Yesterday saw a gathering of the WP clan to celebrate the wedding of the the older of the two WP nieces. For reasons I won’t go into, the wedding was held at a beer garden in the the town of Oxford, Maine. This meant a 2+ hour trip from The Gulch, though it wasn’t a bad trip since most of it was cross-country that stayed away from the main highways. I know the WP Mom enjoyed the trip, particularly since there was a lot of beautiful scenery.
The wedding itself was a lot of fun, a non-traditional one in some ways. I could go into a lot of detail, but frankly I doubt anyone would be interested...except for the fact that the food was pizza. Lots of different pizzas. It helped that there was a portable wood-fired pizza oven at the venue that made all of the pizzas we consumed.
I can safely say everyone had a great time!
It’s also a reason why there was no post last night as we didn’t get back to The Gulch until late in the evening.
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It being Labor Day weekend, I can say I have seen the summerfolk making the best of it. Even here at The Gulch I have seen everyone’s homes with extra cars in the driveway.
I did swing by the town beach (purely for research purposes) late this morning and it was already crowded. (Some of that may be due to the fact that rain is expected later today, but not until very late afternoon/early evening.) There were a lot of boats out on the lake at 9 this morning, far more than I would have expected. During our travels to and from Maine we saw a lot of folks making the best of the beautiful weather, the last blast of summer. It makes sense considering that Monday is supposed to rainy all day.
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To quote The Won, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”
We can certainly apply that quote to Biden’s Reichstag blunder. Seeing the staging for that gawdawful speech had me wondering if someone was borrowing heavily from Leni Riefenstahl’s book regarding imagery. It was not a good backdrop for Biden’s hateful speech.
President Joe Biden’s Thursday speech in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall would have been a disturbing abuse of presidential power had it not been so ineptly bungled in every phase of execution.He decided a winning strategy is to demonize half the American people, to paint them as “the other”, all while borrowing heavily from Nazi imagery? I figure it’s only a matter of time before he starts referring to that half of the American people as untermenschen.
Paid for by taxpayers as a supposedly nonpartisan speech, Biden attacked half the country as extremists who "threaten the very foundation of our republic." Sure, Biden tried to limit his attack to just MAGA Republicans. But this is the same Joe Biden who insisted every Republican in the Senate who voted against the Democratic Party’s anti-voter identification bill were domestic "enemies" who were trying "to suppress your vote and subvert our elections."
Biden can’t travel down to Georgia and label the election integrity laws supported by all Republicans "Jim Crow on steroids" and then turn around and say he is only trying to demonize a small section of the party. That’s malarkey. No Republican has fought against the lawlessness of former President Donald Trump harder than Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Still, given the opportunity to praise Kemp’s integrity and honesty, Biden called him a neosegregationist instead.
Biden went on to say that MAGA Republicans want to take us "backwards to an America where there is no right to choose." This is how Democrats describe anyone who wants to regulate abortion a single second before a mother gives birth. But again, restricting abortion is a position held by the vast majority of Republicans. Biden can’t pretend he is only attacking a small minority of the Republican Party when he labels a mainstream policy position a threat to "the very soul of this country."
What follows after that? A modern day Geheim Staatzpolizei? (FBI or the 87,000 new IRS agents?) Einsatzgruppen? Cattle cars and ‘relocation’ camps?
Or could it lead to a civil war, hot or cold?
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I’m getting tired of saying this: Trump was right.
In this case, his warning to the Europeans about being dependent on Russian natural gas was right on target.
While he was President, Trump created an international furor when he told Germany they were vulnerable because of their dependence on Russian natural gas. Merkel, Macron, and the others thought he was a nutjob. But with the war in Ukraine and Russia’s constant shutdowns of the Nord Stream I Pipeline, they are singing a different tune. Trump was right again, and Europe is paying a frightening price as winter approaches.“Likely political”? It was purely political, as anyone who has been paying attention understands.
Gazprom claimed it was a leaking turbine that had to be repaired, but Siemens, the company that manufactures the turbines, says it was likely political.
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Here’s yet another story about an armed citizen who stopped a mass shooting in Detroit, a story that hasn’t made the national headlines.
The people who lost their lives are on the mind of neighbors on Pennington, where the gunman shot and tried to kill a fourth victim, but neighbors fought back. Detroit Police describe the man as an 80-year-old. He and his dog were shot but survived.Self-defense narratives don’t fit the anti-gunner narrative and for the most part the media ignores such stories. There have been millions of defensive use of firearms in the US (‘defensive use’ includes actions that run from actual discharge of a gun to merely showing that one is armed), none of which make the news.
“He saw my weapon and he went from predator to prey. He had that look of shock,” said a neighbor who grabbed his gun and shot back, to protect his elderly neighbor.
“The neighbor, he fired a shot and the guy turned around and took off. He scattered like a jack rabbit,” said Wallace Pleasant, who witnessed it.
Three of those uses are mine, with one showing someone that wanted my money that I was armed, another time I actually had to draw my sidearm, and then another time I actually had to point my sidearm. Three uses, yet not once did I need to fire. That is the case with most defensive uses, yet they are dismissed as not relevant since they don’t fit the narrative. That serious skews the stats which makes them totally useless because they are a lie.
I’ve had discussions with acquaintances, friends, and family about this topic. One, I can’t remember who, asked me “Are you willing to kill someone to protect your (property)?”
My response was along the lines of “You have that question backwards. It should be ‘Are they willing to die to take my (property) from me?’”
That is the question more of us should be asking.
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The New Republic asks the question “Can the American Mall survive?”
One of the problems of malls, like so many American things, is the discrimination embedded in them from the start. They originated in the suburbs, where white Americans fled in the postwar decades, building segregated communities in the process.An interesting take, one I can neither prove or refute. But I remember when malls really started popping up all over New England. Some of those from the 1970’s are still operating. Others built in the 80’s and 90’s have closed, some repurposed and others abandoned.
Seeing some of the malls here in New Hampshire now being classified as ‘dead malls’, meaning they have either closed entirely or have a small occupancy with a lot of empty stores, shows us how much our ‘love affairs’ with malls have dwindled away.
One of the malls with which I am familiar, the Steeplegate Mall in Concord, NH, opened to much fanfare back in 1990. A number of stores in downtown Concord relocated to the mall, including Sears, probably the biggest retailer in the city at the time. Yet, despite the hype that went along with the opening, the mall never had full occupancy. The food court was never fully occupied either, with maybe 75% at best.
Today it is a shadow of its former self, with only 20 of its 62 storefronts still operating. The food court is empty and has been for years. The last time I was there – about three years ago – there were no kiosks. It is a dead mall.
Some dead malls are repurposed, being turned into business centers – offices and such – and others have become multi-use centers. Far too many are empty, unoccupied, and some are unmaintained and are deteriorating, abandoned by their owners. However other malls are still thriving. It may come down where they are located, keeping up with the times by shifting their focus as consumer tastes changed, making sure they stayed relevant.
There are a number of YouTube channels that cover dead or dying malls. They have highlighted some malls with which I was familiar and it was sad seeing some of those malls now just empty shells.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where everyone is trying to cram as much summer into these last couple of days of ‘official’ summer, the rain is coming, and fall isn’t all that far away.