Thoughts On A Sunday

It looks like we’re in for a little more snow today, adding to the foot of snow we received two days ago.

One would think we wouldn’t have to deal with much more in the way of snow now that we’re edging into March in a couple of days, but it turns out that March is the snowiest month of the winter on average in this part of the country. Some of the storms that dropped a lot of snow we’ve experienced have taken place in March. (One of the biggest I remember is the Superstorm of March 1993 which started in Texas and dropped snow from South Carolina up to the Maritime Provinces in Canada. We received around 2 feet of snow in the Capital area where I lived at the time.)

However, all of that aside, I have already contacted the boatyard where I store the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout – aka The Boat – about preparing it for the upcoming boating season. I generally have to call right around now to get into the queue for removing it from storage, performing any preseason maintenance, and making sure it is seaworthy before it is put into the water in early May.

It’s still February, yet arrangements for the upcoming boating season are already being made.

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Sanctions against Russia have been imposed for its unwarranted (and greed driven) invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions are being imposed even at the state level.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu has ordered the State Liquor Stores and supermarkets to stop selling and clear their shelves of Russian liquor products. While my home state only sells about $20 million worth of Russian booze each year, it is still income the Russians won’t see.

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Another blow that will weaken the Russian economy is a move by a number of countries to block selected Russian banks access to the international SWIFT global financial messaging system and to impose ”restrictive measures” on its central bank in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine.

This would in effect block Russian banks from sending or receiving funds between them and other banks worldwide.

The measures were announced jointly as part of a new round of financial sanctions meant to impose a severe cost on Russia for the invasion.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she would push the bloc also to “paralyze the assets of Russia’s Central bank” so that its transactions would be frozen.

Cutting several commercial banks from SWIFT “will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally,” she said.

Regardless of the Russian cash reserves, something Putin bolstered in light of his invasion plans, being cut off from the electronic transfer system can seriously cripple their ability to do business outside of Russia.

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It looks like the Russians are on the receiving end of cyber-attacks, with Russian state websites have been taken down and TV stations hacked to broadcast Ukrainian songs.

While the attacks could have targeted infrastructure, these attacked websites that propagandized the attacks on Ukraine and, in part, turned them against the Russian government, and more specifically, Putin.

Russian government websites including the official Kremlin and media regulator pages are down, in what could be the first round of tit-for-tat cyberattacks after the West furiously condemned warmonger Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s telecoms agency also announced that Russian TV channels had been hacked to broadcast Ukrainian songs, the Kyiv Independent reported on Saturday afternoon.

Just hours before Russia’s tyrant launched his aggressive war to ‘demilitarise’ and ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine, Kyiv was hit by a ‘massive’ cyberattack targeting its government and banks.

Propaganda only works if it can get out to the people for which it was created. If it is blocked, or even better, turned against those who were using it, so much the better, at least in this case.

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This is something you won’t see anywhere on the DNC-MSM.

Trump Was Right: Europe’s Reliance On Russian Oil and Gas Emboldened Putin.

Those of us who have been paying attention have known this for a long time. Anyone placing their energy supply in the hands of an adversary which would then give that adversary control over those nations, directly or indirectly, must be considered mentally ill. Trump warned the nations of Europe that making themselves dependent upon Russian natural gas and oil would make them vulnerable to Russian extortion. He was right.

If these weren’t such dark times, it would be rather amusing how completely wrong Democrats and their media stenographers continue to be about President Trump. They are busily swooning onto their fainting couches over Trump reportedly stating that he thought the war-mongering Putin was “smart” to take “over a country for $2 worth of sanctions.”

Anyone who has listened to President Trump blast Russia, China, and/or try to reason with the Europeans/NATO knows that this is a comment not about how “smart” Putin is but about how incredibly, unbelievably, shamefully weak and feckless Biden is.

