Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a relatively quiet weekend here at the lake. It’s been mostly chores, a little shopping (beyond my weekly Sunday morning trip to Walmart), and some time out on the lake.

It’s hard to believe the first day of fall is only a few days away. It feels like summer started only a couple of weeks ago, yet the kids are back in school. This has certainly been one screwy year so far, with timelines skewed in such a way that time is passing by quickly and slowly at the same time – summer went by in an eye blink yet SloJo’s first eight months in office feel like eight years.

One good thing about the end of summer is that it’s become a lot quieter around here. There’s not quite as much traffic, we have easier access to our favorite eateries, and checkout lines at the supermarkets aren’t nearly as long. Yes, some of these things are small, trivial things, but they add up to a quieter, calmer climate around the lake. It will let us ‘rest up’ until next summer and the return of the summerfolk.

I do have to admit that we do look forward to the return of summer and the summerfolk. But when the summerfolk return, we look forward to their departure...and when they finally leave we look forward to their return. It’s contradictory, but that’s just the way it is.

==+==

I can get behind this: Let’s make Orwell fiction again!

==+==

This is something else I can also get behind.

Women now account for nearly half of all new gun owners.

More women should own, learn to shoot, and carry a firearm. It certainly ‘levels the playing field’ when it comes to crimes against women. Not that many of them would ever need to fire their weapon to protect themselves. Most often showing they are armed is enough for the smarter miscreants to decide to seek victims elsewhere. But if it comes to that, being armed is much better than being unarmed.

Katy is a gun owner, something I wholeheartedly support. She has a CCW permit (something she doesn’t need up here). She practices now and then. But she’s not nearly as good a shot as I am. (This is one of the few things she doesn’t do better than I can. A couple of the others are pilot an aircraft and pilot a boat. Of these three things, I know she can – and will - get better at the first and the third. She hasn’t expressed any interest in the second. Will she become better than me at shooting and driving a boat? Maybe...but I do have decades more experience and that counts for something, right?)

==+==

Skip Murphy reminds us it is the so-called “Party Of The People” (the Democrats) who are the racists in our nation and have been for two centuries, being obsessed with the color of people’s skin.

It seems their definition of untermenschen has shifted, with the new one being people with white skin as it seems only white people can be racists. (Yes, it is paradoxical. Don’t try to apply logic to this because there is none involved, just feelz and prevarication.)

==+==

I admit to stealing this word-for-word from today’s Day By Day cartoon.

I normally don’t do that, but being a big fan of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone I knew I had to do so this one time.

In Rod Serling’s voice:

“Imagine if you will a malevolent cabal where cruelty is compassion, depopulation is destiny, killing a kindness, and words are weapons.”

“A place where if masks work, why stay six feet apart?”

“If six feet apart, why the masks?”

“If they both work, why the lockdowns?”

“If more people die from the vaccines than the virus, why use the vaccines?”

“If people took vaccines to keep other people safe, why are they now very sick ‘superspreaders’?”

“In this dark utopia of government ‘care’, the elderly are targeted, cures denied, doctors & nurses silenced by threat of job loss.”

“A place where logic is criminal, reason a crime, and hysteria a virtue. This...is The Covid Zone.”

What’s scary is that while Chris Muir is pointing out the absurdity of the feddle gummint’s response to Covid-19, and the more recent nastiness coming from The Swamp, he is also pointing out reality.

How does Washington respond to yet another wave of Covid, one of a weaker variant than the previous waves? By doing the same things everybody knows don’t work and they expect everyone to toe the line and do what they say. That there’s pushback at the local and state level tells us people have had enough and that they do not trust feddle gummint edicts or listen to the politically driven ‘science’ being sold as real science, even with increasing evidence the government’s ‘science’ is not based upon facts.

And so it goes.

==+==

Ann Althouse asks the question “What if they gave a riot and nobody came?”

It appears all the hoopla about the preparations made around the Capitol to qwell rioting by “MAGA hat wearing, Socialism denying, “F**k Joe Biden!” chanting, mask and lockdown hating, Second Amendment loving, hard working Deplorables” far outweighed the number of the protesters who actually showed up. With so few protesters – somewhere around 400 or so – it made it impossible for the antifa/FBI/ATF instigators to goad the protesters into taking actions so they could be arrested and charged. It could be there were more instigators in attendance than actual protesters.

==+==

It seems the the “F**k Joe Biden” chant phenomenon is spreading, with the chant being heard at more college football games and other large public gatherings.

I never heard about anything similar when Trump was in office except at Democrat Party gatherings and rallies. If there had been, you know the DNC-MSM, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook would have reported on “F**k Trump” chants ad nauseum when he was in office.

It only took 8 months for Biden to go from being the supposed ‘Savior of America’ who would undo “all the damage done by Trump” to ‘Joetato’ and ‘SloJo’. His popularity has tanked faster than his mental faculties have deteriorated.

“Undoing all the damage” hasn’t endeared Biden to anyone considering undoing the damage has made things far worse by damaging the economy, igniting inflation by printing money like there’s no tomorrow, seen a humiliating and poorly planned withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan while abandoning American citizens and our allies, purging the military of personnel who believe in America and the Constitution so only Progressives remain within the command structure and in the military academies, an erosion of Constitutional rights, and an ever lengthening list of things that makes American society what it is.

