Friday Funny - Philosophy

I will admit to being an occasional adherent to this Greek philosopher.

Twenty One Years Ago Today

It really doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago.

It was 21 years ago today that the first posts of this blog were made, my dear brother making the first post at 11:15 in the morning followed by a second post at 3:03 that afternoon. I followed later that day at 7:39PM with my own first post to Weekend Pundit.

The blogosphere was never the same.

Weekend Pundit was hosted on three different platforms over the years, starting on Blogger, moving over to the now defunct Blogmosis (Thanks, Matt and Vicky!), then hosted by the folks at GraniteGrok, and finally returning to Blogger.

For the longest time it was just my brother and I, posting almost daily despite our blog’s name. We had a number of other contributors over the years, some proffering guest posts occasionally, and others contributing on a regular basis now and then. Then it was back to my brother and I. Then a few years later my brother was busy with a second blog he started with Dean Esmay as a means of writing a novel – Methuselah’s Daughter – leaving me as the sole author.

Ironically, around the same time another Weekend Pundit blog appeared, authored by a fellow from Texas. There were a number of times we cross-posted to each other’s blogs as The Other Weekend Pundit, but a few years later that blog went dark.

As time went on I didn’t post every day because life intruded and I didn’t have nearly the time to devote to blogging, so relegated posting to weekends – Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays - much as this blog’s title implied. The occasional during-the-week posts were made if something of import took place, but for the most part I limit posting to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Looking over the stats from the three different hosts, it turns out that we posted well over 6,000 posts, have seen over 1,000,000 visits (close to 1.2 million), and have seen a few Instalanches.

How long will this blog continue? I have no idea. Frankly, I haven’t thought about. I have had a few offers to move my efforts over to a very well known blog, and I do contribute to it every now and then in an indirect manner, but this one is mine and after 21 years it would be difficult to abandon it. One thing I might try is to entice my dear brother to start posting again, even if only on an occasional basis.

For the time being this blog will continue and I will offer my thoughts, some humor, and maybe a thoughtful insight or two. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a post for the 42^nd anniversary of this blog.

Blog On, dudes!!

D-Day - 79 Years Later

The largest military operation in human history carried out by men of the Greatest Generation.

I saw this quote that said it best, which certainly applies to those who made the ultimate sacrifice during Operation Overlord:

“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died, rather we should thank God that such men lived.”– General George S. Patton

Amen to that.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We had mid-summer-like weather over the Memorial Day weekend and the week that followed, but that changed over this weekend as daytime temps plummeted from the upper 80’s and low 90’s to the lower and mid-50’s. We also went from sunny skies to clouds and rain showers. It’s supposed to ‘warm up’ into the mid-60’s through the coming week. We might see 70’s and sunny skies come next weekend, something that will be good since it is the opening weekend of the 100th Laconia Motorcycle Week up here in New Hampshire. (Oh, and despite a news report that the 100th Laconia Motorcycle Week would last 100 days to celebrate the 100th anniversary, it isn’t true...even though it sounds true.)

==+++==

Here’s one thing Anheuser-Busch wishes would go away: A new term that adequately describes consumer boycotts aimed at corporations that “that cater to various ‘woke’ causes, particularly transgender issues,” that term being “Bud Lighting”.

The term derives from the spectacular implosion of Bud Light in the wake of their decision in March to enlist transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote the brand. Bud Light’s sales have plummeted, averaging weekly declines of about 25 percent. Parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev has lost more than $15 billion in value. Sales of rival brands have soared, even as many retailers have slashed prices for Bud Light. Some stores are even giving Bud Light away for free—or trying to.

I am very skeptical that the Bud Light example can be replicated over the long haul, but I’m convinced that we are entering a new era of Bud Lighting on the right and left.

First, some background. The most remarkable thing about the Bud Light boycott is that it worked, because boycotts usually don’t—if your definition of success is actually affecting sales and stock price in a significant way.

I remember Gillette’s misstep with its ad campaign pushing a ‘woke’ view of toxic masculinity, insulting a majority of their customer base, leading to a loss of over $8 billion in sales and about $5.24 billion in valuation in a single quarter.

This was one of the first examples of boycotts against ‘woke’ corporations having a measurable effect. The people are sick and tired of agendas being rammed down their throats that they see as sick and degenerate. Boycotting these same businesses is one way to make them realize they are vulnerable.

Another corporation that’s made the mistake of going ‘woke’, angering their customer base and motivating them to take their money and go elsewhere – Disney. They’re losing billions in revenues, have angered Florida’s governor and legislature to the point where they removed Disney’s special tax district, all while trying pushing the LGBTQWERTY agenda in their movies, TV shows, and theme parks. Did they honestly think there wouldn’t be consequences from kowtowing to a small percentage of their customer base and slapping their main customer base in the face?

“Bud Lighting” appears to be a growing phenomenon, one that may be able to humble the ‘woke’, if not make them duck for cover.

Will Six Flags be the next corporation to learn the power of Bud Lighting?

==+++==

From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this from Stacy McCain:

Chicago Group Hired Gangsters to Be ‘Peacekeepers’ and It’s Working Out Just About the Way You Might Expect

Hiring foxes to guard the henhouse doesn’t make sense. The reasoning used to justify hiring these foxes seems seems logical...on the surface. But once you dig deeper you realize it’s a just so much mumbo-jumbo and won’t have the effect proponents say it will.

In 2016, with money from Steve Jobs’ widow, [Arne] Duncan started a group called Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny). Duncan has said that Chicago CRED “proceeds from the belief that the surest way to stop gun violence is engaging directly with those most at risk of shooting or being shot and giving them a reason to put down their guns.”

--snip--

So they’re paying people not to shoot each other, and hey, it’s a “comprehensive approach,” which explains the excellent results!

Those “excellent results” meant a rise in murders to over 700 per year. It also led to the murder of one of those working to reduce violent crime in Chicago.

A man who worked to stop gun violence was killed Wednesday in a shooting outside a community outreach center. Chicago police said they are looking for two people involved.

Police said 28-year-old Ronnie Roper was in a South Side parking lot at about 12:16 p.m. when two people walked up and shot him in the head.

The shooting occurred just outside Chicago CRED’s outreach center in the Roseland neighborhood. The victim was a member of that group that works to stop gun violence. . . .

Irony writ large.

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Oh, noes! It looks like the world is going to end in nineteen eighteen seventeen days!

So says Saint Greta The Green…

==+++==

Now that the latest round of “If we don’t allow the Feddle Gummint go deeper in debt Grandma won’t get her Social Security check next month” drama has been mostly concluded, we have to ask the question why this keeps happening.

Why does our government think it can keep spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need? I know the gazillions of bureaucrats think their particular bureaucracy is vital to the nation’s continued survival/operation/existence when anyone outside the Beltway knows that it is the opposite that’s true.

Do we really need the Department of Education? No. As best I can tell it serves no useful purpose.

Do we need an overbearing EPA that seems to have no problems creating administrative laws that conflict with federal law and the Constitution? Maybe in a severely trimmed back form.

I can keep going on, asking about federal agencies and departments and whether or not they are necessary to the efficient running of our government, but this post would be hundreds of pages long...and I would getting angrier with each one I listed.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer weather has fled for now, Motorcycle Week starts next Saturday, and where the hated Monday once again intrudes on yet another weekend.

Going Too Far?

It’s one thing when we tip servers at a restaurant. Considering their low base pay, tipping makes sense. The better the service, the better the tip. But automatic tipping at grocery stores when a customer uses self-service check-out? What the heck is that all about?

First, big box stores like Wal-Mart introduced self-service checkout stands. You know — the ones where we shoppers begrudgingly do the jobs of the stores for free while under intense electronic and in-person surveillance and all without so much as a discount or meaningful human interaction? Well, now — thanks to the Biden economy — the newest trend at restaurants and stores with self-service checkouts is to coerce and guilt consumers into adding unearned tips to their total.