As Trump later explained:

In a telephone interview with Fox News late Wednesday night, as Russia launched its invasion, Mr. Trump called the unfolding events a “very sad thing for the world and the country.” He said Mr. Biden hadn’t done enough to dissuade Mr. Putin from invading.

“He was going to be satisfied with a piece and now he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News on Wednesday night.

Trump supporters got that immediately, of course, before he spelled it out for them.

The woke partisan media, though, can’t help themselves. Everything that is wrong in the entire world is all down to Orange Man Bad.

Yup, everything that has transpired before and after Trump was in office is his fault. That is the party line the DNC-MSM must toe or be declared non-persons. It doesn’t matter that Trump has been right time after time. We also know that if Trump was still in office Putin wouldn’t have undertaken his Ukraine debacle.

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In little over a week a number of New Hampshire towns will be going to their voting booths to elect town and school officials, vote for/against town and school budgets, and a number of other issues of importance. It will be Town and School District Meeting day.

Some New Hampshire towns hold traditional Town and School District meetings where registered voters attend the meetings to discuss budgetary and other items on the Town and School District warrants, and then vote on them. Others use the option to have two different sets of meetings with the first session being the deliberative meeting(s) to discuss and, if so desired, amend articles on the Town and School District warrants. A month later the second session, the actual elections and voting on the various articles on the Town and School District warrants, takes place. This is also known as the SB2 option, named after New Hampshire’s Senate Bill 2 that gave towns the option to use either system for their individual Town and School District meetings.

The SB2 option was seen as a way to garner more participation by townsfolk to decide how their tax money would be spent on various things. Attendance at traditional town meetings had been falling for quite some time, particularly in the larger towns, particularly because those meetings could last all day if the warrant had a large number of articles, or if there were controversial articles that garnered a lot of debate and amendments before attendees would vote on them. It was thought that splitting the Town and School District meetings might generate more participants if the deliberative and voting sessions were split. SB2 was aimed at the voting sessions – aka Town Election Day – since voting doesn’t take long, even with a lengthy town or school district warrant.

Over the years I have seen the number of interested townsfolk attending our town’s deliberative sessions dwindle – our last one had 24 registered voters not counting town officials and the school district deliberative session saw a few more than that – but voter turnout has hovered around 1,000 to 1,300 out of the approximately 6,000 registered voters in our town of 7,200. (The worst one for voter turnout saw about 800 voters and that was in the midst of a blizzard with heavy snowfall.) Occasionally the voter turnout will be higher, particularly if there are one or more controversial articles on the town or school district warrants.

It is small town democracy, with the people in the town deciding how their town and schools will be run and how much they will spend over the coming year.

One thing I ask when I hear some of my fellow townsfolk complaining about one thing or another going on in our town or our schools: “Did you vote at town meeting?”

If the answer is no, I usually will tell them they have no right to complain since they couldn’t be bothered to vote on the town and school warrants.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where a little more snow is on the way later today, work is going to keep me very busy this coming week, and where February is almost over.

Random Stuff On Saturday

It was a typical winter storm we experienced yesterday here in New Hampshire, with 12 inches of snow falling here at The Gulch. It was only in the teens which meant that the snow was light and fluffy which also meant it was easy to move when it was all done. Since there was little wind the snow pretty much stayed put once it fell or was shoveled away. The lack of drifting meant we didn’t have to deal with shoveling the same snow over and over again. In fact, the snow was so light that I was able to use a push broom to move the snow to one side of the driveway and then a snow shovel to finish the job by moving the piled show to the other side of the snow banks. I had the driveway in front of the Gulch done in less than 15 minutes, with 5 minutes of that time spend cleaning off the trusty RAM 1500.

It isn’t often we get that much snow without there being considerable amount of effort to move it. Even removing snow from the roof with the roof rake was easier than usual!

By 2PM today the driveway was clean and dry and water from the melting snow on the roof could be heard running through the gutters and downspouts.

You could almost think there hadn’t been all that much snow at all.