Is it any wonder no one likes Biden (or Harris), even an increasing number of Democrats? They see them for what they are – looters and wreckers. (Ayn Rand described Progressives as we know them as ‘looters’ in Atlas Shrugged.

If nothing else this means the mid-term elections in 2022 are going to be interesting.

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is great, the lake has been quiet, and where I wish I could put Monday off for one more day.

I Hate My Cable Company

It’s official.

I hate my cable company.

It’s not news that a lot of people have a dislike of their cable provider ranging from a mild disdain to a burning hatred. I didn’t come to hate my cable company until a few months ago and I have a darned good reason for it: a lack of customer service.

My cable provider used to be pretty good. I could call them with any question, any problem, and I could usually get an answer or get the problem resolved. Then, the cable company was acquired by another cable provider.

At first, there was no apparent change other than a different logo on the cable bill and on the the cable company’s trucks. And then things started changing. Customer service wasn’t quite as responsive as they had been in the past. The same was true of technical support. More automation, meaning automated phone systems and an expanded website to handle customer requests, payments, service changes, and technical support.

Then Covid hit.

Today, you’ll find if you have a problem or a request that isn’t related to paying your bill or changing your service, you won’t be speaking to a human being. You can’t speak to a human being because there’s no way to connect to one. If you try to speak to one of the ‘payment’ or ‘change of service’ customer reps, you’re told they can’t help with any problems as they have no access to the systems that can provide any of the other services.

I have two problems I have been trying to resolve for seven months and I am no closer to getting them taken care than I was back in late February. One is a technical problem that is not a showstopper, but is annoying. The other is a big problem – my e-mail.

An increasing percentage of my incoming e-mail is bouncing as mail daemons (e-mail server programs) keep kicking the e-mails as they see my e-mail address domain as invalid. At this point I figure over half of the e-mails inbound to me are being rejected and the percentage is increasing. All I want to do is change my e-mail to the new cable provider’s domain. (I have a ‘permanent’ e-mail address with my own domain that forwards to my ‘real’ e-mail address, one I’ve used for many years. I did check to make sure it wasn’t the server forwarding my e-mail causing the issue.) I know I am not the only one having this problem as I have spoken to a couple of people I know that have been having the same thing happening to them.

Do you think I could get anyone in customer service to make the change for me? Nope. Not one. If I was a new customer it wouldn’t be a problem. But I am an existing customer and that somehow changes things. I can’t even add a new e-mail account because I can’t seem to talk to a human being. Their support website couldn’t handle it either.

My other problem dealt with the cable modem/router/wireless access point.

The wireless is active but I don’t want it to be. I want to shut it off for a couple reasons: 1) I cannot link to the wireless access point because the SSID doesn’t match the one listed on the cable modem nor does the password work, and 2) I have two perfectly good wireless routers that cover both floors of The Gulch while the cable modem’s wireless access point does not. It’s just eating up spectrum better used by the other wireless routers.

But like the wireless access point, the cable modem password doesn’t work because it doesn’t appear to have one. It is supposedly on the bottom of the cable modem, but unless the password is either ‘Made in Taiwan’ or ‘Property of [my cable company]’, the password is missing. Just for grins I did try the wireless password as the admin password and it didn’t work.

I had as much luck reaching tech support as I did a customer service rep. Calling the phone number listed merely pointed me to the cable company’s website which contained absolutely no helpful information to solve the problem I was experiencing. I needed to speak to someone in tech support who could access the cable modem from the “other” side and at least shut off the wireless access point. The best outcome would being able to reset (or read) the admin password so I could access the cable modem directly. But it appears no one human is available to deal with tech support requests not covered by the website.

So until I can talk to a human being at my cable company that can actually help I am stuck in limbo.

The bill gets paid every month but the amount of customer service has declined to almost zero.

That’s why I hate my cable company.

Tax 'Em Until They Leave...And Take Their Money With Them

It seems the Progressive Powers That Be are going to prove Einstein right yet again – “Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result this time.”

Their latest insanity? Four Blue states (California, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York) could see a total tax burden on the wealthy rise to ~60%, between city, state, and federal taxes. Do socialists in Congress honestly believe those same wealthy will take it lying down? It’s obvious they do.

For one thing, successful residents can simply move to another state. It is only the combination of high federal income taxes and high state-level income taxes that leads to these combined rates of nearly 60 percent. Yet some states, such as New Hampshire and Florida, have no income tax at all.

We’ve already seen an exodus of wealth, people, and major businesses from states like California, and that trend will only accelerate if taxes are sent even higher by this new plan. It’s only logical: states that heavily tax something are discouraging it, while states that don’t tax it at all are welcoming it. Why would anyone want to discourage income-earning?

Punitive taxation has ramifications for more than just the high-earning individuals and families directly impacted by higher tax rates. If they leave the state, they take with them jobs, investment funds, and spending that would otherwise go back into their communities.

It’s true that not all high-earners will flee states with these punitively high taxes. Some, for a variety of reasons, will stay. But even for these individuals, the high tax rates will backfire, because they’ll create perverse incentives and discourage economic activity above a certain level.

The wealthy didn’t get that way be being passive or stupid. Once they see how much of their money they’ll be shelling out because the Dems have better use for it than the people who earned it. Of course that “better use” usually has nothing to do with making things better...except for themselves.

So many of our “Spend money like there’s no tomorrow” Democrats don’t seem to understand heavy taxation tends to drive away the folks with the money. If they do that then they won’t have as many rich people to tax to death. It’s a vicious cycle, one that is too often ignored. These are the same “tax and spend” folks with no understanding of the Laffer Curve. They don’t comprehend that they’re on the backside of the curve where increasing the tax rates further decreases the revenues collected.

