We left Del Mar yesterday at 12:15 pm. We arrived home at 3:44 am. Why?
Well, because we have enviro-idiots demanding we go green, we are shipping truckloads of lithium batteries around the country and, in the nature of lithium batteries, one truckload of these exploded into flames on I-15 northbound…forcing the closure of the entire road for about 18 hours. This caused all traffic northbound on I-15 to be rerouted the roundabout way to Vegas – I-40 to Needles (just north of there, actually) and then US-95 into Vegas. Trouble is that I-40 is a much smaller road and it went down to just one lane each way due to construction. It took us 8 hours to go 77 miles! So, very tired this fine morning! And wondering if there is a PhD with the skills to calculate the carbon footprint of a truckload of burning lithium batteries combined with thousands of cars and trucks crawling along I-40 at less than 10 mph.
Also mildly curious about what we’re going to do if there’s a terrorist attack on our infrastructure – there are those two ways between LA and Vegas – I-15 and I-40. Shut both of them down via just a couple well placed bombs and just what happens to our economy? We’ve spent trillions on infrastructure and it is soft as butter. And I guess none of the geniuses in our National Security State ever thought that between major roads there should be first-rate lateral communication just in case something goes wrong. But I’m sure our DEI checklists are all filled out.
Anyways, wasn’t able to pay full attention to politics this last week because things like beach, food and beer commanded a great deal of attention. But I did see the cowardly, bet-wetting panic all over Right social media about Harris. As if she was this super-genius the Democrats had been hiding for decades, just to spring on us at the last moment.
No. She’s an idiot. She’s a commie. She’s taken every stupid position the Left has demanded since she entered public life. She’s a desperate stop-gap the Democrats were forced to turn to after Biden imploded and DEI requirements prevented anyone better from getting the slot. Meanwhile, our guy just forced out a sitting President after surviving an assassination attempt. Seriously, guys: grow a pair.
Now, can Harris win? Of course she can. The commie cancer is deeply embedded in the United States. At bare minimum 40% of the American people nod like morons when someone says “AmeriKKKa is a racist nation”. There’s no way around that in the short term. To get Harris to 270 they need to convince another 10% that another round of welfare spending is the way to go – and/or convince them that Trump is a hairy ogre out to get them. This can be done – especially with the MSM entirely in the tank for her. And as I’ve said all along this election cycle: if we lose, then we never had a chance anyway…the cancer will prove too strong to cure.
But I do not think we will lose. Harris is getting a glow based on MSM slobbering all over her. They are naturally producing polls with a Democrat-favorable results. But, here’s the thing: even the polls showing Harris ahead show her losing. Just like Biden, she has to be, at minimum, +3 in the RCP averages on Election Day to have a chance at getting to 270. A chance, guys; Biden “won” in 2020 based on 40k or so votes across 4 States in a D+5 environment. Harris’ path to victory starts out narrow – and Team Trump is already working to narrow it via a series of devastating ads which merely restate what Harris has said. How is it going? Harris’ people are already lying and saying that Harris will not ban fracking…this proves conclusively that at this moment her own polling shows her losing Pennsylvania. Team Trump is focused, disciplined and quite ruthless – they even had a memo out shortly after Pudding Brain dropped out telling us precisely what would happen…MSM orgasm, polls good for Harris…and then they’ll set to work correcting this.
In the end, we place our trust in God; we know how this comes out. And we have a little bit of faith in the man Trump, who has been through hell for us and is still standing. We don’t doom-monger. We don’t get overconfident but we remain confident.
Blogs For Victory 
Had a really interesting conversation this afternoon with a neighbor down the road who is a freelance mechanical engineer. His company (he and 3 employees) do one-off mechanical fixes for large corporations who get in a jam and need a unique part or piece of equipment that is not commercially available. The guy is a wealth of knowledge, self-sufficient, has a large enough solar array to power his house and his shop, grows most of his own food, and is a mentor (he and his wife) in the WWOOF Program. They get kids from late teens to early 20s from all over the country who come and live with them for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to learn everything from gardening to carpentry. One of the most interesting couples I’ve ever known. They currently have a Woofer (that’s what they call then) who is 22, from San Francisco, who has never worked a day in his life. Bob (my friend) read me the young man’s application to become a Woofer. Completely renewed my faith in the next generation (well, not COMPLETELY). but it makes me even more glad that J live where I live. I have complete faith in the fact that if the ruling class decides to destroy the country, areas like northeast Indiana will survive whatever they throw at us.
