Katy and I spent quite a bit of time traveling around the Big Lake, doing some end-of-the-season shopping here and there. What motivated the trip around the lake was the need to pick up some pewter I’d ordered from a pewtersmith on the north side of the lake that was ready for pickup. It made it easy to roll in some more shopping in one of the resort towns as many of the shops there had goods on clearance. Katy found quite a few items for Christmas gifts and I picked up a new jacket. We must have hit about a dozen shops along the main street, picking up a few more odds and ends along the way. A late lunch at a tavern ‘just up the road’ and a couple of more stops for shopping – including at our local farm stand – closed out our trip around the lake.
We had hoped to make it out on the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout after our trip, but we got back quite late and it wasn’t in the cards. It was quite chilly this morning (36ºF) and Katy was not inclined to venture out on the lake. Neither was I.
As it always seems to happen, all too soon it was time for Katy to depart and make her way back home, something we dread. But it is necessary and I always lament her departure.
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Speaking of the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, I had hoped to get one more trip out onto the lake before pulling it out of the water for the season, but it looks like that may be off the table considering the weather will not be the greatest this coming week.
I will be talking with BeezleBub about making arrangements to pull the boat out of the water and getting it prepped for winter storage.
It’s been a good season for the most part. (July wasn’t all that conducive to a lot of boating due to the 10 inches of rain and cool temps we experienced then.) Neither BeezleBub or I missed many opportunities to get out on the lake. But it’s always a little sad when the boating season finally comes to an end. It will be this time, too.
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It seems the University of Connecticut is still having problems with the endlessly aggrieved spoiled children attending that formerly fine institution of higher learning. The number of bias complaints by students show they will complain about darned near everything.
This is the same university where black students demanded segregated housing (shades of Jim Crow) and the Univesrity suspended a couple of students who expressed opinions that disagreed with the perpetually aggrieved while off campus.
These crybabies need to grow the eff up.
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As much as SloJo wants the California ports to speed up, getting the ships riding at anchor into port and unloaded, he his hamstrung by his not understanding why those ports are so jammed up.
The major cause?
The inability of California truckers to move those containers. There are two reasons for that.
First, it isn’t that they don’t want to load those containers onto their trailers and haul them where they need to go. It’s that the State of California won’t let them due to incredibly short-sighted and nonsensical banning of perfectly capable trucks because they are deemed too old and don’t meet present day California emissions standards. There just aren’t enough compliant trucks available to do so.
Second, California’s execrable AB5 prevented Owner-Operators, truckers who own and operate their own rig, can no longer haul within California because independent, i.e. “gig work” was outlawed as a sop to the labor unions. That eliminated a lot of trucking assets the ports desperately need to move cargo. There aren’t enough ‘union’ assets available to move a fraction of that freight.
There was a great analogy used to describe how container freight is being handled in California:
If I started dropping golf balls into your living room, one every two seconds continuously without stopping for weeks, could you keep up with them?For anyone paying attention, this was an inevitable outcome. To the clueless legislators who thought this was a good idea, it was yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play.
OK, now what happens if we keep dropping them every two seconds, but now make a rule that you can only pick them up with a spoon and then must carry them outside to drop them in a bucket? Can you still keep up?
How long before your living room is full of golf balls?
That’s the metaphor.
The spoon is the California emissions rule.
If nothing else, this may be incentive for shippers to use Gulf and East Coast ports because the containers can be unloaded from the ships and onto trucks in a timely fashion. Yes, it means a lot more traffic through the Panama Canal and higher transportation costs, but at least the freight will move and be delivered. How much does it cost for containers to sit on a ship at anchor for weeks on end or piled up in a freight yard with no means of moving them because there aren’t nearly enough trucks to move them?
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Legal Insurrection asks “Do you think these Democrats would be retiring if they were excited about what’s going happen over the next few years, or if Biden was wildly popular?” regarding an increasing number of House Democrats retiring rather than running for re-election in the 2022 mid-terms.
Did I expect something like this, seeing just how unpopular President * is with the American people? Not really. I do expect a GOP sweep of the House and the Senate reverting to a GOP majority (as long as Republican voters and those leaning Republican actually show up to vote). With these retirements it certainly weakens the Democrats in the upcoming mid-terms.
One thing I’ve been seeing that I think signals the DNC’s fear that incumbent Democrats will be booted from office: Campaign ads for sitting Democrats that started running months ago. I have certainly seen that here in New Hampshire, with ads running every single day on TV and the Internet for Senator Maggie Hassan and Representative Chris Pappas (NH CD-1). The state primaries are 10 months away and the mid-term elections are over a year away, yet the ads run every day.
I haven’t seen or heard of any ads for our CD-2 Representative, Annie Kuster, a long time Democrat (and a nasty piece of work), but that could be because they are only showing up in NH CD-2 on the Net. However I haven’t seen any on our local TV station, so it’s quite possible she’s decided to sit this one out. The other possibility is that the Democrats figure her seat is relatively safe so aren’t dumping any ad money into NH CD-2 at this time.
In any case, the 2022 mid-terms are going to be interesting.
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We need more of this.
It turns out that 2020 and 2021 have been a nightmare for the gun-grabbers.
Among conservative white gun owners in the South and Midwest, I found there is often reflexive support for the idea that northern and urban gun-control laws should be overturned. This was true even for many interview subjects who had never been to the cities in question—and particularly so when I explained that the case centers around gun laws in New York. “New York—well that says it all right there,” a Tennessee Uber driver in his fifties told me. “Hell yes I would want to carry my guns in New York [should I ever go there],” said a Michigan real estate agent in her forties. For these and other conservative interviewees, gun laws in cities like New York represented symbolic northern affront to their notion of uninfringed liberties (“It’s my constitutional right to carry anywhere I want”)—and in places where they imagine they would need to defend themselves against threats from racial others (“I might get carjacked!”).The usual targets for anti-gun organizations to recruit support are changing their minds, seeing the plus side of the Second Amendment, that being able to protect themselves from miscreants and not depending upon others for that is a good thing. They have learned the truth of “When seconds count, the police are minutes away.” They have also seen how some of their leaders have no intention of protecting them or their property and will have to do it themselves.
But I also found a surprising current of pro-gun sentiment among a not insignificant minority of people who identified as liberal and who lived in the very cities in question—especially among people under forty. “Criminals have guns, so why shouldn’t we?” a thirty-seven-year-old white woman art dealer in Brooklyn told me. “Why should police have all the guns?” asked a twenty-six-year-old Black male programmer from Manhattan. A thirty-three-year-old white woman realtor from Boston explained that “hopefully this will make it easier for my friends and me to take shooting classes.”
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the colors are fantastic, the weather has turned cooler, and the boating season is almost to its end.