Only time is going to tell if they will learn the lesson this time around.

If history is any indicator, they probably won’t.

Nine Steps

I am once again pointing to a Tom MacDonald video, but in this case part of the lyrics in one of his latest songs, Brainwashed. It it he lists the 9 steps* needed to destroy this nation, or any other nation the Fascists/Progressives/Socialists want to subjugate and rule. Take a look and you tell me if these 9 things listed below are not exactly what has been happening here:

Step 1: Train the people only to consume.

Step 2: Infiltrate the adults with the news.

Step 3: Indoctrinate the children through the schools and the music and the apps on the phones that they use.

Step 4: Separate the Right from the Left.

Step 5: Separate the White from the Black.

Step 6: Separate the Rich from the Poor. Use religion and equality to separate them more.

Step 7: Fabricate a problem made a lie.

Step 8: Put it on the news every night.

Step 9: When people start to fight and divide, take control. This is called Situational Design.

All of these sound familiar to me. It’s something we’ve been living through for some time, but sometimes others have to point it out for us to realize that’s what we’re experiencing. The endgame is not inevitable, particularly if we realize what’s happening. If we stop letting them divide us, particularly over matters that, in the end, are not as big as they’ve been making them seem.

As Tom also says, they’re afraid “if we get along we’ll probably go against them.” There’s no ‘probably’ about it. None.

*Anyone having taken a Poli Sci course should recognize these. As I recall there was also a Soviet zampolit who described the steps required to overthrow a nation back in the late 70's/early 80's. Tom has merely updated them to reflect today's realities (and technologies).

Legal Sports Betting Paying Off

I find it interesting that even while a lot of folks have abandoning watching professional ‘woke’ sports, sports betting has been doing very well, particularly in my home state.

The local TV news reported legal sports betting in New Hampshire has been profitable, both for the state (which gets a percentage from every bet) and the sports book operator – Draft Kings.

Is this how professional sports will survive going forward? Will fans become less important as legal sports betting keeps expanding? I don’t know for sure, but I think the sports teams get some remuneration from the betting as well, something that can help make up for the drop in viewership and any ticket sales.

Why is it that this all sounds so familiar?

Ah, I have it! It’s part of the plot line from the movie The Last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans. In the movie pro football was a dying sport and the only way to save it was by legalizing sports betting which was going to be pushed by lobbyists in Washington. One of the teams had even bought off a US Senator to help with their efforts.

Is this what is happening in real life, with life imitating Hollywood? More states are legalizing sports betting. Could pro sports be behind this push as a means of generating more income? Am I being too cynical...or is my cynicism well deserved?

Last Days Of Summer

I mentioned the end of summer in part of yesterday’s post (the Last Rosé of Summer), something some folks think is defined by Labor Day weekend but to those of us here at the Big Lake takes place a few weeks later. There’s this song by Don Henley that paints a pretty good picture of what the end of summer means:


While not every summer business is closed yet, those that are still open are open only on weekends. Some will finally close by the end of September and the rest will celebrate their ‘last summer’ day on Columbus Day.

The traffic has fallen off quite a bit, even on this weekend. The beaches are empty during the week (though still open). The number of boats out on the lake are not what we’ve been seeing, meaning it’s mostly we locals plying the waters. Boats are already being pulled from the water and prepped for winter storage, with most of them belonging to summerfolk. Summer cottages and camps are being closed up. In a few more weeks our restaurants and pubs will see few folks ‘from away’ and it will be mostly we locals at the tables and counters. (We tend to shy away from our favorite eateries during the summer, letting the summerfolk spend their money and fill the coffers of those eateries. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.)

We’ll start to see the Leaf Peepers arrive towards the end of the month, the folks from away (in some cases from overseas) coming to enjoy the fall foliage. There won’t be the number of those folks here that we see during summer, a small blessing.

The leaves start changing here around the last week of September/first week of October at the earliest, but folks will be staying here and traveling up to the North Woods and North Country to view the fall colors until they appear here. (It’s one reason the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout doesn’t get pulled out of the water until after Columbus Day – the fall colors seen from the lake can look spectacular.)

Regardless, my summer really doesn’t end until my boat is out of the water.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a quiet, somber day yesterday. I know I wasn’t up for doing much, considering the day. I went for a drive, stopped by the local farm stand and then visiting one of the many lakeside parks to sit for a while. I had watched some of the 9/11 TV programming yesterday morning, but could only deal with it for so long. I had to get away from it all, hence my drive around town.

I talked to a few people while I was out and some of them were out and about for the same reason I was: Too many memories of That Awful Day.

When I got back to The Gulch I decided I didn’t want to turn on the TV. I did anything but that – clean up the garage, run some loads of laundry, and so on.

Katy did pretty much the same thing, getting out of the house and as far way from any of the 9/11 remembrances. She didn’t want to relive That Awful Day, either.

As she told me Friday night “They started doing news broadcasts this week because so many [local] people either lost their lives or went to help. Couldn’t help but tear up again and again. It greatly affected my life, with young kids. So I keep my ‘distance’. It sounds like you are, too.”

