Thoughts On A Sunday

A 'almost' Nor’easter has graced us with its presence, arriving last night and dumping snow across most of New Hampshire, with the heaviest snowfall occurring in the southern and central part of the state. It is the first substantial snowfall we’ve had this winter.

There was a little over 6 inches of snow on the ground when I got up this morning and we’ll easily get another 6 inches before it all winds down. It finally feels like winter.

One concession to the storm is that I did my normal Sunday morning before church shopping trip to Walmart on yesterday morning instead. I got there a little past 7am and surprisingly the parking lot was full. At that time there’s usually only a dozen or so cars in the lot, even on Saturdays.

Once I got inside I saw people stocking up as if we were going to have a four day long blizzard rather than a typical New England snowstorm that would last less than a day. I bought my usual items. The only concession I made to the storm was picking up an extra pint of Half-and-Half at the WP Mom’s request.

The snow is expected to end by 6pm and then I’ll go out, clean off the trusty RAM 1500, shovel the driveway, and use the roof rake to clear some of the snow from the roof.

Believe it or not, I am looking forward to doing so. Of course I will be sick and tired of doing so by March.

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The January 6th ‘insurrection’ was back in the news, briefly, as if it is something that should now be ignored, particularly in light of more evidence that the insurrection was nothing of the sort. It has served its purpose, allowing a number of states to attempt removing Donald Trump from the ballot using Section 3 of 14th Amendment. The Democrats know that if Trump ends up being the GOP presidential candidate he’ll crush Biden in the November elections.

That this issue is now in the hands of the US Supreme Court has the Democrats nervous. It is highly likely the court will find Section 3 does not apply as Trump has not been arrested, indicted, tried, or convicted of insurrection. One has to ask whether just an accusation, one not backed up by actual evidence, is enough to invoke Section 3? I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I am guessing SCOTUS will find that it does not apply and cannot be used to ban Trump from appearing on the ballot. That will invalidate the moves by various states and private citizens to do so.

I expect the Democrats will go nuts if that happens and will start making plans (again) to expand the number of justices and make the Supreme Court a wholly owned subsidiary of Democratic Socialist Party of the Democratic People’s Republic of Amerika.

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Here we go again, in this case gun owners having to prove they’re innocent rather than the authorities having to prove they’re guilty. In this latest case it’s about Minnesota’s blatantly unconstitutional red flag law.

Yesterday – four days after the DFL’s vaunted “Red Flag” swatting-enablement and gun confiscation bill came out – the form to file to appeal a Red Flag order is out.

And it’s worse than you might have expected:

The form is now available, and it isn’t good.

It requires the accused to prove that they aren’t violent or suicidal. In other words, you must prove your innocence instead of your accuser proving guilt.

This isn’t due process. This is guilty until proven innocent.

— MN Gun Owners Caucus (@mnguncaucus) January 4, 2024

By the way – as bad as you think the new ERPO law is, it’s actually worse. The MN Gun Owners Caucus explains it here.

I expect this one will end up in front of SCOTUS, just like so many other 2nd Amendment cases have.

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Here are some predictions for 2024. I will say here that I do not agree with all of them.

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We understand the Southern Poverty Law Center has devolved into a haven for leftist thought and Constitutional Rights be damned. If anything they’re worse than the ACLU.

SPLC’s latest addition to their enemies list? Americans who accept biology.

As far back as the 1980s, Dees was openly admitting that he saw the fight against poverty as passé, and admitted that the “P” in SPLC was an anachronism. Jaded staff began ruefully referring to their own flashy headquarters as the “Poverty Palace.”

Dees and Cohen may have left the Poverty Palace, but the SPLC’s tendency to betray its founding principles clearly remains a problem, as illustrated by a new SPLC report released under the auspices of what the group dubs “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” (This verbal clunker seems to have been reverse-engineered in order to yield the acronym, “CAPTAIN.”)

The report purports to demonstrate “the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” and “anti-trans narratives and extremism.” Much like the dramatically worded hard-sell direct-mail campaigns that the SPLC started up under Dees, it’s marketed as a matter of life and death: According to the deputy director of research for the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” uncovered by the SPLC has “real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and non-binary people.”

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But the SPLC’s report hardly confines itself to such unassailable liberal principles. The real point of the project, it seems, was to catalogue and denounce public figures who’ve expressed dissent from the most extreme demands of trans-rights activists—specifically, (1) the demand that children and adolescents who present as transgender must instantly be “affirmed” in their dysphoric beliefs, even if such affirmation leads to a life of sterility, surgical disfigurement, drug dependence, and medical complications; and (2) the demand that biological men who self-identify as women must be permitted unfettered access to protected women’s spaces and sports leagues.

The SPLC’s authors seek to cast their ideological enemies as hate-addled reactionaries whose nefarious activities must “be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right.” And it is absolutely true that some of the organizations they name-check are hard-right, socially conservative outfits that endorse truly transphobic (and homophobic) beliefs.

It only gets worse from there.

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Here’s a perfect example of Liberal cognitive dissonance:

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the snow’s still falling, we’re waiting for it to end so we can start shoveling, and where Monday doesn’t care if the snow is cleared away.