3/17/2024

Thoughts On A Sunday

Another Sunday is upon us and it is also St. Patrick’s Day. It is also one day closer to Ice Out being declared on Lake Winnipesaukee which also means it’s one day closer to our boating season starting.

March Madness also starts as the brackets are being announced. Both University of Connecticut Men’s and Women’s teams made the cut which pleases the WP Clan to no end. (UConn is the ‘family’ school.) It will be interesting to see how well UConn will do, with the possibility that both the Men’s and Women’s teams could make the Final Four.

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Over the years we Granite Staters have had to deal with folks who move into our towns “from away”. They are usually made up of people from one of three groups – the Kindred Souls, the Drawbridge Folks, and the Back Where We Come From flatlanders.

The first group – the Kindred Souls – will move into a town and after a year or so you’d think they’ve lived their all their lives. They fit in because they were looking for a town just like they one they moved to. They don’t really want to change anything any more than anyone else living in their town.

The second group – the Drawbridge Folks – will move into a town and then want to “raise the drawbridges” to keep anyone else from moving in and they work to make sure nothing changes at all and get upset if anyone even suggests something new. Most of them mellow with time and even though they will never be one of the Kindred Souls, they do love the towns where they now live.

And then there’s the third group – the Back Where We Come From flatlanders – who will move into one of our towns and immediately start trying to turn it into a copy of the place they fled, bringing with them all the things that made their previous place of residence a hellhole. They are rarely tolerated and more often than not manage to piss off just about everyone in town including town officials, the Fire Department, the Police Department, the DPW or Road Agent, the School Superintendent, and all of their neighbors. They bring their prejudices, intolerance, condescension, and delusional ideologies, demanding that everyone else live they way they think everyone should live.

It isn’t just us in New Hampshire who have to deal with the third group. A perfect example of this in East Nashville, Tennessee where a Blue State flatlander moved in and the first thing they did was sue a neighboring butcher shop because the newcomer “can’t stand the smell of meat”.

Where is this flatlander from?

California.

Of course.

What would we expect from one of the Progressive Kalifornia anointed?

...California transplant Natalie Castillo relocated to a spot in East Nashville, Tenn. Her new home is next to Roy's Meat Service, a butcher shop that has been at its current locale for years. The family's presence in the neighborhood dates back to the 1940s. However, Natalie and her partner have decided that they cannot stand the smell of meat, even though they chose to move next to a butcher shop. In true progressive California fashion, they are suing to force Roy's to close.

--snip--

What is Natalie doing in Tennessee? Well, the policies and people she voted for and championed have turned her state into an over-priced sewer lagoon. Crime is everywhere, and one cannot walk down the street without tripping over human feces or drugged-out humans.

Nothing is priced within reach, and even fast-food joints are closing up shop. You can't get a taco, cheeseburger, can of creamed corn, or a box of drywall screws in California without getting overcharged, overtaxed, and possibly putting your life in danger. To steal a quote from Barack Obama, people like her DID build that. Just because these approaches to government and life did not work in California, they have to work in Tennessee, right?

Frankly, I doubt Natalie will win her lawsuit (though she might if it was taking place in the Pyrite State). That’s not much different than someone buying a house next to an airport and then suing to shutdown the airport because of the noise. I would like to think the courts in Tennessee haven’t been corrupted by the Progressive virus and the court will kick the lawsuit as trivial with no merit.

Only time will tell.

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Every time I think Scientific American, a once great science publication, couldn’t become any more woke and irrelevant, they prove me wrong.

In this case, the latest proof is their newest foray into gender-based science analysis.

It is proving once again that actual science must bow to the narrative, first, last, always.

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Hey, let’s add to the stupidity of the American population!

From the halls of George Mason University comes this latest bit of woke stupidity being perpetrated upon us.

“Marriage fundamentalism” advances “white supremacy,” according to a George Mason University professor.

“I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy,” Professor Bethany Letiecq wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

“Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family,” she wrote.

What’s ironic about this is that “scholars say marriage benefits society, minorities included.”

So you have a woke feminist professor telling us yet another custom going back millennia is racist only when white people practice it? WTF?

This ‘academic’ needs to be fired and have her academic credentials stripped from her because she’s a ideologue, not an educator.

We need to end this woke bullsh*t now.

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It looks like the Left is finding out first hand what happens when you don’t lock up criminals:

More crime.