It is an understatement saying the 9/11 has had a profound effect on me and Katy. Even after 20 years it still affects me. That Katy and I barely spoke to each other yesterday tells me that it is something that dwells deep inside of us. I know that whenever I see a movie or TV showing scenes of New York City where the Twin Towers are still standing I get a lump in my throat. That’s after 20 years. I have no doubt there are plenty of others out there that get the same feeling.

==+==

I wrote about the heavy acorn fall we’ve been experiencing while totally ignoring the sound of the crickets and katydids we’ve been enjoying nightly since the beginning of August.

The chorus of crickets chirping on these late summer evenings is one of the finest things in life, and last night they were loud. That evening bug-song has followed me through most of my life, and fills me with joy.

Field Crickets are found across the US. In New England, we have the Black Field Cricket who is at his prime in early October until the first hard frost. They are mainly nocturnal insects and eat almost anything.

Around here, we still have the Katydids singing at night along with the rapidly-growing Field Crickets.

It’s nice falling asleep to the sounds of the crickets, something that lulls me to sleep every time I can leave my bedroom windows open. It’s always a little sad later in the fall on those nights when I hear only a solo cricket chirping away and no others answering. Later in the fall when the crickets are all gone, I know the last vestiges of summer are gone with them.

==+==

By way of Maggie’s Farm comes this Spiked post about wokeness’s “New Puritanism”, applying ‘woke’ standards against classical literature, including children’s literature. In this case the failure of Asterix and Tintin comics to pass the woke purity test. Wokeness has become a cult, a puritanical cult.

New political ideologies often veer towards extremes as adherents try to prove to each other who is the most devout. Woke believers, in particular, are caught in an intoxicating and competitive purity spiral, making them more belligerent and intolerant with every passing day.

An alarming story from Canada has recently emerged, showing that followers of this 21st-century cult have turned their attention to burning books. Two years ago, in south-western Ontario, the Conseil scolaire catholique Providence (Providence Catholic School Board), which brings together 30 schools, carried out a purge of its institutional libraries, removing and destroying nearly 5,000 books, 30 of which were burned in a ceremony. These books included Asterix and Tintin titles, because of their allegedly racist depictions of indigenous American people. (Emphasis mine – ed.)

--snip--

The burning and destruction of books in the name of ideological purification and puritanical dogma has, of course, gruesome echoes of Nazi Germany. It at least belongs to the nightmarish science-fiction of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. That this is happening in modern-day Canada is a reminder that wokery is indeed a sinister, puritanical cult. And like classical Puritanism, it is a cult that demands total obedience in the name of righteousness.

I figure it’s only a matter of time before this kind of insanity arrives here. We’ve already seen cult-like activity by the woke on college campuses in the way of physical assaults against the “unwoke”. Burning books would be the next step. And should it go far enough, it won’t be a long trip to burning people, just like what happened in Germany from circa 1939 to 1945.

The Nazis were a puritanical political cult who killed millions as a means of ‘purifying’ the Reich. (Yes, I am equating the woke to the Nazis. After all, both groups are fascists, whether the wokerati will admit it or not.)

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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I do link posts by Glenn Reynolds on a semi-regular basis. This one is poignant as it addresses the lessons we have learned over the 20 years after 9/11. What are some of the lessons we’ve learned?

1) That our enemies have taken our measure, and we never took theirs. Bin Laden’s strategic predictions vis a vis Afghanistan and the United States have been vindicated: 9/11 was for the other side a massive, generational strategic success.

2) That the entire American governing apparatus is incapable of real strategic thought.

3) That the federal government of the United States is much more inventive, determined, and relentless in curbing its own citizenry than it is in curbing those who would slaughter that citizenry.

4) That the federal government of the United States will allow foreign-power interests — specifically Saudi and Pakistani — to override and eclipse the just interests of the American citizenry.

5) The preceding item exists, of course, because we are ruled by an elite with much stronger social ties to other elites than to the people of our republic.

6) That our generational response to 9/11 guarantees that 9/11 will happen again and again.

--snip--

What did we learn?

Twenty years later, we learn that the enemy won — and our ruling class was on their side.

There’s quite a bit more at the link and I suggest you Read The Whole Thing.

To provide an example of point #6 above there’s this from a Teen Vogue columnist which proves just how effin’ clueless some of our younger generation are when it comes to the realities of life.

“We have to be more honest,” Jackson wrote, “about what 9/11 was and what it wasn’t. It was an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity. It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect.”

I’m sure if Jenn M. Jackson had an opportunity to interview the late 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta about why he and his fellow hijackers attacked the US that he would spout the woke bulls**t she claims as the cause of the attacks.

Yeah. Right.

To quote the great philosopher, Bugs Bunny: “What a maroon! What an ignoranimus!”

==+==

Bird Dog over at Maggie’s Farm talks about the Last Rosé of Summer for sunset boat drinks.

I know Katy would certainly enjoy such a thing...though it might take place in October after Columbus Day when it is time to pull the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water, something that will be the perfect way to close out the boating season and tie the ribbons on a great summer.

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the madding crowds have thinned, the lake is ours again, and where the summer weather is hanging around.

The Unsung Heroes Of 9/11

There have been numerous stories about the heroes of 9/11, the actions of countless firefighters, police officers, passengers on United 93, workers in the doomed towers, and countless others.

One story I came across last year was something I’d heard about but some time ago but had never seen the story, at least not as told by the people whose story it is. Last year I came across a documentary which covered that ambitious impromptu operation and the people involved – The 9/11 Boatlift.

Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?

