There hasn’t been much of a fall-off in boat traffic on the lake even though I have been seeing boats being pulled from the water in increasing numbers. During and after Labor Day weekend that number will increase dramatically. It will also see me out on the lake a lot more often now that the less well behaved summerfolk - aka “Cap’n Boneheads” - will be gone for the most part. It will be ‘our’ lake again.
Our town beach dialed back its operations last weekend, primarily because the lifeguard staff had to get back to high school or college. People are still using the beach, but doing so at their own risk. Labor Day weekend will see the beach close for the season and some much needed demolition and construction start as the town beach bathhouse, a badly deteriorated relic from the early 60’s, is being replaced. That pretty much puts the wraps on the summer season for us. It also means we’ll start getting ready for foliage season, the reappearance of Pumpkin Spice everything, and the invasion by leaf peepers that will start arriving near the end of September.
Oh, joy…
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I have noticed this, just as Glenn Reynolds has and have seen more than a few real life examples.
People Without Meaningful Lives Seek Power Over Others.
One student shared that he would prefer to live in 1700, if he had more money than others and power over them. My first reaction was amusement; I thought the student was practicing his deadpan humor skills. He wasn’t. For him, having power was an attribute of a meaningful life.Some of those include people seeking revenge from past wrongs, in some cases dating back to their childhoods. They want to make sure it never happens to them again and, at some level, to get some revenge against those that wronged them. How better to do that than to obtain power?
If only my student’s mindset were an aberration.
During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition.” That is why “war and high office are so popular,” Pascal argued.
Pascal argues individuals seek to be “diverted from thinking of what they are.” I would argue a better choice of words is what they have made of themselves.
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From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this gem:
Massachusetts advising residents to stay indoors and imposing a 6 p.m. curfew until October because of mosquitoes.
Why?
Because of a single human case of Eastern Equine Encephalitis – EEE – which is spread by mosquitoes.
A curfew? Really? That seems like an over-the-top response for something that could be just as easily prevented by judicious use of one of the many mosquito repellents containing DEET which are available in just about in every store.
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When discussing the mRNA COVID vaccines, we need to be careful about dividing people into the two broad groups of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
The truth is that many vaccinated people didn’t want to be injected and now deeply regret it.Consider me one of those. At least I only got the first couple of injections and after an adverse reaction to the second shot my physician strongly suggested I receive no more. I followed his suggestion. I regret I ever got even one shot.
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Bird Dog over at Maggie’s Farm writes about outdoor showers, something we had at the Official Weekend Pundit Long Island Sound Beach House for decades, even after the WP Parents remodeled/renovated it in the mid-1990’s. It came in handy during summer because it let us wash off the sand, salt, and sun tan lotion once we walked back from the beach. All of the homes in that neighborhood had them. Friends I visited regularly out on Martha’s Vineyard also had one for the same reason.
We used it even if we were taking a regular shower as it was nice being able to shower outdoors. If thought I could get away with it I would build an outdoor shower stall here at The Gulch. I was going to build one on the new house I’d planned to build – The Redoubt – until materials cost doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled which made the new house unaffordable to build. (I was pretty much locked out of building once costs doubled. The tripling and subsequent quadrupling of materials costs merely added insult to injury.)
I do agree with Bird Dog on his observation about using an outdoor shower: It just feels amazing.
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This should surprise no one as we know the “swamp dwellers” say it doesn’t matter who gets elected in November as it is they who run the show and that they’ll do what they want no matter what. These are the same nation-destroying bureaucrats – the so-called Deep State – that will bring this nation to its knees and they will delight at its destruction...as long as they can remain in power.
This alone should be a major motivation for Trump to start dismantling the administrative state and to do so with a chainsaw. He should follow Argentina’s President Milei and clean house, firing the overwhelming number of needless federal government bureaucrats and paper-pushers whose only purpose in life seems to be to perpetuate and expand their various agencies, departments, and bureaus while at the same time intruding deeper into people’s lives for no other reason than they can and that it fulfill their need to have power over others.
It could also save us a trillion dollars a year or so. Goodness knows we need to stop wasting money we don’t have on things we don’t need or want. Getting rid of a good-sized portion of our federal government bureaucracy which contributes nothing to our nation or its economy would be a good start.
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Okay, I haven’t quite figured how this would possibly work, but apparently someone who doesn’t really understand economics claiming that if gas prices fell back to what they were during the Trump Administration it would cause the economy to crash.
Of course the person making that claim is assuming that Trump would just command the price of gas to go down rather than ridding the energy industry of the burden laid upon it during the first few days of the Biden Administration as well as the follow-on rules, regulations, and restrictions imposed upon the industry. Lower energy prices aren’t likely to cause a crash, particularly if the prices go down gradually, unlike what we saw during the Biden Administration which saw the rising energy prices trigger inflation across the entire economy.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summer is winding down, the summer businesses are doing likewise, and where Labor Day weekend is only a week away.