I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I grew up in an era when tipping was in direct proportion to the quality of a service rendered. Better service was rewarded with a better tip, but the service component had to be there. Not so today. When did the simple act of buying a product become a service? And it’s especially baffling when a shopper goes to the store, finds and removes the item from the shelf, takes it to the checkout, scans, and bags the item all on his own. Where exactly is the service in that transaction? There isn’t any, and yet a tip is still expected?

One has to ask “What’s next?” Forced tipping at the gas pumps? What about convenience stores? Online purchases? Vending machines?

Where does it end?

I wonder if this should be filed under “Just when I thought they couldn’t get any stupider…”?

Friday Funny - Salad

Ah, yes! A perfect salad!

Thoughts On A Sunday

There’s no doubt the ‘official’ summer season has started. Traffic coming into New Hampshire has been heavy since Thursday evening. Grocery stores have been seeing a higher than usual number of customer visits since Wednesday, at least according to some of the cashiers I talked to yesterday morning. Local traffic was very heavy most of the day yesterday, particularly at our town’s public boat ramps and docks. The line of vehicles hauling boats to the ramps for launching stretched out between the road to the ramps and the nearby state highway. This is nothing unusual as we see this almost every Memorial Day weekend.

The local restaurants were much busier than they were last weekend, not that it surprises anyone. It will be like this until after Labor Day. Then and only then will we get our restaurants back. At least the seasonal restaurants are now open to help take up some of the load.

==+++==

As if we need any more proof the Greens hate us, there’s this example (by way of Instapundit) via the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) covering the side effects of Green policies on our electrical supply.

One of the incredibly stupid and avoidable side effects is New York’s actions which will ensure blackouts.

One state that hasn’t learned from California’s green-energy folly is New York. A new state regulation will force 627 megawatts of gas and oil “peaker” plants—which can rapidly ramp up to provide power in a pinch—to shut down this year. That’s enough to power 470,000 homes. This year’s state budget requires the New York Power Authority to retire all peaker plants by 2030. New York plans to compensate by building more offshore wind farms, but they face permitting challenges and don’t provide reliable power.

One does not replace peaker plants used to fill the capacity gap when demand spikes with wind turbines. Wind turbines won’t fill the role of peaker plants for a number of reason, the two biggest being wind is not dispatchable and is not stable.

Wind doesn’t work when there is no wind blowing, so how will wind farms be able to take up the load when there’s no wind?

Power output can vary from moment to moment as wind speed varies and wind direction changes. It takes time to adjust wind turbines to compensate for the changes in speed and direction which can add to grid instability.

Then there’s Texas, an energy ‘giant’ state suffering from the nonsensical Green policies.

Texas last summer narrowly averted a power outage by leaning on businesses to curtail operations. The state has since added enough solar to power about 200,000 homes. But demand has grown by even more, and the sun doesn’t shine at night. NERC forecasts a 19% probability of a grid emergency at 8 p.m. Do Texans feel lucky?

Power plants are being shut down and, in general, being replaced by nothing...just as the Greens want.

==+++==

Speaking of Greens, they are why we can’t have infrastructure.

California’s high-speed electric train has burned through nearly $10 billion, far more than its original $9 billion bond, without building a single mile of track.

Where did that money go?

$1.3 billion was spent on environmental impact clearances.

--snip--

Every time presidents make a pitch for an infrastructure bill, they visit the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River for a photo op.

“Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama declared with his back to the bridge. “Help us rebuild America.

After Obama, Trump came to the bridge, and more recently Biden claimed that his infrastructure bill, which spent nearly three quarters of a billion on electric cars, and little on infrastructure, would finally fix the bridge. Over $10 million has been spent on environmental impact studies going back 18 years to explain why nothing much was being done about the bridge.

--snip--

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, $5 million was needed to fund an environmental impact study to build a new bridge, another $5 million to consider building a bridge in Mission, Texas. The current status of that bridge is unclear. After wasting millions and years on environmental impact studies, projects often never move forward due to changing finances or circumstances.

The endless environmental studies drain massive amounts of taxpayer money. For example, the Yeager Airport in Central West Virginia needed a $5.6 million grant for its environmental impact study. And the sheer scale of taxpayer money stolen by the green industry is not being tracked.

Millions, if not billions of dollars spent on endless environmental studies that never seem to come to any conclusions, or worse, end up requiring further “study” which costs more millions/billions. In the mean time needed infrastructure is stalled, in some cases cause far more environmental degradation that the new infrastructure would have reduced or eliminated. The same is true of much needed electrical infrastructure, particularly in light of the need to double or triple both the average and peak capacity in order to support all the EVs the Greens have been ramming down our throats.

Yet we’ll still spend billions of taxpayer dollars on even more environmental studies that will resolve nothing, no infrastructure will be built, or if it eventually is, it will cost many times the original project cost, and will not meet the needs it was originally designed to meet.

==+++==

Just when I thought MSNBC couldn’t sink any lower, they prove me wrong.

Their latest bit of journalistic malpractice?

Demanding Republicans denounce a story that doesn’t exist.

The latest bit of fake news to come out of Florida was that teenager Amanda Gorman’s 2020 Inauguration poem was banned from a school library when the reality was it was moved to the middle school section for “vocabulary” reasons. Not that MSNBC Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace cared. She teamed up with twice failed Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee and election denier Stacey Abrams and PoliticsNation host Al Sharpton on Friday to decry the fact that Republicans have not denounced a story that doesn’t exist.

During their conversation, Wallace mourned to Abrams, “But to take a poet and a poem that should be held up across partisan lines and demonize the piece itself and the creator of it, I mean understand from reporting this week it was one parent that complained, but I have not seen one Republican defend Amanda Gorman or her poem.”

Then they had perpetual sore loser Stacy Abrams comment on the story that wasn’t a story which just made things worse.

So much for journalistic integrity. But then, what did we expect from a morally bankrupt and ethically deficient ‘news’ organization?

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the summer season has started, the Greens are in hiding (for now), and where preparations for Memorial Day continue unabated.

Target Doubles Down On Stupid

Just when I thought Target couldn’t get any stupider after their ‘Pride’ products debacle which seemed to push a Trans agenda, something that has already cost the retail chain over $9 billion in sales and valuation, there comes this news about Target doubling down:

Target Donates To Group That Promotes Secret Child Gender Transitions, LGBTQ Books In Schools.

Really? It’s bad enough the corporate leadership has decided to “Get Woke”. Now they are trying hard to “Go Broke” due to an even stupider move.

Target has repeatedly boasted about efforts to support the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, also known as GLSEN, an entity which helps teachers place LGBTQ books in school libraries and hide their students’ so-called gender transitions from parents.

Conservatives have launched a boycott against Target after the retail behemoth marketed a female swimsuit as “tuck-friendly” and with “extra crotch coverage,” as well as hired an artist who creates Satanic items to make various designs for the company. Links between the company and GLSEN, which supports “affirming learning environments for LGBTQ youth” and activates “supportive educators,” resurfaced amid the backlash against Target.

The retail behemoth boasted last year about donating more than $2.1 million to GLSEN over the past decade, lauding the group’s mission to create “affirming, accessible, and antiracist spaces for LGBTQIA+ students.” Target also actively promotes GLSEN on its online store.

Target has no issues with interfering with parents’ rights and pushing an LGBTQ agenda in schools, yet they think there will be no repercussions for doing so?

The entire board of directors and C-level executives need to be fired.

Friday (Kinda Scary) Funny - Arnold Bueller's Day Off

This video has been making the rounds and I found it both funny and intriguing.



This is a so-called 'Deep Fake' where the face of the original actor, Matthew Broderick, was replaced with an appropriately aged Arnold Schwarzenegger. While the voice was done by the video creator, the impression was very good.