Twenty years.

Twenty. Years.

It was twenty years ago That Awful Day happened.

It was a day of terror. It was a day of tears. It was a day of Heroes and heroic deeds by firefighters, police officers, and ordinary men and women.

It was a day of thunder, of smoke, of fire. It was a day of prayers, last phone calls, and hasty “I love you’s”.

It was passengers on United 93 knowing what was happening and deciding that they would “not go quietly into that goodnight”. It was Todd Beemer telling his fellow passengers “Let’s roll.” It was the end of the fight against the terrorists on the flight in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

It was firefighters in the North and South Towers climbing up the stairwells step after step, directing people heading down and hopefully to safety as they continued upwards to help the injured. It was police officers in the lobbies of the Towers and in the PATH station trying to make sure no one was left behind. It was ordinary people helping others they didn’t know flee the Towers.

It was hundreds of helmsmen and captains taking their boats, tugs, and ferries across the harbor to the south end of Manhattan, loading as many people as they could onboard and taking them to safety in New Jersey. Then turning around and doing it again...and again...and again until 500,000 people were evacuated.

It was the firefighters, police officers, and construction workers digging through the rubble piles after the Towers fell, hoping to find someone alive and removing the remains of honored dead.

It was twenty years ago...

No...

It was yesterday….

********

Aw Nuts! - Part 2

About three weeks ago I wrote about the abundant crop of acorns I was seeing/hearing. Every time the wind blew you could hear the acorns dropping from the surrounding oak trees here at The Gulch. You’d hear them hitting the roof, hitting the tops of cars, trucks, and SUVs parked nearby. You’d see them on the ground, either whole or in pieces, on the driveways and yards, and in some cases in the bed of my pickup truck.

I thought the ‘rain of acorns’ would taper off after a couple of weeks.

I was wrong.

If anything else, the numbers of acorns dropping from the oaks have increased, and not by a little bit. After the rains we’ve had over the past couple of days (which also contributed to the rain of acorns), the winds that came out of the northwest starting this morning have been causing bouts of heavy acornfall. It is times like this that I’m glad we don’t have a metal roof here at The Gulch. The acorns hitting our roof sometimes sound like gunshots. Hearing some of them hit one of our through-wall A/C units certainly gives me an indication of what it would sound like if our roof was metal rather than wood and asphalt shingles.

If this keeps up at this rate I’m going to have to start shoveling acorns off my driveway.

This is the worse I’ve ever seen it in all these years.

Corporate Conspiracies Abound

I have always believed that various corporate cabals have been trying to force us into wasting our money on otherwise stupid or useless products or services. But there is one I’ve always had my eye on but wasn’t able to prove anything.

And then Stephen Kruiser uttered the words I’ve been thinking for decades:

Big Silverware is just ripping us off with the salad fork nonsense.

It proves I am not the only one thinking this is a conspiracy!

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a great Labor Day Weekend for me and it’s not even over yet. Why am I saying this?

Katy.

She made the trek up from Connecticut Friday after work. What was normally a 4-hour drive for her turned into a 6-hour marathon in holiday traffic, something neither of us had expected. That she’d left work a couple of hours early made it even more surprising that the traffic was as heavy as she experienced. It made me appreciate her presence even more.

We had a great day yesterday, between having breakfast at one of our favorite diners, making it to a craft fair here in town, making it to a pig roast at one of the local farms (a farm-to-table event), and meeting some new friends while there. (The new friends are from away but have a summer place up here and plan to retire here in a couple of years.)

The pig roast was great – good food, good music, good company – and Katy won a drawing for some nice perennials from the farm stand greenhouses (which she is taking home with her).

After a great breakfast at our favorite diner this morning, she headed home. (Yes, the weekend doesn’t end until tomorrow, it being Labor Day and all, but she didn’t want to deal with the heavy homeward bound holiday traffic tomorrow, and I don’t blame her.) I would have liked it if she’d stayed another day, but her heading home today made sense.

It was a great weekend!

==+==

What happens when natural processes prevent or reverse global warming?

It must be explained away, of course!

==+==

Is fall football on borrowed time because of climate change?

According to climate alarmists, the answer is ‘yes’.

It must be understood that these climate alarmists are friggin’ morons. They are acting like supposedly human-caused climate change will have such an effect on temperatures that fall temperatures in future that temps will be more like late July/early August. Yeah, maybe in a few hundred years...assuming the AGW faithful are right. Too bad the models they like to use to predict future climate haven’t even come close to matching reality, even with some after-the-fact data ‘editing’ to try to hide the decline (see ClimateGate 1.0 and 2.0 e-mails).

This sounds more like a “We should say something about climate change, too” story rather than a real concern.

And so it continues….

==+==

Is there anything Elon Musk can’t do?

By way of PJ Media comes this about one of the reasons why it is a good idea for Starlink to start using lasers for intersatellite communications which reduces the need for ground stations to link the satellites to the ‘Net:

It makes it a lot more difficult to censor the Internet, particularly in nations that heavily censor or even block the Internet.

Elon Musk is building his satellite-based Starlink service, but he paused launches until some new spacecraft are ready. Quarts reports that those spacecraft give Starlink a new capability — the ability to bypass the ground stations that Starlink currently depends on.

Starlink users need to be within several hundred miles of a ground station that is plugged into the internet, so the satellites can relay data back and forth between them. SpaceX is not going to be able to set up these stations in authoritarian countries, or likely many of their neighbors.

