Hopefully the good weather will help bolster voting at our town’s annual town meeting on Tuesday.
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Speaking of town meeting, it is that season in New Hampshire where town residents meet to debate about their town’s budget, changes in town ordinances, or authorizing and funding building projects. A similar even takes place for the town’s schools, usually a day or two before or after town meeting. There’s also voting for town officials and school board members.
Sometimes towns have a combined ‘meeting’ where all voting for both the town and school warrant articles, town officials and school board members takes place at the same time. Our town is one such town.
The voting decides what our town and schools will spend over the upcoming fiscal year and in turn that spending determines our property tax rates. Residents who can’t be bothered to vote lose the right to complain about their taxes, at least until the following year.
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Should we shift permanently to Daylight Savings Time? I know I am in favor of it, at least here in New England as it makes more sense to do so considering we’re at the extreme eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone. We’re more in line with the Atlantic Time Zone. So for us it makes sense. For others, it may not.
Frankly, I’m tired of having to deal with the time changes in November and March. They serve no useful purpose.
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First, Wikipedia deletes a list of scientists who are climate skeptics. Wikipedia explains the deletion using a rather lame reason – PC scientific ‘consensus’.
Here’s the reasoning for the censorship given by one of the Wiki editors:That’s it, Wikipedia, be all politically correct and delete opinions and information that doesn’t follow the narrative. No dissension allowed. How open-minded of you.
“The result was delete. This is because I see a consensus here that there is no value in having a list that combines the qualities of a) being a scientist, in the general sense of that word, and b) disagreeing with the scientific consensus on global warming.”
Wikipedia
Second, there’s this from the London Times by way of Watts Up With That: Coronavirus will Kill All the Old Climate Skeptics.
Don’t take this the wrong way but if you were a young, hardline environmentalist looking for the ultimate weapon against climate change, you could hardly design anything better than coronavirus.As the saying goes “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it...good and hard.”
Unlike most other such diseases, it kills mostly the old who, let’s face it, are more likely to be climate sceptics. It spares the young. Most of all, it stymies the forces that have been generating greenhouse gases for decades.
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Yet one more thing bad about coronavirus has nothing to do with the disease and everything to do with politics.
On MSNBC, a Friday panel discussion turned into a pep rally for a deadly disease, as Nicolle Wallace and her guests speculated that coronavirus could inflict political damage on President Trump:“The panel was optimistic that enough babies, friends, loved ones and old people would perish from the virus that Trump’s solid base of support would finally begin to waver.” That’s sick, twisted. That they would wish death upon innocents just to ‘get Trump’ shows us it is them we should fear, not Trump.
Wallace, who worked in the Bush administration during the deadly storm, sees an opportunity for the media to blame President Trump for the virus the same way the media blamed President Bush for Hurricane Katrina.
“We gave them a proof point that we were indeed incompetent and also people died,” Wallace characterized the Bush administration’s response to Katrina. “I mean, this has the making structurally for the same kind of moment for President Trump.”
The panel was optimistic that enough babies, friends, loved ones and old people would perish from the virus that Trump’s solid base of support would finally begin to waver.
“And if there’s any a moment that would shake that 40 percent, the folks that would allow him to shoot someone right down fifth — if there’s any a moment, it’s this one because it’s babies, it’s friends, it’s loved ones,” said Eddie Glaude Jr., an African American Studies professor. “And so it seems to me that this is an event that could take down the president.”
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The ban on plastic bags may seem like a good idea on the face of it. But it turns out it’s more virtue signaling than anything that is helpful to the environment.
Banning plastic bags is costly for lower-income shoppers and an inconvenience especially for the elderly. Dirty reusable bags are also a breeding ground for bacteria. They can cause virus outbreaks and deaths from food-borne illnesses. Not to mention, plastic bags make up a minuscule amount of the visible litter nationwide.I know we reuse our plastic bags, mostly to line our small trash cans. I know others in our town use them to pick up dog poop when they take their dogs to one of our public parks. The rest we recycle at our local supermarket. Most of the folks I know around here do the same thing.
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As I explained when this proposal passed last year, people don’t tend to clean their reusable bags often enough or at all. As a result, they become receptacles for bacteria and germs that get passed onto the food items they transport. I’m sure the people who suffered sickness from an outbreak of norovirus because of a reusable grocery bag left in a hotel bathroom, would have a lot to say. In the three months after San Francisco banned plastic bags, the number of foodborne-illness deaths rose 46 percent.
Also, who said plastic bags are single-use? Many people use them to line their bathroom garbage bins or scoop up dog poop. I wonder what they will use now? Perhaps smaller plastic bags.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the snow has been melting away, thoughts of the coming boating season are already intruding, and where town meetings will be taking place this coming week.