.

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One thing the Left Coast Progressives have succeeded in doing is driving Elon Musk out of California.
First, SpaceX moved to Texas. Now, he’s packing up Tesla’s HQ and moving it to Texas as well.

The announcement that Tesla is moving its headquarters to Texas may not be a surprise, but it confirms trends that California’s progressive gentry simply refuse to acknowledge. Tesla, among the diminishing number of large manufacturers based in the state, joins a growing exodus that includes such tech giants as Oracle and Hewlett Packard, financial firms like Charles Schwab, and a host of high-end engineering and business service companies.

While I don’t think we’ll see Facebook, Apple, and a host of the other ‘woke’ corporations pack up and leave, I have no doubt some of the defense/aerospace and electronics companies will eventually depart as well, knowing the Progressives will target them eventually, be it by heavy taxation, heavy regulation, or outright seizure of assets.

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That bastion of Progressive power and group-think - Portland, Oregon – is on track to have its most violent year in modern history. To anyone paying attention, this outcome was not unexpected.

The comparison to last year is especially worrisome because the number of murders had already spiked 83% last year according to FBI data. Another conspicuous aspect of the murder rate is that it is disproportionally impacting black residents. Portland is one of the whitest cities in the US (nearly 75%). The black population only makes up about 6% of the city.

So in a city where Black Lives Matter protests were a constant last year, the city now has a murder rate for black residents that is 8 times the murder rate for white residents.

Portland was also one of the cities that jumped in to defund the police last year. In particular, the city got rid of the Gun Violence Reduction Team which activists had argued was racist. That team was specifically focused on reducing gang violence by interceding before it could get started. And as the murder rate continued to rise, the Mayor had second thoughts and announced he was reforming a nearly identical team under a different name.

Make it easy for criminals to commit criminal acts and crime will go up. Stop prosecuting criminal acts and crime will go up. It’s a no-brainer. Yet it seems the Progressive Powers That Be cannot make the connection. It must be remembered that Portland isn’t the only place seeing this problem, it’s merely farther ahead of places like Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and...well, the list is getting longer every day.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the fall colors are emerging, the leaf peepers are appearing, and Monday is coming again...but it’s a holiday.