That’s not just a technical issue, it’s also a regulatory and censorship issue. For instance, Afghanistan’s internet and smartphone access went from near zero to about 90% during the war that Joe Biden just threw away. The Taliban are heavy into censorship and are expected to clamp down very hard on free speech. That’s easier to do against conventional, terrestrial internet service. But Musk’s Starlink with its laser system may be able to elude Taliban censorship.

Hmm, could the ability to bypass censorship be one reason why Jeff Bezos wants the FCC to block Musk’s implementation of his new generation of Starlink satellites?

==+==

Ayuh.

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the Labor Day weekend isn’t over yet, the weather is getting better, and I don’t have to deal with Monday this week.

Fake Woke

In my last post I included a video from rapper Tom MacDonald who presented truths that too many of our ‘elite’ choose to ignore or refuse to admit exist and truths we need to pay better attention to. What I found interesting was reaction videos to his song from people across the spectrum of personal and political beliefs. With only a few exceptions most agreed with much of what he stated. I’d like to think he opened a few eyes with his lyrics. (I have to admit I haven’t been a fan of rap or hip hop, but Tom’s videos have spoken to me and so many others.)

A preceding video, Fake Woke, delves into the cancel culture, ridiculous demands from the ‘woke’, most of which are using their ‘wokeness’ as a means of taking control of our society.

Without further ado, here’s Tom’s Fake Woke.



Indeed.

Message To Snowflakes: We Are NOT The Intolerant Ones

Skip Murphy over at GraniteGrok quoted a part of my Sunday post, illustrating my increasing intolerance of those who have absolutely no tolerance for those who disagree with their delusional visions of “how things are”. Today I came across a post on Instapundit that covered a related subject, something that struck a chord with me. Even better was a comment to that post that got right to the heart of the issue and reflects my viewpoint on the matter.

I try to operate by a code. One can pretend to be whatever one wants. I don't care. I start to care when that individual decides that I must curb my own rights, opinions and behavior to accommodate him/her and keeps shoving it in my face demanding that I must do more than just tolerate their choices and co-opts the power of government to force me. This person, Blair White, doesn’t seem to be doing any of that. My response in this case is, you do your thing and we’re good as long as you leave me and mine out of it.

As one other commenter put it, rather succinctly: “Conservatives will be fine with you as long as you mind your own damn business instead of their business.” Yup, you mind your own business and I'll mind mine. Once you start minding mine you’re going to get a proverbial Gibbs slap to the back of your head for your trouble, and it will only get worse from there. This 'woke insanity' must be pointed out and ridiculed for the nonsense it is.

And as a little extra (as Skip suggested), there’s this from Tom MacDonald:


Indeed.

Update: The woman in the video is the Blair White in the linked Instapundit post and comment above.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was Old Home Day in our little town yesterday, a celebration of our town by present and past residents. It started with a parade to open the festivities, and once finished, everyone moved to the Village Fields where the celebration(s) take place. There were food stalls, crafts vendors, games, amusements, and musical entertainment. The nearby church had their annual fair which is really a fundraiser which consists of a “White Elephant Sale” for folks trying to get rid of all kinds of items they no longer need. Think of it as a centralized yard sale and you won’t be far off the mark.

The weather cooperated, with temps in the low 70’s/mid 60’s throughout the day. It was mostly partly cloudy most of the day which helped make for a comfortable day, something that was a big contrast to days earlier in the week when we had day after day with temps in the upper 80’s and lower 90’s with very high humidity.

There were fireworks in the evening and I have to say I agree with some of my fellow townsfolk to say they were better than the Fourth of July fireworks many of us saw around the lake this summer.

All in all it was a great day.

==+==

I have to admit to becoming burned out regarding Biden’s Afghanistan Bug-Out Debacle.

The endless comparisons between Saigon an Kabul have become no less true. But with each bit of news about what’s happening and the actions (or inactions) by the * Administration come to light, the situation looks increasingly dire. It’s like this whole debacle was planned to cause as much death and destruction as possible, despite Jen Psaki’s claims to the contrary.

That the * Administration handed over a list of Americans in Afghanistan and Afghans working for the US shows the moral depravity of WRBA. It is, to all intents and purposes, a hit list. What WRBA thinks they are accomplishing by helping the Taliban collect hostages and kill Afghans who don’t like the Taliban escapes me. Perhaps they want to somehow use it to blame Trump for everything that happened s part of the 2022 Midterm election campaign. (If that is indeed the case, they may find it will backfire upon them.)

That field commanders have lost confidence in command staff is increasingly evident. They certainly have no confidence in their increasingly senile Commander-in-Chief. Then again, nobody does. Even the DNC-MSM has abandoned him.

As bad as things are in Afghanistan, I (and many others) expect things to get worse...before they get even worse.

==+==

To show you just how insane wokeness on college campuses have become, a “colorblind study” is now racist.

I guess when your entire raison d’etre is to combat racism, then every problem and every action is defined as racist.

This is what happens when most of society’s problems have been solved: take something that is minor, even non-existent, blow it all out of proportion so that it is now a ‘crisis’ and make it your cause. Anyone questioning your cause is labeled as a fascist/racist/whateverist. Is it delusion? Is it a form of malignant narcissism? Is it a form of schizophrenia?

Whatever it is, it is time to point out these ‘woke’ causes for what they are - absolute delusional nonsense – and end them. They serve no useful purpose and solve nothing. All many of them do is create division, hatred, and in the end, violence.