What a fascinating couple these people must be, and what a brilliant idea!
I have tried to do what I can, in my own limited way, to mentor and educate young people who have worked for me. A few years ago I was invited to an Eagle Scout presentation ceremony (you know the proper name for this, I am sure) and was stunned when the young man called me up and named me as his mentor and read a long letter he had written about all the help I had given him, all the things I had taught him, and thanked me not just for the skills I had imparted but for the life lessons of pride in a job well done, respect for work, etc. It was the proudest moment of my life, and if I had the wealth of knowledge your neighbor has I can’t think of a more noble calling than to share it the way he does. Thank you for sharing this story.
Have you ever heard of the WWOOF Program? I had not. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of it is that it’s headquartered in San Francisco.
I had not heard of this program but I have been involved, at a donor level, in another self-help program which helps people acquire livestock so they can become self-sufficient. I worked with a veterinarian who grew up in Africa where his father, also a vet, worked with Heifer International, also dedicated to the same thing. I attended a church that sponsored a program that drilled water wells near villages in Kenya, and built some schools there as well as a hospital. I was involved, at a donor level, with their program to buy houses where pregnant girls could live through their pregnancies and for six months after, to give them time to get settled into motherhood if that was their choice, where they received counseling on things girls don’t seem to learn these days like cooking.
When I see Leftists being all smug and preening over their alleged moral superiority because they are “FOR” certain things, but never actually DOING anything, I am encouraged to see programs like this developed and grown by people who don’t just posture with slogans and demonstrations but actually analyze problems and work to resolve them.
There is a local kerfluffle about an effort to put a homeless shelter in a residential area next to a beautiful historic cemetery, and the discourse is exactly what we would expect. The virtue signalers are the most vocal, mourning that “too many people think the homeless are not even human”, blah blah blah, while those of us who try to inject a little rational discourse are decried as heartless, blah blah blah. Don’t dare suggest that to be productive a screening process has to take place and then help offered to people who want to improve their lives, with things like addresses and phone numbers they can use to apply for jobs, job counseling, etc. Don’t dare suggest that some homelessness is due to recurring bad decisions and that the problem can only be solved if those people learn different behaviors or coping mechanisms.
Any reference to drug use is met with the pious declaration that these people are merely “self medicating to help them deal with their problems”—never that the problems probably started with the recreational use of drugs in the first place.
The thing is, the virtue signalers never indicate that any of them have the slightest experience in dealing with addicts, or people whose lack of homes is an ongoing problem because they can’t keep jobs, or even that the money spent on cigarettes, alcohol, tattoos and piercings would be enough for rent and a damage deposit. They certainly are not out there helping people in any way other than assuring them that they are victims and should be dependent on OPM.
Transcript of Kamala Harris speech about the border. Kind of.
Then casper weighed in with a comment. OK, it was someone else, but it just sounded so casperish, fawningly describing this as “A straight-talking, coherent, non-nonsense politician. Refreshing”
We often wonder if these people truly believe that what they have seen is what they describe, or if they know it is caca but are so deeply invested in their identity as Democrats that they are compelled to swoon over every Dem emperor’s “new clothes”.
there are those two ways between LA and Vegas
Going west out of Denver there is only one route in Colorado, aside from one rather torturous mountain road that adds at least 100 miles to the trip and is not adequate for heavy truck traffic and another that is barely better and still requires crossing two of the highest passes in the Rockies on a road that is only intermittingly four lanes. US40 west of Denver involves a narrow twisting road through a canyon, a brief merging with I-70 and then splitting off to go over a high mountain pass where it kind of wanders around through small towns till it either joins up with I-70 or heads north to cross another high pass to eventually merge with I-80 in Wyoming. Most of these miles are on two-lane twisting roads. It is a terrible route for cross country travel, especially commercial travel. I have driven every mile of these routes, pulling horse trailers, pulling hay trailers, and I can testify to their inadequacy. Interstate 70 is as wide as it can get and is woefully inadequate for the traffic it gets. On weekends it is literally stop and go, bumper to bumper, with the emphasis on “stop”.