It is highly likely if the four criminals who committed a mass shooting in Philadelphia on March 6th had been locked up, the shooting that wounded 8 teenagers wouldn’t have happened.

It’s time for our Progressive ‘betters’ to relearn the lessons the rest of us never forgot – If you lock up the bad guys they can’t commit more crimes.

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One has to wonder what people in other countries think about America’s descent into ‘woke’ madness? I have seen a few videos and some blog posts opining that the US is now an insane asylum, one being run by the craziest of the inmates – the ‘woke’ Left.

They espouse ideas and narratives the people in other countries know are total unadulterated bullsh*t and they infect our children with that same virulent bullsh*t. They see our nominal leader is a clueless pedophile puppet sinking deeper into dementia who insults and abandons our allies while rewarding our enemies. These same leaders have made sure crime skyrockets by not prosecuting and incarcerating criminals while framing and imprisoning citizens who disagree with their bullsh*t.

Yup, America has become a lunatic asylum.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been all over the place as have the temperatures, road repair season will soon be starting, and spring will be arriving soon.

3/16/2024

Recycling Plastics Isn't Working

I was making my monthly trip to our town’s dump...er…Solid Waste Center, dropping off some recyclables and trash. The recyclables are the usual – paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic. It was as I was offloading the huge container of plastics that I remembered reading a post about recycling, specifically about recycling plastic, and how it isn’t really worth it. Surprisingly, the article was on the NPR website (dated two years ago). It was the last thing I expected – an article telling everyone that plastic recycling isn’t worth it - from a heavily left-leaning media organization. As they stated, recycling plastic is practically impossible and the problem is getting worse.

The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S.

The report cites separate data published...May [2022] which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.

--snip--

Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together. Plastic also degrades after one or two uses. Greenpeace found the more plastic is reused the more toxic it becomes.

New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to produce. The result is that plastic trash has few markets — a reality the public has not wanted to hear.

My town limits what plastics it does take in, that being the #1, #2, #5, and #7 plastics, and on top of that they can’t take any of those plastics if they are black in color as apparently the laser scanners used to determine the plastic type doesn’t work on black/dark brown plastics. Seeing the physical amount of plastic at our recycling center is mind boggling. About the only other recyclable material I see with that kind of volume is cardboard.

There is one plastic our town takes in that has a high recycling percentage, that being #6, also known as polystyrene or Styrofoam. Our town processes it on-site, reducing it from the solid foam we know to ‘ingots’ that are as hard as rock. The processing heats up the polystyrene and removes all of the air. The ingots are stacked on pallets and picked up once there are enough for a full truckload. Our town actually makes money from this operation. Our town also takes in polystyrene from a number of other towns in the state as it is the only one recycling polystyrene. So we make money from other towns’ Styrofoam as well.

Do we make anything from the other plastics collected at our recycling center? Yes, but not a lot. At least we haven’t had to pay to have the plastic hauled away. At least not yet. But that could change.

If the percentage of plastics actually being recycled keeps shrinking, then where does all that plastic actually go? Around here it likely ends up at our local trash-to-energy incinerator, burned to generate electricity.

What percentage of the #1, #2, #5, and #7 plastics our town collects are actually recycled? At the moment I have no idea. I have a feeling the answer to that will not be easy to determine, but if it is anything like that mentioned in the NPR piece then it’s less than 10%. The rest is incinerated to make electricity. That also means it is more expensive for that plastic to be collected rather than to be put into the regular trash and then burned like the rest of our trash in the trash-to-energy plant.

What about the rest of the recyclables like paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, and glass? Our town does pretty well with those materials, with one of them, glass, being recycled locally. This came about because the last glass recycling facility in the Northeast closed its doors years ago and glass became nothing more than trash. However, our town still collects it and crushes/grinds it to create gravel-like pieces of glass to be used as fill and aggregate for construction and road maintenance, saving the town a lot of money in gravel costs.

It is well past time for all of us to take another look at our preconceptions about recycling, and specifically plastic, to determine if it is worth the time, effort, or money to recycle plastic. If the numbers in the NPR piece are correct then it is a money losing proposition and does not help the environment as has been claimed. It might be time to admit recycling plastics doesn’t work and stop wasting time and money pretending that it does.

3/15/2024

Friday Funny - Twilight Zone



The problem is that I don't have to imagine. The world is being run by dumb f*cks.

