At least I don’t have to worry about having to go anywhere today so there’s no rush to get things done. Church services were canceled (though our church is still holding online services) as the town and state highway crews are still out plowing.
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If you want to see a perfect example of “Get woke. Go broke,” all one has to do is look at the debacle of how Anheuser-Busch took one of their most popular brands – Bud Light – and destroyed it by going woke and in-your-face by using the most inappropriate spokesperson they could find - Dylan Mulvaney – a transgender woman who helped turn off a lot of Bud Light drinkers.
Bud Light is still trying to make up with the customer base it alienated on April 1, 2023. On that day, a brand that had been the top-selling beer in America for over two decades launched a social media campaign that would rock its customers, and not in a good way. Starring a transgender activist, Dylan Mulvaney, it celebrated Mulvaney’s first year of “girlhood.” Bud Light even sent Mulvaney a personalized can to mark this milestone date in Mulvaney’s transition from biological male to transgender woman, which millions had already followed on Instagram and TikTok.Why anyone at A-B or InBev thought this was a good idea baffles me. It’s as if they ignored the demographics of their customers and were aiming to gain customers in another demographic that was a fraction of the size of their existing one. Anyone with even a inkling of marketing knowledge would know that is a suicidal move. Did they think the move would merely add that ‘woke’ demographic to their customer base without offending their existing customer base?
This was not an April Fools’ Day prank as some believed, but a serious effort by the world’s largest beer company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, to “rebrand” its product.
For Bud Light, the consequences were no laughing matter. Consumers immediately recoiled and targeted the beer with one of the largest boycotts in recent history. Bud Light sales declined 11 percent that week compared to the previous year. By April 15, 2023, sales were down 21 percent. In the ensuing months, the company shed billions of dollars of shareholder value, laid off hundreds of employees across the Anheuser-Busch ecosystem, damaged its reputation, and plunked itself in the middle of a highly contentious political issue. Almost every Anheuser-Busch stakeholder—wholesalers, employees, customers, and shareholders—lost trust in the company.
I guess so...and they learned the “Get woke. Go Broke,” lesson the hard way.
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I have to admit I like this take on DOGE.
DOGE has forced democrats into the position of defending waste, fraud and abuse.Looking at just where taxpayers dollars are going via USAID has been eye-opening. Yes, much of the funds for USAID are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. But way too much is going to people and organizations and businesses that have absolutely nothing to do with USAID’s purpose, including some that feed funds to terrorist organizations. How can Democrats justify this?
It’s even worse with with the entrenched departments, bureaus, and agencies where the graft, payoffs, and “no show” jobs eat up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, if not a trillion or more. Maybe if DOGE had been grafted onto the Inspector General’s office which would have possibly given it subpoena power.
Our federal government is fat, is wasting tax money on things no one but the bureaucrats, lobbyists, and grifters want or need. It’s time to clean house. And if you think we should leave it to Congress all that means is that nothing will get done, it will cost a couple of hundred billion dollars to get nothing done, and nothing will change...other than to get worse.
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To anyone that has been paying attention this is no surprise. To those with a green scam...er...agenda to ram down people’s throats it is anathema.
New study Points To Hunga Tonga Eruption As Cause Of Global Temperature Spike.
In January 2022, a massive underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga suddenly erupted and shot so much water into the upper atmosphere that levels in the stratosphere rose suddenly by at least 10%. It was a genuine one in 100, even 200 year event and was reasonably expected to produce temporary weather changes around the globe. Sure enough, subsequent temperatures showed a 0.3-0.4°C upward spike. Needless to say, the Net Zero fanatics claimed the rise as their own and blamed it on humans controlling the climate by increasing the trace gas carbon dioxide. Today the Daily Sceptic can give wider publicity to sensational recent findings that suggest Hunga Tonga was the main culprit in producing the recent spike. The scientists directly link a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere of between 0.5-2°C to Hunga Tonga. It is generally held that there is an anti-correlation between the lower and upper atmosphere and cooling at the top produces warming at the bottom due to a number of complex atmospheric processes.I found it interesting that a volcanic eruption that put 160 million tons of water into the atmosphere, thereby increasing the water vapor content of the atmosphere by up to 13% (depending upon which figures with which you agree), was minimized by the climate change cultists as “insignificant” and having little if any effect on global temperatures and precipitation.
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This is dramatic stuff. It appears to promote Hunga Tonga as the prime cause in explaining the recent spike in temperatures. Indeed it could be concluded that the temperature rise should have been a little higher – and higher even still if the effects of a recent strong El Niño natural oscillation are included. Satellite observations, confirmed by computer analysis, shows stratospheric cooling of 0.5°C to 1°C in the middle and upper stratosphere during 2022 through middle 2023, followed by stronger reductions of 1°C to 2°C in the mesosphere after the middle of 2023, note the scientists. Last year, two distinguished atmospheric scientists observed the anti-correlation between the higher and lower atmosphere and suggested the lower stratosphere cooled by approximately two degrees per degree of warming nearer the surface. Where the troposphere has been anomalously warming, the lower stratosphere has been anomalously cooling “and vice versa”, note the scientists.
It has also been devoutly ignored by the media since it doesn’t fit The Narrative and therefore must be wrong.
And so it goes.
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As an aside I have been looking into the failure of my laptop to boot, wondering if it had been seen by others after the latest software update. I have found a couple that reported a similar problem and it turns out they were using similar hardware to mine, so I have to wonder if it is some kind of hardware incompatibility. I wouldn’t think that would be the case considering I have been using the laptop for years and I have seen no such incompatibilities before.
So it looks like I will need to reload the OS to see if I can regain function, something I will deal with next weekend.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re still cleaning up the snow, the skiers and snowmobilers are making the best of the new snow, and where Monday is returning yet again.