7/03/2022

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s the Fourth of July Weekend and the summerfolk have been arriving in large numbers, a not unexpected event. My before-church shopping run to Walmart certainly showed that since the parking lot was darned near full, something we usually don’t see until late in the morning. But at 8AM the lot was full. Once inside Walmart I could see that there were four checkout lanes open. Usually it’s one.

The traffic has been insane since Thursday afternoon, and this morning was no different.

On my way home from my Walmart run I experienced three near-miss incidents, two of which involved me directly. Those two were caused by the same driver, with the first being this clueless driver pulling into traffic across 3 lanes without looking and darn near getting T-boned by the trusty RAM 1500 in the process. The second of the two took place when the same driver signaled to take a right turn, then at the last second decided they weren’t going to take the right after having already slowed and started to make the turn and pulled right back into traffic and almost getting rear-ended by the trusty RAM 1500. (Fortunately for me I installed a dashcam in the trusty RAM 1500 a few weeks ago, so if either of those near-misses had been a collision, I would have video proof of what happened.)

The third incident (well, actually it was the first incident of the morning) took place as I was leaving Walmart. I was in line at the traffic light at the exit, three cars back. The light changed and as the first car started to move a car ran the red light and almost collided with the first car. (My dashcam caught that incident as well but didn’t catch the license plate of guy running the red light, but I did see that it had out-of-state plates - New York - after the miscreant had blown through the intersection.)

The traffic in general has been crazy since Thursday, was really heavy (and crazy) yesterday, and I expect it will be that way the rest of the day today and especially tomorrow.

Welcome to summer.

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As if we really need yet another example of “Get woke, go broke”, there’s this story showing how a bank’s social media manager “told them to LEAVE if they don’t like staff sharing pronouns on badges”...and the customers obliged him.

It appears the woke virus has infected the Halifax Bank in the UK which has caused customers to close accounts and move their money to rival banks after their woke social media manager challenged bank customers to leave if they didn’t like the changes made to employee name badges. Talk about an avoidable PR disaster.

One account holder told MailOnline they have already pulled out investments and savings worth £450,000 while many more said they are closing ISAs, cutting up credit cards or transferring balances to rivals after they accused the bank of 'alienating' them with 'pathetic virtue signalling'.

The row began this week when Halifax, which was propped up by the taxpayer to the tune of £30billion as part of a 2008 bailout, tweeted its 118,000 followers on Tuesday revealing that it would allow staff to display their pronouns on their name badges, in a post that read 'pronouns matter'.

It showed a photo of a female staff member's name badge, which featured 'she/her/hers' in brackets under the name Gemma, and said the policy was to help avoid 'accidental misgendering'.

One customer replied: 'There’s no ambiguity about the name “Gemma”. It’s a female person’s name. In other words, it’s pathetic virtue signalling and is seen as such by almost everyone who has responded to the initial tweet. Why are you trying to alienate people?' Within 20 minutes a member of the Halifax social media team, calling himself Andy M, replied: 'If you disagree with our values, you're welcome to close your account'.

Andy M's response has outraged customers, and seen hundreds claiming they will boycott the bank with many saying they have closed their accounts. Others have cut up their credit cards or getting rid of insurance policies and said the threat was the final straw after it cut 27 branches alone in 2022.

As one former customer put it, “I don't want to be having conversations about gender when I go into my bank...Frankly, I'd rather they be focused on lowering interest rates.”

This is what happens when businesses forget their primary reason for their existence - serving their customers – and that’s why their customers leave.

Woke employees have been learning their lessons too when their employers invite those woke employees to leave if they don’t like what their customers want. Netflix certainly made that clear when some of their woke employees complained about allowing customers to stream programs they didn’t like.

The tolerance for ‘woke’ has reached its tipping point and both people and businesses aren’t taking the woke bulls**t any more.

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Ed Driscoll has put together a collection of posts and links that delve into the whole fuel prices/energy costs and how the Democrats are trying to play both sides – ‘victim’ and perpetrator – when it comes to falling fuel supplies and skyrocketing prices.

‘Solutions’ proposed by Biden, WRBA, and the Democrats aren’t real solutions, such as “demanding gas stations to ‘bring down’ gas prices.” They do understand that gas stations have little control over prices, right? Gas stations do change the prices at the pumps, but they set them based upon what they get charged for gas and they have to make some profit (which is a lot less than the oil companies make per gallon). Are gas stations supposed to take a loss for every gallon they sell just because SloJo demands they do so? Yeah, that’ll work.

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Okay, I’m going to take a stab at this one: the perpetrator wasn’t white.

Curry College (Milton, Mass.) won’t provide the race of an employee it fired for making dozens of racial threats and placing swastikas around the campus.

The investigation stems from a series of swastikas found on Curry College’s campus in January, along with graffiti directed at black individuals.

The investigation involved the Milton police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Spokesperson Liz Matson shared a media statement similar to the one below with The Fix but would not answer direct questions twice about the race of the suspect and why it could not be disclosed.

If the alleged perpetrator had been white the news media would have been shouting it out loud and long. But if that alleged perpetrator wasn’t white, then no mention of their race would be made, period. At least that’s how the DNC-MSM has been handling other situations similar to this in the past.

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As an aside to the above, I have to ask why the Greens here in the US believe we need to be the ones responsible for reducing the CO2 generated by other countries? Seeing just how much the US decreased the amount of CO2 emissions between 2020 and 2021 alone – just over one billion tons – more than 5 times more than the next closest nations, the UK and Germany. And what about China?

China’s CO2 emissions increased during that time, just as they have been for years. China’s CO2 emissions are over 2.3 times that of the US, having passed the US back in 2004, even as US emissions were falling. The US peaked out at 1.8 billion tons (1.6 billion metric tons) of CO2 in 2005 and it has been dropping since then.

India’s emissions, while nowhere near those of the US (about half that of the US), have been growing until the past few years and have remained relatively steady over the past 4 years.

It’s time for the US to pause for a bit, to stop taking actions that do nothing but damage the economy, and paradoxically, the environment. Forcing out fossil fuels while not replacing the energy with nothing but vague promises or pie-in-the-sky energy sources we already know cannot and will not meet demand is insane. Until we have something in place to provide the energy we need, nuclear power being one of the only technologies that can reliably and cleanly provide the needed power.

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Is there nothing Climate Change can’t do?

The latest claim?

Aussie ‘Ambassador for Women’ claims ‘climate change’ causes rape! ‘Exacerbates the risks of sexual & gender-based violence’.

Really?

“50 years from now when historians look at why the Western Empire fell, they will look at videos like this and realize we voted incompetents into public office. This is what happens when your notes get mixed in with another topic.”

Yup.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where preparations for Fourth of July celebrations continue, grills are running and “charring mammal flesh”, and coolers contain “mass quantities”.