One thing I and others have noticed over the past couple of weeks is the number of acorns the oaks have been dropping, something that is happening weeks earlier than usual. A wet spring and early summer might have something to do with it, but I don’t recall acorns falling this early.
I am also going to bring up traffic...again. I had the chance to talk with a couple of NH State troopers who live in my town and asked if they’ve seen the much heavier traffic and they both said they have. It now starts early Friday afternoon and has since mid-June. Even this Friday saw very heavy bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main highways starting around noon. It’s insane.
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Some criticism has been leveled at Trump after he fired Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer after allegations she purposely provided a July jobs report that had been altered to show less new jobs than were actually created.
There might be something to this as during the Biden administration reports of the number of jobs created was over 1.5 million jobs too high. A million and a half jobs supposedly created during the Biden years never existed.
Regardless of the allegations that [McEntarfer] deliberately tried to weaken the latest jobs report to make Trump look bad, anyone who’s been paying attention to the jobs numbers over the past few years understands that numbers were reported high, then quietly revised downward. Something shady has been going on at the BLS. That’s what economist Steve Moore is trying to emphasize.One thing I learned from the Biden administration was to wait for the revised BLS jobs numbers a couple of months later as they reflected the reality. Not that most of the media paid much attention to the revised numbers as it wouldn’t reflect well on Biden’s policies.
The Biden administration grossly overestimated job gains, and whereas real wages consistently went down under Biden, the opposite trend is emerging under Trump, based on the data Moore shared.
It is also worth keeping in mind that, as of the start of 2024, the touted “job gains” were going to migrants, including illegal aliens, while U.S.-born men were facing disturbingly high unemployment. While big companies, hotels, and farming conglomerates hired illegal aliens at lower wages, Americans couldn’t find any of the jobs McEntarfer and Biden boasted about.
As with the Biden era jobs reports I will wait for the revised jobs numbers which should be out in another month or two to find out if the dismal July numbers were real or the product of a Democrat/Deep State wishful thinking.
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First I thought it was just me, being a “old faht”, looking back to the nostalgic pre-Internet days with fondness. I have seen how, as wonderful as the Internet can be, it has also been problem, particularly when dealing with social issues. Surprisingly it appears a lot of Gen Z are romanticizing a pre-Internet era they never knew, seeing the same thing I and the rest of us Boomers and Gen X have noticed.
What exactly do we think we’re missing? Personally, I assume that before the social Internet people behaved in more authentic and idiosyncratic ways. Social media has sped up trend cycles, resulting in an eerie uniformity across styles and personalities: we buy the same products, wear the same clothes, act in the same way, reference the same memes—even quirkiness itself or more “unique” behavior can be ascribed to trends.One of the downsides to today’s 24/7 mass connectivity is what is called FOMO – the Fear Of Missing Out – which has people clinging to their smart phones and using them with the tenacity of a junkie looking for their next fix. If they don’t have their phone within arm’s reach they start getting antsy. If they misplace it or forget it some will melt down and act almost like they’re going through a drug withdrawal cold turkey. Maybe that analogy is appropriate because some folks have become so addicted to what it presented on the screens of their phones even though most of what they think is important isn’t even real.
I also imagine that if we weren’t on display all the time, our friendships and interactions could be less commodified. Now, spending time with friends is material to be documented and then demonstrated to a faceless audience.
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But it may be that these “negative” aspects are what young people yearning for disconnectivity actually want—we have a sense that there was a value, now largely lost, in the practical effort required for social interaction, for finding good music, or joining a subculture. Life now in comparison seems streamlined, efficient, more yassified, in a phenomenon that writer Michael Harris calls a “loss of lack”.
I will admit to a small bit of FOMO, but only because I am taking care of the WP Mom who is in her 90’s and I don’t want to be out of touch for too long in case she needs help. But I don’t spend hours and hours on my phone perusing social media. In fact, one of the apps on my phone tells me how much time I spend using my phone on a daily and weekly basis. I average 37 minutes of usage per day. That’s split between calls, texts, and Solitaire. (I have to admit that between 10 and 20 minutes a day is taken up by Solitaire.)
I remember when phones were mounted on the wall and had a long cord between the phone and the handset. I remember when dialing someone’s phone number meant actually using a dial to enter the phone number. (This was pre-Touch Tone phones.) I remember having a party line when we lived in Maine when I was a kid.
