Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a pretty quiet week here on Lake Winnipesaukee. I'm certainly not complaining. The two biggest events taking place here in town over the past week were a motorcycle crash and the annual hazardous waste disposal day.

Yes, I'm understating the case. But that's how it seems to me.

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Okay, here's an example of something else that happened around the lake – the annual Antique & Classic Boat Show in Meredith Bay.

I make it up there about every other year to check out some of the really neat boats of bygone eras.

Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those years.

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Most of the towns in the Lakes Region have a large number of summer residents. Some of those towns, including mine, hold what is in effect a Summer Town Meeting, which allows the summer residents to find out what's going on in town and to ask questions of town officials. The latest town to start such summer town meetings is Holderness.

It seems only fair as in some towns the summer residents pay a majority of the property taxes.

While the summer residents don't have a vote during the traditional town meetings in February or March, the summer sessions do allow them to voice their opinions and concerns with town spending that affects what they will pay in property taxes.

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I've been giving some thought to the collision and crash of two TV news helicopters in Phoenix this past week. Is our insatiable desire to know what's going on 24/7 the real cause of the deaths of the four crewmen on board? Do we really need to know what's happening immediately, assuming there isn't some kind of an emergency?

These are questions we should be asking, both of ourselves and of the TV news operations.

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In light of yesterday's post about federalism and Congress's moves to do way with it, I found that this post from our friends at GraniteGrok was another piece of evidence showing the arrogance of our representatives to the US House.

I would certainly call taking credit for passing a bill that they both voted against arrogance.

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Jay Tea regales us with the tale of two out-of-town environmental activists that decided that they didn't like the idea of a truck stop being built on a vacant lot in Brattleboro, Vermont. Their actions got them the attention of the Brattleboro police. It also got them tasered more than once by the police because they refused to unchain themselves from a steel barrel rigged to make it difficult for the police to release them.

Personally I believe these two jerks got exactly what they deserved.

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Did you know that the insurance industry uses your credit score as a factor in setting your insurance premiums? Neither did I.

I don't know if it is true in every state, but here in New Hampshire insurance companies are limited by law how they can use credit reports to set their rates. While there appears to be some correlation between a person's credit history and their frequency of insurance claims, it can't be used as the sole basis for setting a person's premium for auto or home insurance.

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Charles Schwab says that all he's ever tried to do is to promote democratic capitalism.

I'd say he's succeeded.

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Thomas Sowell quotes Winston Churchill:

"There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action."

Churchill was talking about World War II and the failure to stop Adolph Hitler when the cost would have been small. Sowell quotes him in order to illustrate that the same thing may be said about Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's machinations some time in the not too distant future.

It doesn't help that Ahmadinejad may be trying to provoke a US strike against Iran in order to bolster his almost non-existent popularity with the Iranian people.

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And that's the news in Lake Winnipesaukee, where the usual summer crowds have finally materialized, the lake traffic is almost back to 'normal', and where school will start again in a month.