3/10/2024

Thoughts On A Sunday

It seems winter is winding down early this year, at least up here at Lake Winnipesaukee. The big lake never froze over entirely and Ice In was late. (Ice In is declared when all 5 ports of call for the MS Mount Washington cruise ship are iced over.) I have no doubt that Ice Out will be declared any day now as one of the predictors, a small pond near the airport, was ice free this morning. Ice Out is usually declared about a week after the pond is ice free. This most often occurs in mid-April, but there’s no chance it will wait that long this year.

While this ‘barely’ winter is almost over, it does mean that our boating season is going to start a few weeks earlier than normal. While it is unlikely I will get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout into the water any earlier, usually towards the second week of May, there are plenty of boaters who will get their boats in as early as it is practical to do so.

I just hope this means we’ll have a better summer and boating season than we did last year.

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I’ve seen signs of this, too, right here in my home town.

See the Future of Global Depopulation – a Giant Empty School.

While the post linked to in the Instapundit link above deals with a Japanese elementary school, school systems all over the world – and here in the US – are seeing a shrinking enrollment. Some of that is due to demographics as the number of children being born is declining. (Some of that is due to the shrinking number of families as fewer adults are getting married, let alone even dating.)

Some of the school enrollment shrinkage is due to more families homeschooling, a trend that accelerated during the Covid lockdowns. Some of the shrinkage is due to more parent enrolling their kids in private schools. But overall, the trend is downwards and it is expected that trend will continue.

As I mentioned above, I have seen that trend in my home town as school enrollment in our school system has been shrinking for at least 15 years even as our town’s population has been slowly growing.

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I had no plans of watching the horror show that was the State Of The Union address because I pretty much knew it was going to be more of a campaign speech and there was going to be a lot of bullsh*t spewed as if it were true. Yet despite my not watching it, I did hear some of it which merely confirmed my suspicions.

One of the claims the Joetato made was how much better the jobs market was, something I’ve known has been a claim he’s been making that anyone paying attention knows is not even close to being accurate. The only jobs part of the jobs market that has been doing well is the government sector, which doesn’t add to the nations GPD. In truth, the job market has been losing jobs.

Every month, the Biden regime’s job report is revised DOWN by 20-50%. It bears noting that it’s the government sector that continues to dominate the new jobs reports.

Rich Baris posts: “Another MASSIVE downward revision to the prior monthly jobs report. These people are lying to us, and covering their tracks a month later. We’ve now had downward revisions for 10/12 to 11/12 on the 12-month for nearly two years.”

Government statistics, once a tool to measure the health of our economy, are cooked and created – weaponized as a campaign tool.

Over the last 3 months the US economy has shed 1.87million full time jobs. That's the largest decline since the GFC, outside the covid lockdowns. pic.twitter.com/9h8JfSHtUP

— steph pomboy (@spomboy) March 8, 2024

Every claim made by Biden and WRBA must be looked at askance as so many of them have turned out to be good sounding prevarications that in no way reflect reality. This was just one of them.

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Just when we thought the media couldn’t be any more in the pocket of the DNC, they prove us wrong.

Only the MSM can describe the low turnout for Biden’s Georgia “rally” as “a very intimate setting” as if it were set in a cafe or roadhouse. What it was instead was a rally with a lot of empty seats.

That’s a hell of a lot of spin.

I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of that between now and November...and I’m already tired of it.

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I have to agree with Scott Johnson that 1976’s Network was a perfect movie.

Almost 50 years later I remember Howard Beale’s rant on TV, Beale played by the great Peter Finch. I keep waiting for one of the network talking heads to speak the truth much as Howard Beale did when he finally had enough of the bullsh*t.



This was then surpassed by his “I’m mad as hell!” rant that is a masterpiece and still rings true today.

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And that’s the (alleged) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where most of the ice has fled, thoughts of the upcoming boating season fill our heads, and Monday once again comes around to give us a kick in the teeth.

3/09/2024

Renewable Energy Is A Taxpayer Funded Scam

I will unabashedly admit that I am heartily sick and tired of the whole climate change and “green” energy scam that has been perpetrated against us. Pseudoscience and outright lies have been used for years in order to sell the public on the idea that we must make all kinds of sacrifices in order to “Save The Earth”.

One of those sacrifices?

