8/11/2024

Thoughts On A Sunday

The humidity that has been hanging over New England over the past week has finally departed, with some of that ‘departure’ taking place as heavy rain. There was some flooding here and there in Vermont and parts of northern New Hampshire over Friday and into early Saturday. By Saturday afternoon the air was drier and the A/C was shut off, at least here at The Gulch. It’s going to be nice over the most of the week, something all of us will appreciate.

We’re coming to the last few weeks of summer and it seems folks are trying to squeeze in as much vacationing as they can before the kids return to school. Our town beach closes at the end of the day on Labor Day, though there won’t be lifeguards on duty past the 25th of the month. Some of the summer businesses will remain open until the end of September and others until Columbus Day, being open only on weekends until then.

Of course by then we’ll be at the beginning of leaf-peeping season and we’ll be dealing with a different tourist demographic…

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This perfectly explains our younger generation’s lack of understanding about how communism actually works.

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Hmm, it seems the British Crown Prosecutor has decided has warned that he might extradite Americans who have the audacity to express their disdain for the UK’s shift to a totalitarian state.

Yeah, like that’s going to work...unless the Biden Administration will hand over Americans who disturbed their sensibilities by pointing out how the UK is becoming to resemble the dystopian hell described in Orwell’s 1984.

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Was a photo showing a crowd waiting for Kamala Harris in Detroit as she stepped off of Air Force Two faked? Snopes is ‘unsure’ whether or not the photo is real or had been manipulated to add people that weren’t actually there.

Some people zoomed way in on the camera phones the crowd were holding. But the thing that got me was the absence of any reflection of the crowd on Air Force Two.

--snip--

How did Harris and Tim Walz even make it through that huge crowd that isn't reflected anywhere on the plane? We certainly hope Snopes doesn't give up trying to find a source for this photo and let us know for sure it's real.

One has to wonder why, if this photo was faked, someone thought it was necessary to do so. Did they think they had to make Kamala seem more popular than she really is, particularly at the airport in Detroit?

I think I can safely state that I won’t be wasting any more of my time on this matter. I have other things more important to ponder, great and small.

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To give you an idea just how odious the Harris-Walz ticket is we must ponder Tim Walz’ lack of understanding of the First Amendment, something he showed when he said “There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

The Supreme Court has held that labeling speech as hateful does not render it unsayable. Indeed, the First Amendment is specifically designed to protect speech in the event that government authorities attempt to suppress it on such grounds. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his opinion on behalf of a unanimous Court in the 2017 case of Matal v. Tam: "Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'"

Walz is hardly the first political figure to make this mistake; high-level government and media actors who ought to know better frequently suggest that bad, wrong, and hateful speech is illegal. But his invocation of the dreaded specter of misinformation is especially concerning, given the current moral panic around the concept.

The Left seems to think the First Amendment only protects speech they approve of, period. However, the Founders and the Supreme Court thought differently and it pisses off the Left.

One of the arguments the Left uses is that the First Amendment does give anyone the right to yell “Fire!” in a theater. However, it does, particularly if the theater is on fire whether the Left thinks it’s on fire or not.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is even better than it has been, summer is passing by far too quickly, and Monday is coming back again far too soon.