==+==

Speaking of nonsense, it seems a number of doctors are ‘sick and tired’ of treating patients who aren’t vaccinated against Covid. That raises another disturbing question:

“I cannot and will not force anyone to take the vaccine,” Dr. Jason Valentine of Mobile, Alabama, wrote. “I also cannot continue to watch my patients suffer and die from an eminently preventable disease.”

In other words, only healthy people deserve medical treatment, which exists to cure people who aren’t healthy.

Will Valentine treat people who are obese? What about those suffering complications from drug addiction? Smokers? STDs? HIV? Diabetes 2? Liver disease? Mouth cancer? Lung cancer? Hepatitis? An aggressively healthy lifestyle can prevent all of the above. When reached for comment, Valentine’s office simply hung up.

Heh.^TM

==+==

What, if any, lessons were learned from Katrina 16 years ago? If only one needed to be learned, it was this: the governor shouldn’t wait to ask for federal assistance.

What lessons have actually been learned?

Only time will tell.

==+==

How many times have we seen or read that what our Progressive political elites are really trying to build is not some kind of socialist utopia, but a society with them cast as the new nobles and the rest of us as the serfs whose only reason to exist is to meet their every need, fulfill every whim, and follow every order without question...or be beaten or killed for failing to do so.

They want to create a modern medieval society.

The Taliban's takeover in Afghanistan is just one illustration of a seventh-century ideology overcoming the power of the neo-liberal world. Autocracies have arisen in countries which once seemed candidates for liberal democracy from Russia and Turkey to Iran. Arguably the most powerful person in the world is now China's all-but Emperor, Xi Jinping, who has presided over the mass detention and forced sterilization of a Muslim minority, the silencing of Hong Kong's free press and the arrest and prosecution of protestors (sic) and dissidents.

But the West, too, has fallen prey to encroaching illiberalism. America's intellectual, political, and corporate establishment may not share the ideology of ill-educated Central Asian religious fanatics, but they echo the Taliban by embracing an increasingly medieval dogmatism and—crucial—an ideology that similarly scorns reason and debate. As historian J. B. Bury put it in 1913, the Middle Ages were a time when "a large field was covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and reason was warned off the ground."

Where does our own medieval lurch come from? Developments akin to what followed the fall of classical civilization: growing concentrations of political and economic power, a shrinking middle class, increasing intellectual dogmatism and a global pattern of pessimism about humanity's prospects. We are also living through a relentless effort to supplant any remaining reverence for the ideals that historically have held our civilization together, and this, too, parallels the experience of the Middle Ages, a period in which, as Belgian historian Henri Pirenne noted, "the very mind of man was going through degeneration."

This is what our elites are pining for. They want control over the lives of their serfs, law by fiat, i.e. droit du seigneur, knowledge held tightly by those in power and kept from the serfs, who must be kept ignorant of that knowledge because they might become ‘uppity’ were they to learn that secret knowledge. They have no problem deceiving their adherents, no problem selling them on ‘woke’ ideas that have no basis in reality, but do help dismantle and weaken modern society and make it easier to bring about their desired result – modern medievalism.

I keep thinking the time is soon coming where we will need to make a decision about whether we let this descent into a new Dark Ages continue, fight it and stamp it out, or find a means to get off-planet as a means of maintaining a modern liberal society off-world (the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, perhaps one or more of the Jovian moons).

==+==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has cooled off...for now, hot and humid weather is on the way, and where Labor Day is eight days away.

Truer Words Were Never Spoken

I saw the following picture over at Knuckledraggin and it struck a chord with me, so I knew I had to share the meme as it is timely.

This picture also brought to mind this great rant by the late Peter Finch playing newscaster Howard Beale in the movie Network. Finch won a posthumous Academy Award for his portrayal of “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves”. It is amazing that this movie from 1976 was prescient, portraying the TV media of the present day for what it is – a propaganda machine.



We should shut off our TVs just as Howard Beale said we should.

Why Masks Don't Work - A Proof - Part 2

Last week I offered some proof the masks the various government officials insist that we wear in order to ‘protect’ ourselves from Covid-19 don’t work.

Dr. Byram Bridle offered both illustrations, some simple math, and a practical demonstration why the cloth masks and disposable ‘procedure’ masks provide little, if any protection from the Coronavirus. The only protection they provide is psychological, yet The Powers That Be keep insisting masks are the only thing that will prevent the spread of Covid despite the vaccines. (If they vaccines don’t work, then why have we taken them? We could have saved our time and the government could have saved billions of dollars if we’d just worn masks, right?)

Since the good doctor seems to be going against the narrative, I figured I could offer yet another example that comes from a non-medical source. It aptly demonstrates just how useless non-N95 masks are regarding preventing Covid.

Considering the ‘vape’ droplets are quite large, larger than the Coronavirus, you can see the mask used in this demonstration was useless...just like most cloth masks.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s ‘Hurricane Sunday’ with Hurricane Henri paying a visit to New England. It’s the first hurricane to make landfall in New England in 30 years. While we’ll be seeing mostly rain with some wind (30mph) up here in New Hampshire, we won’t have it nearly as bad as the folks in southern New England.

Katy is one of those folks in the path of Henri and she spent time getting ready, getting things from her yard and around her home put away or lashed down to keep them from being blown away. She also made preparations to bug out if things got bad. (I told her that if the need arose, I would pull the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water and trailer it down to Connecticut to get her from her house if the flooding got bad enough.)