Reduction of CO2 emissions here in the US to offset the exploding emissions generated by China. China’s emissions are many times that of the US, yet somehow it is the US has to make the ‘sacrifices’ to offset China’s emissions? Really?

That’s a ‘sucker’ move and the climate change and “green energy” proponents know it. We shouldn’t be crippling our nation and its economy to offset China’s increasing emissions.

I have to say the “green” energy scam has been one of the more effective cons played on the American public. According to the scammers, solar and wind energy were supposed to replace most of our traditional energy sources like oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The only problem with that claim?

It’s a complete and utter lie.

We’ve seen other countries go all in on renewable energy and every single time that they couldn’t even come close and fossil fueled backups were required to meet energy needs. In at least two cases – Germany and the UK – those backups being fueled by coal. Yeah, like that’s going to help reduce CO2 emissions. (It didn’t help that Germany shut down all of its nuclear power plants, something that made no sense to me whatsoever.) We’ve been having similar problems here in the US.

... in California, where politicians now require all new homes to have solar panels, all new cars sold in 2035 to be zero-emission, and all the state's electricity to come from carbon-free resources by 2045.

They're getting results, but not good ones: California's cost of electricity increased three times faster than in the rest of America.

People in Washington State pay about 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Oregon, 13 cents. In California, now almost 30 cents.

Do they at least get reliable energy for that? No.

The big problem with wind and solar power, of course, is that they don't work when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. Sometimes that happens when people most want heat or AC.

Increased use of "renewables" is why blackouts are more common in California. Bloomenergy says there were over 25,000 in 2019 -- thousands more than the previous year.

"We failed to predict and plan," said Gov. Gavin Newsom. Right.

Instead, they embraced unscientific green fantasies.

Requiring all new homes to have solar panels is a big reason California has the most expensive housing in America. The average house costs almost $800,000.

And let’s not even get into wind which has turned out to not be all that great either. Between service life and maintenance intervals being shorter than promised, capacity factors being less than a third of the plate capacity, and the fact that wind farms can take up a lot of land area for the amount of power the generate. The same can be said for solar, if not more so.

Read The Whole Thing.

3/08/2024

Friday (Ironically) Funny - Environmentalism vs The Environment

Some folks need to be shown the difference between the two because they ain't the same thing.

3/03/2024

Thoughts On A Sunday

It seems winter has fled, whether for but a couple of weeks or until next winter is unknown. I know it has been a disappointing winter for me, not seeing the temperatures or snowfall we usually see during a New Hampshire winter. Some will say “It’s climate change!” even though if one goes a little over 150 miles to the west of us you’ll see winter has been normal – cold and lots of snow.

We haven’t been seeing the usual winter weather patterns – coastal storms driven by the jet stream which give us the Nor’easters which dump a lot of snow and pull a lot of frigid air down from Canada. Instead most of the systems we’ve seen this winter have swept in from west to east, generating a lot of snow from the Sierras through the Great Lakes, but fizzling out by the time it reaches New England. It has also pulled warmer air in from the South which has given us spring-like weather a couple of months earlier than usual.

I do have to wonder if this means I might be able to get the Official Weekend Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout into the water a couple of weeks earlier than usual. (See? There’s always an upside to something like this.)

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I keep seeing stories about CNN and every time I do my first thought is “They’re still on the air?”

The once-great cable news station has deteriorated, particularly after it’s founder, Ted Turner, sold it to Warner Brothers in 1991. It is a shadow of its former self.

A number of its offerings such as its CNN+ subscription streaming service crashed and burned. It didn’t help that CNN went full left and become more about telling viewers what to think about the news rather than just reporting like they used during its Ted Turner days. Is it any wonder they’ve been shedding viewers like cats and dogs shed their fur in the spring?

“CNN is trying to keep up with the news landscape and become a digital-first provider,” a source said. “It makes sense for them to pursue anchors who have already established a presence there — especially if TV becomes history in their portfolio!”

--snip--

Something tells me CNN is going the way of the Hindenburg.

Yeah, hence the “crash and burn” I mentioned above...though to be accurate, the Hindenburg burned then crashed.

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First, it’s “White Rural Rage” is a danger to Democracy. Now it’s “White Rural voters”. I wish the Left would make up its mind.