I remember when TVs were only black-and-white. Color TVs didn’t become more common until the 1960’s. TV shows quite often included the tag line “In living color!” Rabbit ear antennas were the most common. Outdoor antennas were used in the outer edge of a TV station’s coverage area. You were really lucky if you had an antenna rotor so you could pick up more than a couple of TV channels. TV stations signed off the air around midnight, usually playing the national anthem, then showing a test pattern, and eventually going off the air for a few hours.
If you wanted to send someone a letter there was no e-mail. You had to use paper and pen or pencil and write them out, fold them and put them in an envelope, address the envelope and put a stamp on it, then put it in the mailbox and raise the little red flag that let the mailman know there was an outgoing letter.
Were the old times better? Who knows? Some things were definitely simpler. I can understand why Gen Z has been looking back to those days. For lack of a better term I think of it as “Future Burnout”.
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From the Land of Oz comes this tidbit:
Great Barrier Reef in great health, but climate change is killing science institutions.
Despite record high emissions of carbon dioxide, and hottest ever temperatures, the Great Barrier Reef was again enjoying one of its best years yet. In the 40 years that AIMS has been studying it, the last four years are great results.The above isn’t saying the reef isn’t being affected by climate, but that it isn’t being affected to the extent all the ‘experts’ said it would. It isn’t just the reefs where we’re seeing predictions made by the experts falling to the wayside as Mother Nature has refused to cooperate. It’s being seen across the globe. Antarctica has thumbed its nose at the ‘experts’ predictions of declining ice thickness and shrinking ice sheets. Desertification hasn’t occurred. Instead the Earth has been getting greener as carbon dioxide levels have increased.
Judging by the data, corals are coping fine with today’s heat and CO2. But the more money we spend finding a climate crisis, the worse our science institutions get. One-sided money and monopoly science can turn any institute into a tax-grabbing-machine, that serves the Blob, not the people. Thus is it so.
Whatever are all the science institutions receiving millions and billions of dollars of funding going to do when the funding starts being rolled back because they haven’t been able to produce relatively successful climate predictions and/or climate models? Will they end up being the victims of climate change?
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Yes, Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. But Mike Rowe does, too.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly seen the liberal meltdown taking place over actress Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle. Innocent play on words or outright Nazi propaganda? If you’re overweight, over-tatted, and have an unnatural hair color, you’re probably screaming the latter.All is not as it seems.
Don’t get me wrong, the ad is annoying. While I could do without the vocal fry, the commercial is otherwise good marketing; it features Sweeney, who is recognizable and gorgeous, and utilizes a fun play on words to sell jeans. It’s really that simple.
…Or is it?
Mike Rowe seems to think something more sinister is going on at American Eagle and he took to social media to discuss the blatant propaganda. The shocking part? Rowe revealed he is also a denim-wearing Nazi. Oh, heil naw.
Jean TherapyGood jeans indeed.
Long before the Nazis at American Eagle began promoting The Master Race in a series of commercials celebrating “good genes,” (with a little help from a hot model wearing some “good jeans,”) I was doing the same thing for another famous denim provider hoping to capture the attention of millions of white people. I refer, of course, to the bigots over at Lee Jeans, who asked me to help them raise some money for The American Cancer Society.
Specifically, as the official “Celebrity Ambassador of Denim Day 2011” I was asked to announce a very promising breakthrough in “gene” therapy, and then, urge Americans to forego the purchase of another pair of “jeans” they probably didn’t need, and instead, donate the cost of those jeans to The American Cancer Society. I said sure, but only if I could do so in a way that would please Adolf Hitler.
“No problem!” they said. “Go for it!”
So I called my mother, an avowed white supremacist and breast cancer survivor who taught me all I know about eugenics. We filmed the PSA later that week, and the bigots at Lee Jeans put it on the air fourteen years ago. In it, you’ll notice I’m not wearing any pants, and flaunting my genes in a way that would have made The Fuhrer proud. In other words, you’ll see me doing the same thing that MSNBC, The New York Times, and countless scolds across the Internet have accused Sydney Sweeney of doing. Accusations that, it must be noted, have led to an unprecedented level of free publicity that’s turned American Eagle into the latest Wall Street darling.
Perhaps, had the mainstream media been this diligent in 2011, those bigots over at Lee Jeans would have raised enough money to cure breast cancer once and for all.
Maybe next time.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the hot and humid weather has returned, the traffic is still heavy, and where Monday is coming back to screw up yet another weekend.