I have seen some deep fakes that were also able to recreate the voice of the person being 'faked'. This is both neat - I'm a tech geek and like stuff like this - and scary at the same time. Being able to create convincing videos of anyone saying anything means it would be easy to destroy reputations and end careers - political or otherwise - something that should scare everyone.

Thoughts On A Sunday

This week’s TOAS got a late start as I spent a good portion of the day working on the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, basically cleaning it up, loading the gear – cushions, PFDs, transom light, spotlight, mooring lines, fenders, air pump (for the 3-person tube), fire extinguisher, charts, Marine radio, and so on – and getting the new registration stickers on the bow.

I wish I could say the boat was perfectly clean but it needed a lot more cleaning than I expected, meaning I still haven’t finished it. I had hoped to have the boat in the water before this, but between other folks having better use for my time and a heavier than usual workload, I wasn’t able to get the prep work done in a timely fashion. That the boat needed a lot more cleaning than I expected also set me back. I’m hoping to get the boat launched later this week, well before the upcoming Memorial Day Weekend.

==+++==

Most of the summer businesses have reopened, mostly for weekends until after Memorial Day. One of our favorite seasonal restaurants has been open for the past few weekends though they have only been serving ice cream. The rest of the restaurant doesn’t open until Memorial Day weekend.

I certainly expect the boat ramps will be busy all weekend as a lot of summerfolk will be putting their boats in the water for the summer. Our restaurants, even the year-round establishments, will be busy until after Labor Day when we’ll get ‘our’ restaurants back.

==+++==

It seems that yet another corporation is learning the “Get work. Go broke,” lesson Anheuser-Busch recently learned the hard way. This time it’s retailer Target.

Target is already facing boycotts for selling "tuck-friendly" bathing suits and LGBTQ onesies for babies. Now it has been revealed that Target is selling LGBTQ Pride products from a designer that appears to promote violence, drug use, and Satanism.

Target sells three items by the brand Abprallen – a "We Belong Everywhere" messenger bag, a 'Too Queer For Here" messenger bag, and a "Cure Transphobia, Not Trans People" shirt. The LGBTQ items are available on the Target website and in its stores.

It seems Target is already starting to feel the heat and if it follows the path A-B did I expect we’ll see retail sales be affected as the 90%+ of their customer base decides they no longer want to do business with a company that supports more radical Trans agenda, grooming, violence, with Satanism thrown in for good measure.

==+++==

This seems to be a repeating headline in one form or another.

Is San Francisco Doomed?

I added my two cents worth in last Sunday’s TOAS post, but it seems the question about San Francisco’s accelerating decline won’t go away.

What makes this decline tragic isn’t something from outside the city. Instead it has been self-inflicted by the city’s government, the same government the people of San Francisco keep electing.

==+++==

Speaking of San Francisco - well, really the Bay Area - it looks like California jurisprudence has yet again been set aside by a woke DA who decided a “Person of Color” convicted of setting students on fire at UC Berkeley should be not be punished and released him.

A man who was found guilty of lighting UC Berkeley students on fire at a boba shop near the Cal campus in 2020 has been released from custody without prison time or probation after agreeing to participate in a diversion program for veterans, court records show.

In late April, according to records reviewed by The Berkeley Scanner, Brandon McGlone was convicted of multiple felonies in connection with the boba shop attack as well as felony assault and gun charges from a separate domestic violence case.

The resolution to the case was the result of a plea deal between the Alameda County district attorney’s office and the public defender’s office.

As a result of the deal, McGlone was referred to Veterans Treatment Court, according to Alameda County Superior Court records.

If he completes that program, Judge James Cramer said during the April 28 hearing, the cases against McGlone “would be dismissed.”

So a guy with a series of violent crimes to his name including trying to set people on fire is going into treatment. If he can control himself long enough he gets to walk. I’m betting he doesn’t make it though and will eventually kill someone.

The DA is not exactly held in high esteem, particularly by members of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Two veteran prosecutors have recently resigned from their positions because of the DA’s overly woke approach to law enforcement.

Law enforcement and the justice system in California is being dismantled and the Progressives running things are cheering this from the sidelines.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summerfolk are being seen in increasing numbers, preparations for Memorial Day continue, and where Monday is already knocking on the door.

A Preview Of What We're In For

The EU went whole hog into their equivalent of the Green Nude Eel...er...Green New Deal, abandoning reliable stable power and energy systems that have been used for decades and replacing them with power generation systems that sounded good but turned out to be anything but reliable, stable, or abundant. Germany shut down its nuclear power plants, replacing them with wind and some solar. Natural gas fueled power plants were shut down because Russia shut off Europe’s natural gas supply in response to Europe’s support of Ukraine.

Electric rates skyrocketed as grid stability and capacity decreased. Ironically Germany recommissioned a number of coal plants to make up for the deficit, massively increasing their CO2 emissions, just the opposite of what they said they were trying to do. With a few exceptions, the rest of the EU is in the same. It appears the people have had just about enough of the madness.

That looks like what’s happening in Europe right now, almost across the board. The frenzied, climate hysteria engendered, end-of-days rush to save the earth from ourselves is finding its movement crashing under the weight of its own failures – both in promised results from imposed radical actions and predicted, repeatedly rescheduled (as they are yet-to-materialize) dooms. When the stated reason for extreme measures and mandates which have changed people’s lives exponentially for the worse fails to materialize, and then the end date shifts even as the misery index continually ramps up with no relief, a breaking point will be inevitable.

“Genug” is German for “enough.” And, with not a minute to spare, the zealots are going to have to give way. Perhaps even start answering for what they’ve done.

Once unthinkable articles are appearing in major media outlets, and they highlight just how deep the insanity has wormed it way into the consciousness of a good swath of impressionable…well…lemming-like idiots. High anxiety reigns among the meek-minded.

What’s ironic is that the Biden Administration (or WRBA) has been trying to do the same thing here, with one of the big differences being that it isn’t the Russians cutting off our natural gas supplies which has driven electricity and heating costs higher, but Biden...all while telling us “It’s for our own good”, something that is an outright lie. If you think problems like those seen in Europe won’t happen here, you’re wrong. We are already being warned our electrical grid doesn’t have the reserves needed to deal with seasonal heat waves and severe storms.

A worrying new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) estimates over two-thirds of North America will see elevated risks of energy grid shortfalls and blackouts over the summer if faced with extreme temperature spikes and dire weather. While resources remain “adequate” for normal seasonal peak demand, the major non-profit international regulatory authority’s 2023 Summer Reliability Assessment warns most of the US—including the West, Midwest, Texas, Southeast, and New England regions—may not possess enough energy reserves to handle heatwaves, severe storms, and hurricanes.

--snip--

“This report is an especially dire warning that America’s ability to keep the lights on has been jeopardized. That’s unacceptable,” Jim Matheson, the CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, said in a statement.“Federal policies must recognize the compromised reliability reality facing the nation before it’s too late.”

Then add the push to replace all fossil-fueled vehicles with EVs and the capacity and reliability of our electrical grid is highly questionable. Renewables can’t meet the demand – they are neither reliable, stable, or dispatchable – and traditional powerplants are being shut down and replaced with nothing. But somehow we’re supposed to be able to charge an increasing number of EVs even as the grid capacity shrinks?

I would like to think this problem is being caused by the incompetence of the Biden Administration, but my gut tells me this is being done on purpose by people who don’t really care about the environment, but do care about controlling people, using environmental issues as a means of doing so.

And so it goes...

Friday (Not So) Funny - Dostoievski Was Right

He was ahead of his time, almost as if he had a way to see into the 21st century. I think he would be dismayed to find out he was right...in spades.

Thoughts On A Sunday

BeezleBub and I retrieved the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout from the boatyard Friday and hauled it to his place so we could prep it to launch.

‘Preparation’ is mostly cleaning the cockpit of the boat – vacuuming the carpet, wiping down the vinyl, and cleaning the windscreen – as well as cleaning all of the cushions and gear and stowing it away on the boat.

