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By the end of the month, I will have cut a cord that has been in my entire (almost 6 decade) life – a landline phone.  And I can thank the striking FairPoint Unions for giving me the impetus for having done so for shoddy service.  If the service your company provides fails to meet expectations (or even worse, fail to deliver even the BASIC level of service), don’t be surprised that when consumers have alternative choices, they take them. And so I have.

When those that strike at a company because they believe they have been hurt, what they often fail to take in consideration is that those that REALLY get hurt are their customers.  You know, the folks that actually pay for their salaries and bennies.  In a monopoly situation, they have no recourse – they have to suck it up, sit in silence, and just steam while the strikers strike; customers be damned as they just become part of the process.  Even better, in some cases, as the “wronged” customers would be bringing heat to the company – another club, indirectly, wielded by customers on the part of the strikers.

That is if the company / strikers have no competition.  When there is, there are options.  And so I did.

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When you’ve only been a precious little snowflake your entire life, at which every turn someone is patting your head, rewarding you for basically not much more than living, a mindset occurs that can drive the rest of us to the (WARNING: EMOTIONAL TRIGGER ALERT!) point of strangling these dear waifs that have no clue as to the hammer and anvil that Reality is about to use on them.  Weekend Pundit has a nice word of warning:

I find all kinds of “microaggressions” claims are in themselves a form of aggression, trying to make everything some form of aggression against someone.

Anyone who feels they are surrounded by all kinds of microaggressions against them or other protected classes of “victims” should seek psychiatric help. It’s obvious to me they are suffering from some form of paranoia, most likely originating in the bastions of indoctrination once known as our education system.

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Stupid is as stupid does.  22 year old dead stupid (reformatted, emphasis mine):

A woman in Memphis, Tennessee, answered a knock at her door at around 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday. When she opened the door, she found herself in a potential life-and-death situation.  The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Nico Carlisle, reportedly forced his way into the residence and pressed a gun to the female homeowner’s neck. However, the suspected criminal was seemingly unaware that the woman had retrieved her handgun before she went to investigate the knock at the door. Police say the woman then fired multiple shots at Carlisle in apparent self-defense.

Responding police officers found the suspect lying down near the front door with multiple gunshot wounds. Carlisle was eventually pronounced dead…WREG-TV reports that no charges have been filed against the homeowner.

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I read this on GrokTALK! this past Saturday and I figured that you might want to read this Big Government post yourselves (reformatted, emphasis mine):

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer conceded that he fears a President Ted Cruz will overturn President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, perhaps signaling that Cruz represents the greatest threat to the progressive left.  “Our first 100 days we spent a lot of time signing executive orders undoing what [President George W.] Bush did, and I would like not to be sitting on a beach somewhere reading about President [Ted] Cruz doing that to us, so it’s very important to us,” Pfeiffertold the Wall Street Journal on Friday.  Earlier in the day, Pfeiffer declared that Obama’s executive amnesty was one of the reasons that made 2014 a “year of great progress” for the “progressive agenda.” He told theJournal that from the “perspective of advancing our agenda through our pen and our phone, this has been a tremendously successful year.”

A couple of takeaways from Pfeiffer’s words:

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A story on when Government KNOWS what is best for you – even if you know it is not: a sad tale of Obamacare:

My older daughter, who is 28, married with 2 children, Her husband is in optometry school and she works three jobs. They have a bunch of loans and I pay their rent. They have refused to take food stamps or anything else from the government.

They went on the O’care website because their private insurance was going to go from $600 to $1000 per month. They were hoping to get a plan that would allow them to keep their pediatrician and her OB-GYN and thought they would qualify for a subsidy that would make it affordable.

Proud people.  Self-reliant people working to make it the old American way: on their own with a bit of help from family and friends and NOT an instant turn to being on the dole.  So what happens?  The Government, with all of its rules and mandates, forces your health insurance to jack up the rate.  And then it forces you to violate who you are trying to be:

Instead, they were directed to Medicaid. None of her doctors take Medicaid. My daughter spoke to a supervisor who kept telling her what she didn’t make enough to qualify for an insurance plan and all that the federal government was doing for them. No matter how many times my daughter said she did not want Medicaid and was willing to pay for private insurance, the supervisor kept telling her all about how much the federal government was doing for her and said

she had to take Medicaid.

Freedom is measured by the choices one can make for themselves.  

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“In a paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, Esper et al. (2014) write that tree-ring chronologies of maximum latewood density (MXD) “are most suitable to reconstruct annually resolved summer temperature variations of the late Holocene.” And working with what they call “the world’s two longest MXD-based climate reconstructions” – those of Melvin et al. (2013) and Esper et al. (2012) – they combined portions of each to produce a new-and-improved summer temperature history for northern Europe that stretches all the way “from 17 BC to the present.” And what did they thereby learn?

As the international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland describes it, this history depicts “a long-term cooling trend of -0.30°C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe” (see figure below). Most important of all, however, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.”

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If you have passed through Meredith, NH in the “summah” time during the bigger tourism / vacation weekends, you know that traffic in and around it can be miserable.  Yes, there are some backroads that we locals use but if you want to get to something in the middle of town, well, it can suck.  A few years ago, they put a rotary in from the south coming up from the Weirs to replace one rather sketchy intersection but they are still looking for better.  Now, they want more.  Once again, a citizen journalist (‘Grok friend Rosemary) brings us the discussion on the issue (which seems to be pretty much splitting the town over the aesthetics, if it is an actual solution or a mere stopgap, and of course, the cost).

As you can see, NOTHING is simple in small towns (and that can be a GOOD thing!) – Part 1:

Oh, the existing roundabout?  Yeah, I have a personal story about it:

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