There has been a huge effort to address the problem, and the results have been, to say the least, ridiculous. The one that has gotten the most attention is a high-speed rail system from Denver to the two counties west of the first pass, Summit County and Vail County. This focus has been solely on ski and condo traffic on weekends and holidays. So the “solution” was to build a high-speed rail system, somehow, at some incredible cost, and then charge something like $40.00 between Denver and Summit County. Per person. Each way.
When four college students can chip in on gas, park close enough to a lift to make it convenient to go back to the car for a different jacket or sunglasses or lunch, and pay $5.00-$10.00 each for the round trip.
The theory, from those high-speed rail aficionados, is that a family of four will decide to leave Rover at home when they go to the mountains to their condo, pay $160.00 for the family’s train fare, hauling all the stuff a family takes for a long weekend or holiday week, have to find transportation from the station to the condo, and then spend the weekend there with no car to go buy groceries or go out to eat, and then get a ride back to the station and pay another $160.00 to get back to a station in Denver where they might have left their car, paying a hefty parking fee to have it relatively convenient to finally get home.
As someone who used to have a condo in one of the resort areas accessed by I-70 I know that a trip to the condo involved buying groceries, loading up clothes and whatever recreational equipment was not already at the condo, the dogs, perhaps a friend or two going up with us, and then carting this car full of stuff to the condo and then back again, after using the condo as a staging point for sightseeing, shopping, going out to eat, visiting neighboring ski areas, etc.
There is a moderately developed highway south of I-70 that crosses a lower pass and goes through a long flat valley, crossing another lower pass and ending in Breckenridge Colorado. This system could easily be expanded, giving an alternate route that would be valuable if 70 is closed due to weather and/or avalanches, as has happened in the past. This would still create a bottleneck as this traffic would have to merge with I-70 at that point to continue on west over Vail Pass but with some negotiating with the federal government for Forest Service land the highway could continue all the way to the other side of Vail Pass, actually giving an alternate route instead of depending on the existing route and trying to improve it.
For some reason the idea of two roughly parallel routes through and across the mountains, crossing different mountain passes and therefore often facing different weather conditions, is simply not even considered. But…but…THE TRAIN!!!
The two mountain counties west of the Eisenhower Tunnel over Loveland Pass were completely cut off for more than a week a few years ago when avalanches closed I-70 and the limited access from the north and south on two-lane roads was also shut down due to weather to the north and a semi truck accident to the south that completely closed that narrow route, with weather not allowing equipment in to clear it. People were sleeping in cars, grocery store shelves were bare, filling stations were out of fuel—it was inexcusable, the result of poor or nonexistent planning, and a potential disaster.
We forget that the entire Interstate system was inspired by the Autobahn in German, where then-general Eisenhower realized the national security advantage of wide, high-speed, highways crossing the country so in times of national emergency military movement would be enabled. Now we have an Interstate system that is essentially dysfunctional in some areas and woefully inadequate in others, with the original intent of the system lost in its own Memory Hole as people fret about ski traffic and light rail.
Now it’s just the Democrat Party
A great motto for those objecting to men in womens’ sports:
Stop Women’s Sports from being a back up plan for mediocre men
“Mediocre men”. That’s got to sting.
Though now that I think of it, that’s kind of an identifier of men on the Left. Remember, there was fretting about “all that testosterone” on display at the GOP convention. At least they recognized it, even though it did make them fretful.
This was a perfect start to a Monday, an antidote to too much seriousness.
ROFL – I love the effort!