A popular waterfront access point and boat ramp in Murphy, North Carolina, is closed and will remain off limits to the public for another month, the Town Manager’s office said.
Payne Street runs from its intersection with Tennessee Street near the Valley River bridge to a public boat launch, where it becomes unpaved but continues on past the town’s wastewater treatment plant and follows the river for a mile or more — largely as a hiking trail for the more adventurous — though it is sometimes accessible to off-road vehicles.
Traffic cones and an out-of-service police car restrict traffic at the entrance to Payne Street at its intersection with Tennessee Street near the Roscoe W. Hall Bridge below the Texana Community, a largely minority residential community in Murphy. Authorities say the closure will be in force for another month.
Payne provides a popular river-view and sight-seeing spot for locals as well as a road that offers easy access for bank fishermen to the Hiwassee River, just above its junction with the Valley River. Low water often leaves the boat ramp unusable, but it can be used when conditions are favorable.
City crews closed the road around the first of April, apparently related to work with a pumping station located on the riverbank at the head of Payne Street.
An out-of-service police car and traffic cones warn traffic away from the road, though the road remains open to local septic businesses who dump their product at the Wastewater Treatment Station.
Payne is just above the 1899 railway trestle that crosses the Valley River at the Murphy River Walk, though Payne itself is not part of the popular local trail network.
Map image showing Payne Street as it runs along the Hiwassee River in Murphy, North Carolina.
The overwhelming defeat Sunday of Hungray’s Victor Orban was a huge loss for the already unpopular U.S. President and his second in command.
Vance had travel to Hungary to campaign for Orban, but it did no good — in fact, it more than likely hurt. Peter Magyar, a former Orban loyalist and the leader of the main opposition party, will now take over as Hungary’s prime minister once the newly elected Parliament meets.
With 66 percent of votes counted, Magyar’s opposition party was on course to win 137 seats — more than a two-thirds majority. Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, was expected to win just 55.
Hungary’s Victor Orban (center), an enemy of Democratic governance, concedes defeat in Sunday’s elections.
Shortly before polls closed, the electoral authorities said that more than 77 percent of registered voters had cast ballots, the highest turnout in a Hungarian election since the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the start of democracy.
The implications of the outcome extend far beyond Hungary’s borders. The next prime minister may help alter the course of the war in Ukraine, a neighbor that Mr. Orban has cast as an enemy of Hungary, and affect European security. And the results will be looked at by populists around the world who view the Hungarian leader as a model of success and of pugnacious defiance of the mainstream.
After the results, large crowds of mostly young people thronged the banks of the River Danube in front of the Parliament Building, cheering and waving Hungarian flags. Many were stunned by the speed and scale of the defeat of Mr. Orban, whose party won the four previous elections easily.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Thus spoke U.S. President Donald Trump on his Truth Social social media on Easter Sunday.
You don’t even need to let that sink in. It will of its own accord: Easter Sunday.
So, yes, it really has come to this: Our nation’s foreign affairs are being conducted by the equivalent of inebriated Uncle Rufus from his seat at the American Legion bar outside Toad Suck, Arkansas.
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What a crazy old bastard.
What’s especially unnerving and odious is that my generation elected this potty-mouthed ignoramus, serial liar, draft-dodger, narcissist, convicted rapist, and an overseer of six bankrupt businesses. Six.
And not once have we elected him, but twice — to the highest office in the land.
It should be clear to everyone by now that my generation has woefully failed in its civic duties, and a depressingly large percentage of my group is either too dumb, too deluded, too self-centered or too altogether out of touch to have an inkling of the damage they have done to themselves, their children, their grandchildren and the nation.
We’ve screwed up.
And the thing is, as far as I know, there’s still no rehab for stupidity.
We gotta live with this shit and I’ve no clue how to do it. So I hope you haven’t come here looking for advice. I got nothing but despair.
But even I know that despair is a loser’s game.
“No society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them.”
Robert Pondiscio, a former public school teacher who is now at the American Enterprise Institute, made that remark several months back while urging teachers to avoid adopting “an unbearable bleakness” in their classrooms.
Optimism, he argued, is an essential civic virtue.
Yet optimism is something in this day and age that seems to be its own category of rare earth mineral, but it’s out there, and it must be dug from the soil and championed.
Perhaps the only streak of optimism to be found in Trump’s disgraceful Easter Sunday post is that it opens yet another window to his soul that should make it easy to see through for all but the most deranged of his supporters: This is a man off his meds and off his rocker.
This is a man woefully unfit to lead, a man so morally and mentally stunted that questions about his sanity are not only apt they are essential.
Wherever you are on this spectrum of certainty and doubt, it’s okay to start small.
Let’s not join our old high school friends in re-posting ICE-friendly AI smut films; let’s not lean into that pot-like buzz of indulging in quick anger on our social media feeds.
When they go low, we go high really wasn’t bad advice. The air is cleaner and clearer above the clouds.
The view is better, different. It’s true, of course, that our technologies have made it easier for so many of us to see so much more of the world, but never before have so many of us seen so much without understanding what we are seeing.
Take time to understand the world. At the very least, take time to try.
Time may well be running out for there’s no dodging the fact that the USA has become a rouge nation where war crimes and the delight of bombing another nation “back to the stone age” are dangerously close to being normalized.