Of course I have heard more than a few of the ‘usual suspects’ claiming this storm is all the fault of climate change, as if hurricanes have never made landfall in New England before. There’s a long list of hurricanes hitting New England over the years, with the last one being Hurricane Bob in 1991. (Sandy was not a hurricane when it hit New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut back in 2012, but a tropical storm.) Considering Henri was barely a Category 1 hurricane when it made landfall, it doesn’t seem it can be blamed on climate change. Many of the previous hurricanes were much stronger when they made landfall, yet they haven’t been blamed on climate change.

==+==

I made some preparations for the storm as well, but mostly making sure I had a full tank of gas in the trusty RAM 1500, making my bi-weekly run to BJ’s on Saturday rather than today, and filling one of my gas caddies in case I need it for the pickup, the boat, or the generator. Cell phones and laptops were charged as were batteries for a couple of my two-way radios. I also made sure the propane tank for the gas grill was also filled. I did check the boat yesterday to make sure it was properly secured, though there was little chance for problems this far inland. Beyond that, I really didn’t do all that much. I certainly haven’t done nearly as much as Katy did down at her home in Connecticut.

==+==

Compare and contrast:

Biden screws up the withdrawal of American citizens, their Afghan allies, and the military from Afghanistan so badly that our allies have been condemning him – officially – and the DNC-MSM have turned on him.

Trump addresses a rally in Alabama and delivers a scathing rebuke of how things have been handled by President *’s administration and hangers on.

“‘Do you think that General Patton was woke? I don’t think so. He was the exact opposite,’ Trump said. He pivoted to lambast notorious woke figure General Mark A. Milley who has defended the divisive teaching of critical race theory to military members. ‘You know what woke means? It means you’re a loser,’ Trump jabbed, adding: ‘Everything woke turns to sh*t.’ ”

While President Trump is not known for his eloquent speech, he does have the unique ability to get to the point and state it in terms everyone, including the self-anointed elite, can understand. Sometimes that’s the only way to get to the point across.

I wonder how many of those who actually voted for SloJo are now regretting casting that vote?

==+==

Skip Murphy reminds us that it is not just Afghanistan from where we may need to consider withdrawing.

Writes Skip:

“In the worst year in Afghanistan, 2010, the U.S. suffered 440 troops killed in action. So far this year in Chicago, 480 people have been shot to death. When will the U.S. begin its withdrawal from Chicago?”

Indeed. Every weekend, the toll is displayed all over the nation and much of it is concentrated in “gangbanger” neighborhoods. Just like Biden and his staff, however, that are sounding like my 5-year-old Grandson in “WHAT cookie in my hand???” and denying he’s not to blame, so are the Chicago leadership doing the same in their jurisdictions.

Most often, they lay the blame on surrounding States that have more Constitutionally oriented gun laws even as they’ve created a Merry-Go-Round environment: arrest thugs, book’em, bring’em to Court, and then a gentle wrist slap, and they’re turned out onto the street.

It is a war in the Chicago environs but why should WE be concerned with it if Chicago’s leaders refuse to Follow The Law and handle these miscreants the way the Law demands they should be.

You brought it onto yourselves by coddling them this long.

It’s your problem and we probably should “withdraw” from them. Given that Democrats control the Federal Government, however, that’s not likely.

The Detroitification of Chicago continues apace. It will be interesting to see how long it will take for the depopulation of Chicago to reach the level of that of Detroit.

==+==

Can a rock be racist?

It’s 2021 in Woke America. Of course it can.

==+==

I have to agree with this: The Biden White House Is Betting That America Is Finished.

It is the dream of the Progressive totalitarians that they will soon be able to declare the rise of the New Soviet Union. No more Constitution. No need to gain political consensus. The new Nobles will dictate and the new Serfs will bow to their will...or die.

Here’s something these same Progressive totalitarians should remember: Sic Semper Tyrannus.

Here’s something else they should always remember:

==+==

And that’s the (soggy) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rains have arrived, the weekenders have already left, and where Monday is lurking just around the corner.

Why Masks Don't Work - A Proof

We keep hearing the arguments for and against the efficacy of masks for protecting against being infected with Covid-19. Most of us of an engineering, mathematical, or science bent understand that 90%+ of the masks do not provide protection...except psychologically. I’ve had people call me an outright liar about it, most of those people being math deficient.

In my defense, I present this YouTube video by Dr. Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist, who shows with simple illustrations, math, and a practical demonstration that masks of the types a large majority of the people have been using are worthless for preventing the transmission of Covid.



As I have explained to a number of people, including the WP Mom (who is a retired health professional), I have no desire or need to wear a mask, particularly in light of the fact that I am vaccinated and the only reason people would require me to wear a mask is to give them a false sense of security.

It's Deja Vu All Over Again

Seeing the totally preventable tragedy in Afghanistan reminds me the original reason we went in to begin with: Taliban support for Osama bin Laden and their efforts to protect him.

President * and WRBA decided to chuck all of the plans to deal with our troop drawdown and eventual departure and instead effed things up, all while trying to blame Trump for their FUBAR’d evacuation of US citizens and Afghan allies, something that “fills me with an urge to defecate”. (With apologies to Roger Waters and David Gilmour.)

This pretty much sums up how I’m feeling about the whole debacle, something I’m sure I am not alone in feeling: