5/14/2023

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.