Forget the deplorables. What we have here is the REAL threat to our Democracy. Which is, drumroll please, the rage of the white rural voters.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s according to two very VERY liberal writers, one of whom used to write for the Washington Post. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman wrote a book titled: “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” Isn’t that such a darling title? Well, Paul wrote an op-ed for MSNBC in which he informs us that the real danger to this country is because of the rage embedded into the psyche of the WHITE rural voters.

--snip--

Because they used data in their book to make their case, this must mean it’s true that those of us who live in, or grew up in rural areas as I did, and have the audacity to be WHITE, are the very real threat to our Democracy. The two authors appeared on MSNBC last week and you REALLY need to watch, but also keep throwable things out of reach.

I guess they can’t help themselves, demonizing rural white people as if they are the cause of all the ills being suffered in the urban blue areas, particularly because they refuse to vote for Progressives.

Yeah. Right.

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Might ‘liberal fragility’ explain why liberals do what they do?

Liberals really are extremely fragile people. This helps explain why they need “safe spaces” with cuddly stuffed animals, grief counselors, and warning labels against “microaggressions.”

The latest evidence is a completely unironic and totally un-self-aware piece in the New York Times about the anguish of liberal law professors having to teach constitutional law at a time when the Supreme Court leans right. It’s so upsetting that some professors are moved to tears and can’t conceive of continuing. The New York Times thinks this is actually “a crisis.

I think they need to “man up” or “grow a pair” or whatever it is they call it these days because from reading the rest of the article and linked columns tells me that far too many of these Progressives were coddled and never learned how to deal with adversity, even such ‘adversity’ that most people would merely shrug off and continue doing what needed to be done. No tears required.

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Have you ever wondered why college tuition is so high, having risen at a rate well above inflation? This may be one reason why: Yale University employs nearly one administrator per undergrad.

Other colleges and universities have ratios running between 1:1 like Yale, and 1 administrator to 4 undergrads for others like the University of Florida. Both ratios are far too high.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice has been disappearing, the temps are going to be in the 50’s, and where I don’t care (this time) that Monday is coming back again.

3/02/2024

Gun Free Zones = Sitting Duck Zones

I find it hard to believe this debate is still going on, that being that banning guns from some areas – school grounds, shopping malls, public areas – will prevent gun violence. Yet we see again and again these “Gun Free Zones” become targets for those wishing to kill as many people as they can without worrying about being stopped by an armed citizen. The most recently updated stats dealing with Gun Free Zones and school shootings show an interesting correlation.

It’s tragic; people are tired of seeing the senseless loss of innocent lives in educational settings. Despite mounting gun control laws on the Federal and state level, school-related shootings continue to rise (2023 being the highest year yet, with 388 school shootings in only six months). Regardless of political affiliation or thoughts on well-regulated militias and the right to bear arms, one thing is clear; what we’ve been doing for the past forty years isn’t working.

Each school shooting incident in America reflects one thing, children are vulnerable. Schools tend to be easy targets while simultaneously producing mentally ill individuals with an unstoppable intent to harm others.

Unfortunately, we still have a lot to learn about school shootings. There are a lot of unanswered questions. But what we can do is investigate the changes between societal shifts and legislation over the years and spark meaningful conversations about stopping school shootings. Of course, the clock is ticking down to the next horrific headline, so we need to start these meaningful conversations now.

For more than a few mass shootings the people doing the shooting weren’t legally allowed to own or carry guns. Many others were ‘known risks’ – people whose family, friends, and others knew the shooter was ‘not right in the head’ well before they went on the attack. When it comes to school shootings one of those commenting on the linked post hit the nail on the head:

Three common factors in most (not all) of these rampage killings:

1. A broken home.
2. Shooter had been a victim of bullying.
3. Psychotropic meds like SSRIs and antipsychotics.

This list came from the book How To Make A Monster: A Sensible Look At Rampage Killers.

In “How To Make A Monster”, Paul Glasco performs a true root cause analysis of rampage killers - sometimes referred to as "mass shooters". The book looks at how broken homes, being bullied, and children on psychotropic drugs can affect personalities as young people mature. Previous killers from shootings such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, Las Vegas, and Parkland are broken down based on these causal factors.

Imposing nonsensical “Gun Free Zones” with no way to actually enforce them, though most law-abiding gun owners will not carry their firearms in those areas, is not the way to prevent mass shootings. If there were armed guards in those zones to protect the people in those zones, that would be one thing. However, that is rarely the case and that in turns means everyone in those zones is in a “Sitting Duck Zone” because they have no means of defending themselves, at least not legally. All these zones do is guarantee more casualties.

It’s time to rethink Gun Free Zones and do away with them.

PS - One last thought that seems true to me:

2/25/2024

Thoughts On A Sunday

I can’t believe just how much this case of bronchitis has been kicking me in the butt, particularly yesterday. (Today isn’t much better...so far.) It seems I’ve been dealing with this for a month and every time I thought I was finally seeing an end to it it would return with a vengeance. About the only positive thing about this is that I know it isn’t Covid. (Three negative Covid tests tell me that.)

It has certainly affected me in ways I hadn’t expected it to and I’m not talking out the symptoms or their side effects. Its more to do with not wanting to expose anyone, particularly the WP Mom, to what I’ve been dealing with over the past month. That has meant working from home more than usual, foregoing meetings or attending them via Teams, Zoom, or GoToMeeting, and curtailing social activities. It has sucked. In some ways it was worse than anything we dealt with during the whole Covid pandemic scam.

It has also left me tired which has meant I haven’t had energy for many of my usual activities, including blogging. When I’m going to bed an hour or two earlier than usual it eats into what little free time I have and most of the time I blog it’s during the evening. (TOAS is an exception as I work on it here and there throughout the day.) It’s the reason my Friday post was delayed one day and why there was no Saturday post.

Hopefully I’ll get past this soon enough and everything can get back to normal.

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Is the outcome of yesterday’s GOP primary in South Carolina a surprise to anyone? That Trump won in all but three the districts in the state says something, particularly about Nikki Haley’s popularity. She was a pretty good governor from what I gathered and an equally good UN ambassador. (Ironically, she was appointed by Trump.)

Does Haley’s trouncing by Trump mean she’s ready to drop out? From what reports I’ve seen it appears she’s going to wait until after the Super Tuesday Primaries to make a decision about whether she’ll remain in the race or not.

I expect she’ll be spending a lot of time hopping from state to state over the next couple of weeks, attempting to visiting Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia if she can. The only place she definitely won’t be visiting is American Samoa, which is also holding its primary on that same day.

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It seems that Sweden’s “tolerance of diverse youth” has a problem, that problem being those diverse youth have no tolerance for the Swedes in any way shape or form.

It could be the reason a lot of Swedes would like to see those diverse youth and their families to go back to the Muslim countries from whence they came. Considering violent crime, particularly sexual assault, has skyrocketed in Sweden, most being committed by Sweden’s Muslim refugees, I can see why the Swedes would like them to leave.

If memory serves, Norway has been having a similar problem.

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From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this from Seattle:

Seattle Public School Kids Being Told Proper English and Grammar is ‘White Supremacy’

This headline makes me want to ask this question: Is it only proper English and grammar that are ‘rayciss’? Or is it only Western languages – English, French, German, Flemish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese, and so on – where proper usage and grammar are ‘rayciss’? Or is it all languages worldwide?

If I had to guess – and I don’t need to – it’s primarily the Western European languages, with the exception of Spanish, that are seen as ‘rayciss’.

Buncha’ friggin’ morons. They need to be fired, removed from any position with any connection to educating children because of their moronic ideology.

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Vegan leather? Really?

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What do the latest statistics tell us about gun ownership in the US? A lot.

In 2023, 32% of Americans own at least one firearm. There are approximately 259,000,000 adults, which equates to 82,880,000 people who own a firearm in the U.S.

Firearm ownership increased by 6.7% in the U.S. (all demographics) between 2017 and 2023. During that same time period, women increased ownership by 13.6%, and Hispanics increased ownership by 33.3%.

Not only is gun ownership on the rise, but some demographics are purchasing guns at higher rates today than ever before.

Furthermore, 7.5 million adults (2.9% of adults in the U.S.) became first-time gun owners between 2019 and 2021. Of those, 5.4 million did not have a firearm in the household before purchasing.

The post has a number of enlightening charts and statistics which will counter many of the claims of anti-gunners. It delineates the number of American households with guns, the number of guns an average gun owner has, as well as the primary reasons why Americans own guns.

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And that’s the (abbreviated) new from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the lake still isn’t frozen over, we’re going from single digit low temperatures (this morning) to high temps in the 50’s on Wednesday, and where Monday is (inevitably) arriving again whether we want it to or not.