Once that’s done it will be ready to go back into the water.

It would already be there but life, as it is wont to do, had its own plans which included the Official Weekend Pundit Refrigerator breaking down. Fortunately I was able to make use of a neighbor’s “garage fridge” to store our food until the refrigerator is fixed on Monday (I hope).

==+++==

As we have seen again and again, the amount of school spending does not automatically equate to educational performance, be it big city school systems or small rural school districts. What’s disturbing is that spending and staffing has been increasing even as student enrollment has been decreasing. What’s even more disturbing is that scholastic performance has not increased. In many cases, it has declined.

Bloat – when adults get the money, and the number of kids getting an education drops like a kid going down a playground slide. Make no mistake, that drop in enrollment is happening here in NH as well.

And now you see why my question is so important. Sure, it is easier to point out in overly large school districts, but the scrutiny they receive is also too small for their size. Here in NH, the ordinary citizen CAN provide such oversight and suss out even small savings of the economy – if they bother to look for it.

The best example I can give you is Twitter. Before Elon Musk took over, it had 7.500+ employees. Afterward, head count (and cost) started to drop – dramatically. Much of the Left, who looked at Twitter as their “playground,” howled that Twitter would cease to work and then exist (both complaining and exulting at the same time). Now, the headcount and the commiserate cost are down to around 1,000. It’s still working – you can go and read tweets and create your own. That’s what it was meant for – everything else was “overhead.”

Perhaps y’all should be examining your districts more closely and asking what will be called “embarrassing” questions. Hold them accountable.

Indeed.

==+++==

Is San Francisco stuck in a so-called Doom Loop?

San Francisco journalist Elizabeth Weil asked that question in a piece she was writing “to debunk all the horrible right-wing talking points about her beloved metropolis.” How ironic she found out that all of those “horrible right-wing talking points” were true.

It was then she realized San Francisco was in a Doom Loop.

The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don’t return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.

The night the Chronicle published its doom-loop article, Manny’s, an event space in the Mission, hosted a public discussion on what to do about the death spiral. The panelists tried to sound optimistic. “We just need to fix San Francisco’s dysfunctional permitting system!” “We can find an affordable way to turn some of the office space into housing.” “We should fund artists to repopulate downtown!”

I think it will take much more than that to fix San Francisco’s problems. Many of those problems are self-imposed, something neither the city government or many of the prominent and influential residents seem willing to admit.

As two close friends of mine who escaped San Francisco for New Hampshire almost 4 years ago have told me more than once, the only thing they regret is that they hadn’t left San Francisco years earlier.

==+++==

What happens when the results of a poll don’t give you the answers you expect?

The poll ‘disappears’.

When Americans are asked directly, without euphemisms, a majority are against medical interventions that could permanently affect children.

Who says so? A new poll from an outfit called Change Research, based in San Francisco, which per their website, works with left-wing organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Emily’s List, the American Federation of Teachers, many state Democrat groups, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. This is a leftist polling outfit who is dedicated to leftist causes. And they conducted a poll on how Americans view gender ideology, transgenderism, and their favorite term, “gender-affirming care,” which in this case means how the American public sees medical and surgical procedures for children, like puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and sex change surgeries.

The poll results did not reflect what Change Research wanted them to say, to their great disappointment.

Apparently the results of the poll “were so bad that Change Research has no plans to release the results at all.” That there wasn’t widespread support for that “gender-affirming care” doesn’t surprise me. There is nowhere near the support of trans ‘causes’ regarding children as many trans activists claim. The last thing they want is poll results that are the opposite of what they want to be made public. It doesn’t support the narrative they’re pushing. Therefore the poll results have to go away.

==+++==

I doubt the Powers That Be in New York are going to be able to explain this away.

NY Hotels Evict Struggling Homeless Veterans to Make Room for Illegal Aliens.

Homeless vets are being evicted from hotels in order to house illegal aliens that shouldn’t be here to begin with? What the eff is wrong with the buttheads running New York?

According to a non-profit foundation helping veterans, twenty homeless and struggling veterans have been evicted from upstate hotels to make rooms for the incoming illegal immigrants, as reported by the New York Post.

The outlet added that the hotel staff told a former military and a 24-year-old man who had served in Afghanistan and was in serious need of help that their temporary housing was being taken away and they would have to find another place to stay.

“Our veterans have been placed in another hotel due to what’s going on with the immigrants,’’ said Sharon Toney-Finch, the CEO of the Yerik Israel Toney (YIT) Foundation.

Vets who served this nation, put their lives on the line and are now struggling are getting kicked to the curb to make room for people who broke the law in order to get here?

I have but one thing to say about this: FJB.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the leaves have created a ‘green explosion’ on the trees, the green and yellow tree pollens are coating everything so much my black RAM 1500 isn’t black anymore, and where I still have work to do to on the boat to get it ready to launch.

Just When I Thought They Couldn't Get Any Stupider...

Just when I thought no one could possibly be stupider than AOC, someone comes along to prove me wrong. In this case it’s Denver City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca who wants to impose a racist and wholly unconstitutional tax on white businesses, the revenues to go to minority businesses as some form of reparations.

A Denver councilwoman caused a stir when she declared that white-owned businesses should pay reparations.

Candi CdeBaca, a 37-year-old Democratic Socialist who is facing a run-off election in June, told a business forum Thursday that white-owned businesses should pay an additional race-based tax, which would be given in turn as reparations to minority-owned businesses.

“Capitalism was built on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen resources,” CdeBaca told the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance, 9 News reported.

She said business improvement districts could levy the racial tax.

‘You could be collecting those extra taxes from white-led businesses all over the city and redistributing them to black and brown-owned businesses,” she said.

I doubt something like this would have to go beyond a state court to be struck down as unconstitutional should it ever come to be. But since this AOC wannabe has no understanding of economics, history, and just as important, no understanding whatsoever of human nature, none of this is surprising.

If she got her way I would expect white businesses to close up shop and flee, just as businesses in general have been fleeing California due to the incentives provided by government at state and municipal level. However, California’s taxes and regulations have gone after everyone while CdeBaca is going after the paler citizens of Denver. But then we must remember that Colorado has been infected by the California sickness, and particularly the political virus infecting the populace.

Friday (Not So) Funny - Oh, The Irony!!

I have witnessed this in person, seeing the anger and incredulity of those who went through hell being lectured by closeminded know-nothings.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s the second day of great weather that’s expected to last all week. It’s promising since Beezlebub and I plan to get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout back into the water before next weekend. All of the arrangements have been made, all the bills paid, and the only thing left to be done is clean the cockpit – vacuum the carpet, clean the windscreen, and wipe down the vinyl surfaces – and load all of the gear which includes two anchors, PFDs, the cushions in the cuddy cabin, mooring lines, paddles, tow lines, a spotlight, the marine radio, an updated nav chart of the lake, and a host of other small odds and ends.

One of the big problems I’ve had in the past is loading too much stuff into the boat, so BeezleBub and I made a list of stuff that needs to be in the boat versus stuff that should be left back at The Gulch unless it would be needed during a specific trip out onto the lake. Doing this reduced the amount of stuff stored on the boat by more than half. One can’t get tripped up by the “We might need this” trap if a list of “must haves” and “nice to haves” are put together. Then and only then can we prevent all of the “might need this” stuff from being loaded on the boat and filling every bit of storage space.

==+++==

I have to say I like the cut of Ron DeSantis’s jib, particularly when come to schooling the media about their inappropriate use of euphemisms as a means of trying to diminish the reality of the surgical mutilation of children.

WATCH: DeSantis interrupts reporter on sex transition for minors.

"Seriously? … I know people in your industry will dress it up with a euphemism, and they'll say it's 'healthcare' to cut off the private parts of a 14 or 15-year-old. That is not healthcare, that is mutilation." pic.twitter.com/Nok2YuYmbk

Transitioning kids when they really don’t know what they want, or worse, they are being pushed into it by a mentally ill mother – Jazz Jennings being but one example – or trans activist sickos that do not have kids best interests at heart is not a good thing. The kids are an ends to a means for them, period.

==+++==

I’d like to think that corporations are leaning the “Get Woke, Go Broke” lesson, particularly after the example of Bud Light’s fall from grace. It took 20 years for AB to take “Bud Light beer to the No. 1 beer in the country, and it took them one week to dismantle it.”

AB didn’t learn the lesson of Disney or Gillette or any of the other businesses who found out the hard way that pissing off the majority of their customer base they rely on in favor of trying to capture a very small percentage of the population is a good way to lose customers and go broke.

At least it appears someone at AB realizes what’s happened:

Robert Lachky, a former chief creative officer at Anheuser-Busch, said the decision to work with Mulvaney was a mistake, according to the Post-Dispatch.

“The minute you step into the political or religious spectrum, when you know your target audience is going to have a real issue with this, you know you’ve alienated at least half of your target audience,” he said. “People don’t like getting preached to, especially when it comes to drinking beer.”

One has to wonder if the other corporations contemplating targeting marketing towards the woke will reconsider after seeing what happened to Anheuser-Busch. But my guess is they won’t because to them being woke is more important and they couldn’t possibly make the same mistake all of their predecessors made.

Yeah. Right.

==+++==

China has its ghost cities, with some claiming there may be as many as 50 of them. Modern cities built to house millions of people, trillions of dollars invested by banks and Chinese citizens buying apartments unseen, yet they are all empty, the only occupants being the caretakers, government functionaries, and a few residents who actually moved into their new digs.

While the US doesn’t have new-built ghost cities, it does have cities that are increasingly looking like ghost towns, particularly those cities under the control of increasingly Leftist Democrats.

The Democrat Death Spiral has been destroying American cities. Democrat policies drive out productive citizens, resulting in a population that elects increasingly left-wing Democrats, resulting in still more insane policies in a vicious circle. Eventually, no one is left but a core Democrat constituency living like rats and cockroaches amid decaying ruins (e.g., our formerly wealthiest city, Detroit). Covid tyranny has accelerated this tragic process…

The downtown areas of San Francisco, St. Louis, Portland, Oregon, and other North American cities remain deserted months after the pandemic waned, despite many urban areas bouncing back to life, new data show.

Researchers tracked smartphone use across 63 cities and found that San Francisco, which is battling waves of crime and homeless addicts on its streets, only has 32 percent of the activity that was recorded before the pandemic.

Other cities not under the thumb of Democrat leadership bounced back after Covid. Then again, those cities haven’t being doing their best to make themselves unlivable, haven’t gone out of their way to be soft on crime, haven’t tolerated lawlessness, haven’t crippled their police departments by defunding them, haven’t had their justice system crippled by Soros bought-and-paid-for District Attorneys.

The big difference between the ghost cities in China and those coming into being in the US is that the ones in China are clean and don’t have lawlessness while the ones in the US look increasingly like movie sets used in a post-apocalyptic film.

==+++==

This is not a surprise to me or anyone else who’s been paying attention to SloJoe, the present Resident.

It looks like the meds they’ve been using on SloJoe to slow the progression of his dementia aren’t working any more.

Joe Biden’s idea of engaging directly with the media is submitting himself to the rigors of MSNBC “reporter” Stephanie Ruhle, who is an unusually lightweight and ideologically partisan media figure. But even she managed to summon up the moxie to ask Biden about his age. His answer belongs in the museum exhibit for “old man yells at cloud” phenomena—he’s just so darn much smarter than anyone else in the country…

When they have to vet questions the media is going to ask and make sure Biden has a ‘cheat sheet’ so he can answer those questions without having to think about them, you know it’s getting bad.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer weather has returned, more boats are appearing at the lakeside docks, and Monday is returning too soon...again.

It's All Whirlpool's Fault!

Note: I've got to remember to actually hit the 'Post' button when I'm done uploading a post. I didn't realize I hadn't until I looked at the blog a few minutes ago and realized last night's post wasn't there.

++++++++++

I read Megan Fox’s PJM article about the wrong turn made by humanity with great interest. I think we all can agree that something has gone wrong and humanity is heading down the wrong path. There are a number of causes posited for this wrong turn. The cause put forth by Ms. Fox?

Washing machines.

We like to think we’re very advanced, but is that true? Has innovation brought us the freedom it promised? Are human beings the happiest we’ve ever been? Considering that more than 37 million Americans are on antidepressants, I doubt it. Teen suicide rates are skyrocketing. Drug use, violence, despair, isolation, and loneliness are completely off the charts. No one is okay.

But life has never been easier for human beings. Everything can be accomplished with the touch of a button. Everything is instant and automatic. We should have more free time than ever, be happier, and be more content than ever before. Look around. Is that what you observe? All I see are sick, miserable people who don’t know what gender they are.

Mr. Fox and I are watching 1923, the Yellowstone spinoff starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren (a great show). In the episode we watched last night, the Dutton family, ranchers who work from sunup to sundown caring for animals, fighting rustlers, and trying to survive the harsh Montana conditions, take a trip into town and see a sidewalk salesman with the electric company showcasing a new invention: the electric washing machine.

Under a sign that says “housecleaning made easy” stands a bright and shiny washing machine that catches the ladies’ eyes. “What is that?” asks one of the young women in the group. “That’s a washing machine,” says the salesman, eager to make a sale. After informing the group that it’s for washing clothes, the women exclaim, “Can you imagine?”

Ms. Fox uses this tale to illustrate the beginning of where we went astray. As you continue to read her narrative you come to realize that it is a proper logical path showing the train of events that have brought us to this place. As Megan writes, “[I]t has been women throughout our history who are at the root of all foolishness. So many cultural ills we face are the direct result of women gone wild and the men who didn’t stop them.”

Is she serious about her analysis? Is it more tongue-in-cheek, or is she serious?

This is just my opinion, but I think it’s a bit of both. Too much leisure time can lead to people getting themselves into trouble, be it legal, social, or otherwise. As the Bible-inspired saying goes, “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.” There’s a lot more free time than there used to be and people need to fill that free time with something. It appears a lot of that ‘something’ is coming up with new ways to damage our societies.

Do I agree with all of Ms. Fox’s conclusions? No, but I agree with enough of them to think she might be on to something. It’s up to you to make up your own mind.

Read The Whole Thing.

A suggestion: You’ll find comments from a number of readers have equally interesting takes on what has set us on this path to self-destruction.

Friday Funny - Chuck Norris

I don't need to say anything else.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been raining here at The Gulch since midnight and got heavy during the afternoon, something the Weather Guys^TM says is supposed to continue until sometime Monday morning. More rain is forecast during the rest of the week, here and there.

I don’t think the climate doomsayers will be able to continue making the claim that we’re suffering a drought here in northern New England.

==+++==

This had me scratching my head until I remembered 1984 and the contradictory statements others have used to illustrate the absurdity of claims made by the Left such as Slavery = Freedom, just to name one.

An actual absurdity I came across is the media saying voting threatens democracy. Umm, excuse me?

This controversy starts with the election of 8 Republicans to a Michigan County Board of Commissioners the Washington Post took exception too, painting the election as the Right taking control of local government being a Bad Thing^TM.”

“The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.”

The meeting was in January. The reporters were not present. But it ran pictures of the meeting taken by Evan Cobb, a freelance photographer from South Bend, Indiana. Maybe they interviewed him.

People elected an overwhelming majority of 8 new Republican commissioners (out of 11 commissioners) that the Jeff Bezos newspaper did not like. They made changes that the newspaper did not like, and so the Jeff Bezos Post said this threatened “the building blocks of American democracy.”

One of the changes made was to the county’s motto “that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery.”

The 186-year-old county adopted that motto — Where You Belong — six years ago.

The new one is Where Freedom Rings.

Freedom must be a threat to democracy, too.

Anyone paying attention knows the Left hates freedom, otherwise why would they be trying so hard to stamp it out?

There’s more to the story about why the eight new county commissioners took the actions they did, including why they fired a number of long time county employees, the main reason being how they mishandled Covid, getting to the point where they saw residents as a threat to public health.

Read The Whole Thing.

==+++==

800 years of Climate Crisis.

To think they were driving SUVs over 800 years ago! Who knew?

==+++==

We’re seeing more fallout from the “Defund the Police” actions taken by a number of Blue cities. The latest highlights an attack that took place in West Hollywood where two “Safety Ambassadors” stood and watched the assault while police officers would have subdued and arrested the perpetrator.

In an effort to make citizens feel safe with fewer police, the city has deployed 85 unarmed security ambassadors on residential streets and in commercial corridors. Their presence is meant to deter crime, but they do not intervene at the sight of trouble. Instead, they are supposed to notify the police.

Business Owner Larry Block agrees with Reynolds that West Hollywood’s decision last year to cut its police force was a bad idea. Block told ABC 7 that the feckless security ambassadors are no substitute for police officers:

"Armed people can do something, they're intimidating, the security ambassadors walk around aimlessly, not really knowing what to do."

Another way to make citizens feel safe with fewer police is to allow all law-abiding citizens to be armed. When only criminals and police are armed, the citizens are defenseless and violent crime runs rampant. We see that in every Blue city with severe Second Amendment restrictions. Reduce the number of police and the crime problem gets worse, “Safety Ambassadors” notwithstanding.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where it’s raining to beat the band, it’s gonna rain for most of the week, and where even Monday is throwing in the towel.

Suicidal Teenage Girls

By way of Instapundit comes this:

One-third of teen girls in US seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021: CDC.

From the comments comes this punch line:

“Then they stopped listening to the CDC and Fauci and recovered.”

Seems like a reasonable explanation to me.

Friday Funny (On Saturday) - The Difference

Sorry, folks, but I got sidetracked and wasn't able to post last night. But fear not, this post corrects that oversight.

Years of experience have proven to me again and again the accuracy of the following illustration:

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s a wet day here The Gulch, with rain forecast to fall all day. It’s been a dry month so far but today’s rain is expected to get the total close to what we normally see for April. At least it’s a soaking rain meaning there’s no flooding forecast to take place.

Being a rainy day I expect we’ll be inside all day – except for church, of course – so we have an excuse to not partake of any spring cleaning. Not that there’s much that really needs to be done with the exception of cleaning windows and screens, something that isn’t in the cards this rainy day.

==+++==

It’s hard to believe that my boating season starts in a little more than three weeks. All the arrangements have been made, bills have been paid, and the only things I’ll need to do before putting the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout back into the water is clean the cockpit and cuddy cabin, then load all of the gear – anchors, mooring lines, PFDs, cushions, and so on – then haul it to the town docks and launch it.

==+++==

I lifted this entirely from Instapundit because there’s no way I could make it any better with commentary of my own.

Dreadful news, which I feel duty bound to share. Activists in my mentions are trying to organise yet another boycott of my work, this time of the Harry Potter TV show. As forewarned is forearmed, I've taken the precaution of laying in a large stock of champagne.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 21, 2023

She’s let everyone know just what she thinks of the ‘woke’ activists with that one tweet, i.e. not much. And why should she give them any more power than they think they have? It isn’t like they’re rational human beings. What they are is delusional narcissists who let feelz drive them rather than logic, reason, or facts.

==+++==

Who says there’s no such thing as justice even if it isn’t through the justice system?

BuzzFeed destroyed the media. The media returned the favor.

It was never a viable operation, meaning it never made money. Investors spent hundreds of millions of dollars ‘investing’ in a media operation that couldn’t seem to get its financial house in order. Then again it seemed more interested in sensationalism than actual news. It was this that led to its downfall, a fate it deserved.

However, there is a larger narrative implicated in BuzzFeed News’ collapse, and it inevitably returns to that decision to publish the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed News was a beautiful idea that failed, not just because of the financial model, but because BuzzFeed News itself could never differentiate itself as being more trustworthy than either its parent company or the rest of the media. Why not? Because by publishing the Steele dossier — which we now know to have been partisan bunk concocted and spread with malevolent intent — BuzzFeed immediately rendered itself the least trustworthy news organization in America.

The more arrogant they are, the harder they fall.

I, for one, will not be lamenting its demise. Now we have to see about the propaganda organs of the DNC like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post….

==+++==

News reports that Joe Biden will be announcing his run for re-election has me dismayed considering his obvious and continuing mental decline. My ex works in the dementia ward of our state institutions and has been saying he exhibits many of the signs of dementia. (One of the WP Sisters got angry when I mentioned that, rebutting by asking “Did she or anyone else examine him? If not, how can anyone say that?”) I’d say working with dementia patients for almost 15 years gives her insight that the ‘man on the street’ doesn’t have.

I am not the only one questioning the wisdom of Biden running again. So is the Wall Street Journal. (This link is paywalled, but you can see much of what was in the editorial by going here.)

The White House is whispering that next week President Biden will announce his intention to run for a second term, though the polls say that even most Democrats hope he doesn’t. The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake.

--snip--

But asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish. It’s impossible to know Mr. Biden’s real physical and mental state because the White House goes to great lengths to hide it. But his decline is clear to anyone who isn’t willfully blind. He rarely holds a press conference, and his words are as scripted as possible to avoid embarrassing stumbles that he nonetheless continues to make.

Different people age at different rates, but the risk of an accelerated decline for Mr. Biden is considerable. The chance that he could serve a full second term is hardly assured.

And unless the Democrats decide that Kamala Harris is more of a liability than a help and replace her as Biden’s running mate, we could easily end up with Harris as President, someone who is nearly as clueless as Biden, but can’t use dementia as an excuse for her behavior. I think WRBA would have an extremely difficult keeping Cackling Kamala reined in.

==+++==

I have to wonder how the Climate Change faithful and watermelon environmentalists are going to explain this away.

New NOAA STAR satellite temperatures only show half the warming that climate models do.

An all new reanalysis of the STAR satellite data finds markedly lower temperature trends for the last 40 years. The big deal about this is that this third dataset suddenly supports the original UAH satellite data, not the other RSS system, and not the “surface thermometers” sitting near hot tarmacs and absolutely not the climate models.

The satellite data didn’t match the data from ground stations, many of those stations improperly sited or correction factors not properly applied or not applied at all. When a survey was performed by BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures), it was found that pristine surface stations – properly sited and isolated from Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect – were not showing the temperature increases being seen at ‘dirty’ stations. The UAH satellite data mirrored the findings of the BEST survey, yet the Climate Change faithful ignored it as the data didn’t fit the narrative they’ve been selling.

Will we ever have enough data to end this climate version of Lysenkoism?

==+++==

Have you noticed that rich people, more specifically the rich Left, talk about how they’re all for being taxed more? However, when it comes to actually cutting a check, they’re a no-show.

I have long been bemused by rich liberals like Warren Buffett, who tell us their tax rates are too low. Really? Guess what: the IRS will cash your check! If you seriously think you aren’t paying enough taxes, or you actually believe the government spends money more wisely and effectively than you do, there is an easy solution. Write the IRS a check, I guarantee they will cash it.

Yet, strangely, I have never heard of a rich liberal doing this, even though most of these people are second or third generation beneficiaries who cannot comprehend how hard their ancestors worked to accumulate the wealth that they enjoy.

So, they talk the talk, but don’t or won’t walk the walk. It’s just another bit of virtue signaling as best I can tell. After all, it isn’t like they actually have to cut a check to the IRS, right? It doesn’t cost them a penny to talk about paying more taxes, does it?

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where it’s raining, where we’re being a bit lazy, and once again Monday will be returning with its usual malice.

The "Get Woke, Go Broke" Virus Is Spreading

I have to wonder if the C-level executives of some corporations have been taking illicit drugs. What’s making me ponder this question?

How about sheer stupidity?

How many companies have made the decision to go ‘woke’ as a marketing strategy only to find out it backfires and causes them to lose market share?

The first one I became aware of, but was unlikely to be the first rather than the biggest at the time, was Gillette. Their disastrous ad campaign that denigrated men ended up costing them over $8 billion in sales and valuation.

The latest is Anheuser-Busch who thought it would be a great idea to use a trans-woman as the center of their ad campaign to capture younger customers for their Bud Light brand. While the popularity of Bud Light had been falling off, this ‘woke’ campaign may have killed it off. It may have killed off the career of the architect of the ill advised move, Alissa Heinerscheid, a marketing VP for the Bud Light brand. She’s taken a leave of absence and her position is being filled by Todd Allan for the time being.

Another example - retail chain Bed, Bath & Beyond whose very public dislike and denunciation of My Pillow magnate Mike Lindell seriously affected their already struggling bottom line. BB&B has closed 400 stores across the nation, including all but three of them here in New Hampshire.

Then there’s Disney which has seen falloffs in subscriptions to its Disney+ streaming service, box office failures of ‘woke’ remakes of popular movies, and falling popularity of some of its Star Wars spin-off series because they appear to be too woke for fans. Disney is also laying off staff, something it has never done before as best I recall.

It is doubtless there are plenty of more examples, big and small, of businesses who went woke, and then broke.

More of corporate America is learning the lesson of “Get woke. Go broke.” Pissing off a majority of one’s customer base in order to capture a small percentage of customers they might not have seems like an incredibly stupid move. Why anyone thought it was a good idea escapes me. The only explanation I can come up with is that either those who made the decision to do so were either off their meds, using illicit substances, have had too much of the ‘woke’ Koolaid, or some combination of all three.

Friday (Not So) Funny - Self-Inflicted

Anheuser-Busch is learning the lesson "Go Woke, Go Broke" the hard way.

Thoughts On A Sunday

NOTE: It wasn’t until Monday morning (5:47AM) I realized I had written my usual TOAS...but never posted it! I obviously got distracted and, thinking that I had finished writing it had also posted it. I was wrong. Sorry about that.


We had a preview of summer this past week with some warm sunny days in the 80’s, with couple of places seeing 90ºF. Windows in both The Gulch and the trusty RAM 1500 were open, the heat was off, and we made the best of the weather.

While there are still a few places showing piles of snow, primarily areas that receive no direct sunlight, those piles are almost gone. As best I’ve been able to determine there is no ice left anywhere on the Big Lake. I’ve certainly seen quite a few boats out on the lake, most of them being fishing boats – it’s salmon fishing season – hitting the spots where landlocked salmon might be.

The Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout – aka The Boat – is still scheduled to be returned the water early during the second week of May. I suppose I could have made arrangements to have The Boat removed from storage earlier, but since it would not really be used until early May why do so?

==+++==

Just when we think we’ve gotten past racial issues we find that descendants of victims of segregation are demanding segregated housing, at least to the level where they get to choose the race of their potential roommate.

The demand to allow "students of color" to elect not to room with students of other races was one of several such demands issued by a group of protesting students who aired their concerns about racism on campus during an ongoing sit-in. Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud spoke at the sit-in in a live-streamed exchange.

Calling themselves “#NotAgainSU,” this group of protestors is calling for the chancellor to resign if he does not sign a document conceding to the list of demands by Wednesday. Even before the given deadline, over 1,000 protesters have already petitioned for his resignation online.

Yet another group of students who have the mistaken belief that they run the show at their university.

I remember when ‘students of color’ demanded segregated housing at my alma mater a few years ago. The administration basically said ‘no’, reminding them that segregated housing was illegal, particularly on state property. They didn’t like the administration’s response and demanded the university ignore federal law and numerous US Supreme Court decisions. What would be next, demands to restore of some modern version of Jim Crow laws? Considering their ignorance of history, and particularly the history of the US Civil Rights movement, their demands were over the top and illegal as heck.

Maybe it’s time to remind them that they don’ run the show. Start with suspensions. If that doesn’t work, then expulsions. It’s time for college administrations to start doing their jobs and take back control of their campuses.

==+++==

There are calls for governments to start taxing wealth. Both national and state governments have considered doing this even thought there is plenty of evidence showing that so-called wealth taxes don’t work, don’t collect anywhere near what proponents claim they will, and have the added side effect that they have a negative effect on the economy of any place imposing them as the wealthy flee, taking their wealth with them.

Along with wealth leaving, so does investment. Why would anyone want to invest someplace where the government can decide they can tax “unrealized gains” meaning taxing the supposed increase in the value of an investment even though the investor hasn’t cashed out.

The latest ‘victim’ of the wealth tax?

Norway.

“A difficult choice has been made. I’ve moved from Asker, Norway, to Lugano in Switzerland,” Norway’s biggest taxpayer, and the largest shareholder of investment firm Aker ASA, Kjell Inge Røkke wrote to the rest of the board in an open letter last September. Mr Røkke, an industrial tycoon with an estimated net worth of Nkr 19.6bn (£1.5bn), is among 50 billionaires and millionaires to have left Norway over the past year as they were hit with higher rates of wealth tax.

Record numbers of the country's richest residents have fled since the Labour-centre coalition increased wealth tax rates by 0.1 percentage points, costing the government tens of millions in lost tax revenue. The 50 high earners, with a combined net worth of more than Nkr 40bn (£3bn), make up more than the total number who have left the country for Switzerland since 2009, according to Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv.

A number of nations have imposed wealth taxes in the past. Most have abandoned them because they had the opposite effect of that predicted by proponents. One of the last countries to abandon wealth taxes was France back in 2017 when it was found it lost more money than it ever collected in revenues.

What I find disturbing is the UK is considering a wealth tax...again.

It imposed such taxes back in the early 70’s and the British economy, already in the depths of a recession, collapsed. It wasn’t until Maggie Thatcher became Prime Minister and pushed Parliament to undo the crushing economic policies and confiscatory taxes that the British economy recovered. That the British are thinking of going back down that route again means they have forgotten the lessons they were taught the last time they tried it.

That California has been contemplating a similar move tells me they also choose not to learn from history, will make the same mistakes, something that could be the death knell for California’s already struggling economy.

==+++==

And that’s the new from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summer weather has taken a step back to more normal spring weather, camps and cottages are being opened for the upcoming summer season, and where we’re waiting for our local ice cream joint to re-open.

Friday (Not So) Funny - "More Of The Alleged News In a Minute"

If only this weren't true.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was during church services this morning that I heard someone say something I’ve never heard anyone say in church before.

“Has anyone seen a Slinky?”

A Slinky? Really?

Apparently one of our very young parishioners brought his Slinky with him to church and dropped it on the floor towards the rear of the church and it rolled down the slope of the floor towards the altar. His grandmother walked down the center aisle asking about the wayward toy. Said Slinky was eventually located six rows from the front and was returned to the young parishioner’s parents for safekeeping until services were finished.

Just when I thought I had seen it all…

==+++==

Is China the rising economic power that will replace the US some of the ‘pundits’ are saying it is, or is China a version of a Potemkin village writ large? Of the two, I am coming to believe it is more the latter than the former considering some of the signs I’ve been seeing.

A few of of those signs:

- A couple of trillion dollars of defaults in the real estate market, with Evergrande alone totaling just under a trillion all by itself.

- The so-called Zero Covid measures that shut down entire cities for months which also included major manufacturing, transportation, and financial hubs. The effects of those measures are still being felt

- Increasing government control of the economy which will eventually short-circuit the market feedback mechanism.

- More companies are moving their operations out of China to places like Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Indonesia, if not ‘reshoring’ operations back home.

Is the might of China built on shifting sands? Is it facade like that seen on movie lots?

Only time will tell.

==+++==

Why is it I figured Social Security would not be around when I finally retired?

Because I knew the funds needed to pay out benefits wouldn’t be there. That’s something I figured out over 30 years ago.

Unless there was an actual Trust Fund to pay benefits, there weren’t going to be enough people paying into the system to fund payouts. It was expected that our population would continue to grow which meant an increasing number of workers paying into the system to fund payouts. However, that expectation turned out to be incorrect as the population in the US is not growing at anywhere near the rate expected while at the same time the labor participation rate is dropping. That does not bode well for the viability of Social Security.

Anyone depending upon Social Security for their retirement income is screwed.

==+++==

Leave it to Joe Biden to destroy Title IX, and in turn, women’s scholastic sports.

The Biden Administration has really bought into the transgender craze. So much so that, in response to states trying to protect girls and women in sports, they announced a Title IX rule change yesterday. In the interest of being FAIR, there shall be no blanket bans of transgenders in sports.

SloJoe is killing off women’s sports in schools by making sure they will be unable to compete against ‘transwomen’ who are faster and stronger than biological girls. Despite claims to the contrary by many modern women, women aren’t as physically capable as men. We see the proof again and again in sports, be it in soccer, track, lacrosse, wrestling, gymnastics, MMA, and a whole host of other sports. Yet SloJoe and WRBA have decided to believe the hype from third-wave feminists and destroy women’s sports all in the name of ‘fairness’.

We don’t need that type of fairness since there’s nothing fair about it, period.

==+++==

And that’s the abbreviated Easter Sunday news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where Ice Out was declared this past Friday, boats have already been seen out on the lake, and where my boating season starts in 5 weeks!

EVs Ain't All That Once You Look Closer

Instapundit takes note of Kia’s new EV9 and finding it’s “not actually impressive.”

From the comments come this observation:

"But this is not bad: 'And will charge from 10 to 80 percent in under 25 minutes.' "

Really? I can go from 1% to 100% of fuel for my pickup in less than 4 minutes - 26 gallons of gas - and go well over 400 miles while carrying three other passengers and a half-ton of cargo.

The Kia - or any other EV - does not impress me at all. Twenty five minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent charge means that's 25 minutes I'm not getting things done. I don't have time for that. I'm too busy.

And these two:

...will charge from 10 to 80 percent in under 25 minutes using a 230-kWh Level 3 charger

...... Googles "price of 230 kwh level 3 charger" ......

You can expect to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $80,000 for a quality Level 3 EV charger, this includes installation and associated permitting costs. Of course, the exact cost will depend on a number of factors, such as the specific charger you select and the prevailing electrical rates in your area.

Followed by this one in response:

I think you'll find one of those 230 kwh level 3 chargers require 440V 3-phase. You don't see that in residential areas, at least not in the rural and semi-rural areas.

A 230KWH charger would require a 1000 amp service using a 220V drop. I know I wouldn't want to pay for one.

The more you dig into the realities of EVs, the more you realize EVs are not a solution to the alleged climate change problem being caused by cars and trucks. They are a smokescreen that ignores the very big negatives of EVs.

Thoughts On A Sunday

Yesterday was a sad day here at The Gulch.

One of the feline contingent, Cole, passed away yesterday. He was 17 years old and had been fighting a health issue over the past couple of months, but in the end he lost the battle. He died in my arms, with me telling him I loved him and that he was “a Gu’boy”.

He and I went through a lot together over the past 17 years, both joyous and saddening. He was comforting. He loved to cuddle, purring contently all the while. He would groom BeezleBub after he took a shower because “he couldn’t do it hisself”.

On weekend mornings he would wake me up, letting me know it was time to get up and feed the feline members of the household. (During the week I usually am up by 5:30AM. On weekends Cole might let me sleep in until 6AM, and sometimes even 6:15AM, but not much past that because the food dishes were empty and I, the Food Giver Person, needed to fill them.)

Be at Peace, Big Kitty. May your supper dish always be full and your bed always filled with catnip.

==+++==

I find it hard to believe that Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House, let alone a member of the House.

Her understanding of the justice system in this country, and of the Constitution as well, is abysmal. That she tweeted the following shows that she was never fit to serve in Congress.

...everyone has the right to a trial to prove their innocence.

Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right. (Emphasis added – ed.)

First, the accused doesn’t go to trial to prove their innocence. The trial is for the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution has to do that work. The defense is there to disprove the prosecution’s case.

Second, ‘the system’ Nancy references doesn’t grant any rights. Rights are inherent and are enumerated by the Constitution, and specifically the Bill of Rights. The system must work within that framework or it provides no justice, just oppression and tyranny.

What’s scary is that a lot of Democrats in Congress, state legislatures, and government believe the same thing as Pelosi.

==+++==

This is something I have understood for some time as I actually ran the numbers and they didn’t add up.

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math.

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut down on fossil fuels was made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison, who is also a researcher at CERN, said in a 2023 paper (pdf).

Allison noted that because solar power is “extremely weak,” it was inadequate to “sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living” before the Industrial Revolution.

“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures. Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective; even unnecessary,” Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

I have debated about wind and solar with true believers and in every case was able to demolish their arguments with the math, and I am not talking about high end math. It’s straight up arithmetic.

I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how many solar panels it would take to replace the output of the Seabrook (NH) nuclear power plant, assuming the solar panels aren’t perfectly side-by-side and the storage needed was available in order to equal the 24/7 output of Seabrook’s 1300MW capacity – it would take ~120 square miles of solar panels. (This calculation assumes winter sunlight hours as we are above the 43rd parallel up here in New Hampshire). That means destroying 120 square miles of forests and the carbon-sinking those forests provide to replace the ~2 square miles taken up by Seabrook. It’s better and more environmentally friendly to build a new nuclear plant, and in the end, cheaper to do so.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice on the main part of the lake is gone, the winds have been helping to break up the remaining ice, and where boating season starts in 6 weeks!

The Continuing Politicization Of The Justice System

I have been seeing the coverage of Trump’s indictment, the commentary on TV, the various tweets and web posts, all of the “Yeah, we got him now!” and “The Dems have no idea what they’ve unleashed!” opinion pieces in the papers and on the blogs. I’ve read a lot of legal opinions from lawyers and legal pundits about the Manhattan DA’s actions (as well as his increasing inaction against violent criminals in his part of New York City).

It seems DA Bragg has gone out of his way to spin what was at best a misdemeanor into a felony, has ignored the statute of limitations, has withheld exculpatory evidence, while the media ignores a felonious misdeeds of both previous and present presidents and some of their associates that would have gotten anyone else thrown into a federal prison, particularly Republican anyone elses in government as well as average citizens.

The justice system has been increasingly politicized, is being pushed away from the restrictions of the Constitution as well as the enumerated Rights, trying to suborn federal and state laws by redefining them to mean something other than their original meaning, suborning the legislative process. The push to criminalize things that aren’t criminal, that are protected by the Constitution, and doing so for purely political reasons as a means of suppressing political opponents, be they individuals or groups, is the mark of an increasingly intolerant, oppressive tyrannical ruling class.

Is the Trump indictment a purely political move? In my opinion, it is. ‘They’, the Democrat/Progressive elites, will do everything they can get away with to maintain power by destroying Trump. It’s a gamble since it could easily backfire on them. To quote Obi Wan Kenobe “If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can imagine.”

I do have to wonder if Trump is convicted an appeal will make its way to the Supreme Court, citing the flaws in the case, the ‘rewriting’ of laws that turned a misdemeanor into a felony sans any legislative action, willfully ignoring the statute of limitations, as well as prosecutorial misconduct and malicious prosecution.

And so the circus begins.