6/16/2024

Thoughts On A Sunday - Part 2

The roar of motorcycles started a little earlier than I expected this morning, hearing the first batch of bikes heading towards Weirs Beach at 6 this morning. I figure the peak was sometime around noon and then many of the bikers who made their way to New Hampshire for the 101st Annual Laconia Motorcycle Rally headed home. The beer and vendor tents saw the number of customers fade away and by late this afternoon most of the motorcyclists were gone. Yes, there will be some who will wait until tomorrow before heading home, avoiding most of the homebound traffic. That pretty much happens every year.

While we both look forward to and dread Motorcycle Week every year, we understand that it brings a lot of people and their money to New Hampshire. We like it when people come up this way to enjoy themselves and to take in the beauty of this place. For the first time in a number of years it also looks like there have been no fatal motorcycle accidents. I know there were some accidents, something that is unavoidable - including one non-motorcycle related accident in my town at an intersection well known for accidents – but we never really like hearing about anyone having been involved in a traffic accident, particularly if it involves folks visiting from away.

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Speaking of traffic accidents, I think I have mentions one a couple of occasions that one of my guilty pleasures is watching dash-cam videos on YouTube. It never ceases to amaze me how many drivers make poor decisions when they’re out on the highways and byways. The same is true for incidents of road rage, with people getting angry at other motorists and doing dumb stuff that endangers everyone. It’s even worse when a road-rager is angry at another motorist for no apparent reason.

The most common accident I’ve seen on these videos is caused when a driver blows through a red light or stop sign and t-bones another vehicle. Sometimes its someone trying to beat a red light. At other times someone misreads a green light for a left or right turn as a ‘regular’ green light and go through the intersection and cause an accident. (I have personally experienced a close call when I was returning home with some friends and the driver of the car I was in blew right through a red light at the top of an off-ramp, mistaking the left turn green arrow as a regular green light. We were fortunate there was no traffic making a left from the opposite side at the time.) Other red-light runners were apparently paying more attention to something else...like their smart phones, rather than to the road.

In any case, seeing all of the hundreds dash-cam videos convinced me to purchase one and install it in the trusty RAM 1500. I also bought three front/rear dash cams for family members last Christmas. In my case I have caught a number of close calls – people doing dumb stuff and almost causing an accident – one such close call taking place in one of the local supermarket’s parking lot when a woman got out of her car after parking it and walked right into the path of the RAM, her attention on her smart phone and not the traffic in the lot. She started yelling at me and as she did so I pointed to my dash-cam ...and she stopped yelling and went on her way. (Yes, I saved the video just in case. I reviewed it later and it clearly showed her paying more attention to her phone than to what was around her and that if I hadn’t been paying attention I would have hit her.)

If you don’t have a dash-cam I strongly suggest you get one. There are a lot of them available and they run from the basic and inexpensive ones to full function voice-controlled multi-camera ones. They’re cheap insurance and they can eliminate the he-said/she-said accounts about accidents.

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We are still months away from the November elections but controversies about voting, or more specifically, voting machines as well as mail-in voting has returned to the forefront, and with good reason.

Puerto Rico’s primary elections just experienced hundreds of voting irregularities related to electronic voting machines, according to the Associated Press.

Luckily, there was a paper trail so the problem was identified and vote tallies corrected.

The comments address this in more detail as well as the election fraud pulled off in the past. Many believe the 2024 election will see this again, but on a larger scale. Like Glenn Reynolds, many of us are calling for a return to paper ballots. There also needs to be a complete ban on mail-in voting because it lends itself to massive fraud, one reason so many other countries have banned it outright.

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If the UK thinks 79ºF is a heatwave, then I wonder what they would think of temps close to 100ºF and high humidity here in New England? That’s what we’ll be seeing later this week, with the temp on Tuesday expected to be 94º, 98º+ on Wednesday and Thursday, and 92º on Friday. In other words, summer.

Temps are expected to be back in the 70’s and 80’s next week.

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It looks like the Democrats are learning an old lesson. Again. That lesson?

Be careful what you wish for...because you just might get it.

...the suburban traditional liberal continues to vote Democrat because of abortion. Or some nonsense about the rich paying their "fair share." Or climate change. Or any number of manufactured grievances designed not so much to solve a tangible problem than to make a certain class of educated voters feel righteous about themselves.

They cast their votes on the Machiavellian calculation that the mob was useful as a lever from which to derive unconditional surrenders from congressional Republicans (never a difficult feat to begin with). They calculated that such antics would never be allowed to fester uncontrolled so long as the victims were conservatives who deserved it. They calculated that, once the mob had served its usefulness, it would disperse, much as the German elitists and corporate leaders once thought they could do with their own street thugs.

Well, my friends. You miscalculated.

--snip--

- You supported the LBGTQ agenda without question when it was being shoved in the noses of uppity Christians.

- You supported Obamacare because it felt virtuous, and all the democrat socialists of Scandinavia were doing it, and you didn't want to side with Paul Ryan pushing a wheelchaired grandmother off a cliff (in reality, it's more likely a wheelchaired grandmother pushing Paul Ryan off a cliff).

- You supported open borders and sanctuary cities to entrench a permanent Democrat voting base.

You supported drug legalization on the farce that you cared about boosting tax revenues when in reality you just wanted to enjoy your daily edible because apparently your life in the first world, middle-upper class, most privileged society in recorded history is just too unbearable without cannabis to ease your omnipotent suffering.

- You supported "green energy," not because you really believed the end-is-nigh sidewalk prophets outside the Davos fleshpots but because it was trendy and hip and got you accolades at your neighborhood's fair trade coffee shop.

- You supported the draconian COVID mask mandates and travel restrictions because Science Is Real©, and the only opposition came from flyover state knuckledraggers who think the earth is flat.

- You supported the movement to defund the police, not because of any evidence whatsoever of systemic racism in policing, but because your life is a spiritual sewer and, to fill the void, you need a cause to cling to.

- You supported every act of violence, censorship, social coercion, government repression, and outright insurrection so long as it was seen as beneficial to advancing your agenda and, more importantly, as long as it never affected you personally.

--snip--

You are who Lenin accurately referred to as "useful idiots." But I'm not so sure that you still support what democracy "looks like," now that it "looks like" it has reached your front yard.

All those things they’ve supported have come back to haunt them, like “Frankenstein's monster always comes home to his castle” to destroy its creator. They are being plagued by the very things they supported as a means of “saving Democracy”. Some are coming to realize the very things they supported are now coming for them...and will destroy them, too. Others are still clueless...and will be destroyed by the monster they helped create, too.

Read The Whole Thing.

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OK, I have to wonder why people think that Republicans backing the Republican nominee is such a big thing?

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This is yet another reason we have to stop illegal immigration, to undo the damage Biden has done to this country with his “open borders” policy.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the roar of motorcycles is fading away, tillers are full of bikers’ cash, and where for once we’re glad Monday is coming around.