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I thought I’d mention the goings on in Ukraine, seeing that the Russians are seeing increasing resistance, both on the ground and the air. But to hear it from the DNC-MSM, you would think the Russians are running freely rolling over Ukrainian forces. But seeing reports from non-US news sources we’re finding out that isn’t the case. Some reports have stated that Russian armored units are seeing their T-80 tanks and other armored vehicles being hit with effective anti-tank fire. There have also been other reports that the Ukrainian Air Force have shot down a number of Russian fighters and helicopters, putting a dent in air support for Russian ground forces.

What’s surprising is there is also resistance to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from some of Russia’s allies. Kazakhstan refused Putin’s request for Kazahk troops to bolster the invasion as it has bogged down. What’s even more surprising is the protests against Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in Russia. It looks like Putin doesn’t have the support of many of the Russian people for his ill advised invasion.

This does not bode well for Putin.

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I have to keep wondering how long the rabid Dems are going to keep ignoring the fact that the reason our energy prices have risen is Joe Biden’s ill-advised Executive Orders that shut down a needed oil pipeline, banned any new oil and gas leases on federal lands, and severely limited fracking on existing leased land?

The results are easy to see: Rapidly climbing oil and gas prices as domestic supplies were choked off by Presidential decree. This left us vulnerable as we went from being energy independent to needing to import increasing amounts of oil and distillates from foreign sources that are not known for being friends of the US. That it happened as quickly as it did is not surprising to anyone paying attention and not blinded by their ‘good intentions’, as ignorant as they were.

They have blamed everyone but Biden. They’ve pointed their fingers at Trump, Putin, DeSantis, Abbot, Republicans in general, and anyone else, even those who had no connection in any way to the energy policy or the energy industry.

But everyone else knows exactly why we’ve seen oil, gas, and natural gas prices have skyrocketed. It might explain why the guerrilla campaign against Biden and his energy dictats have been so effective.

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And so it goes...

What's Up With The U.S. Postal Service?

At first, I thought it might just be me. I understand that sometimes there are periods when someone might not get much in the way of mail. But when neither my mother or I don’t get mail at the same time, that tells me it isn’t happenstance.

For some time now we’ve noticed that we don’t receive any mail every other day. Occasionally we only get mail every third day. Asking neighbors, I’ve found that they are experiencing the same thing. Today I asked some of my co-workers, most of them living in other nearby towns, if they have experienced the lack of mail delivery.

Every single one said yes.

I don’t know if it’s a problem beyond our immediate area or if it’s widespread, but it seems the USPS may be having problems with staffing. If they don’t have enough letter carriers to cover all of the delivery routes every day, even with overtime, then moving to every-other-day deliveries make sense. It would have been nice to have received notice that the USPS was moving to every-other-day delivery rather than leaving us wondering what the heck was going on.

Checking the ‘Net, I’ve seen dozens of articles and announcements about delivery delays, but many of them date back to prior to Christmas and are aimed at informing customers to allow longer delivery times due to both Covid and heavy online order volumes.

We aren’t seeing delays here, per se, but non-delivery. No mail one day, then twice the mail the next day. That tells me it’s probably a mail carrier issue, at least on the local level, and not a distribution problem. I have yet to determine if anyone else in the area is receiving mail every other day, but on the days that I am not. That would certainly indicate it’s a lack of mail carriers and not a distribution problem.

Thoughts On A Sunday

This past Friday was a transition day here in N’Hampsa.

When I woke up that morning – just a few minutes before 5:30am – the temperature outside was an unseasonable 59ºF and it stayed there until about 7am and stared to drop. Two hours later it was 34ºF and by noon it was 25ºF.

It had rained the day before and through the night. Between the warm temperatures and the rain, much of the snow and ice on the roof here at The Gulch and on most of the neighboring homes was gone. Maybe 5 to 10% of what had covered the roofs remained. The ice and compacted snow on the driveways was gone. A good portion of the snowpack on the ground was still there after the rain and warm temperatures. With the rapid drop in temperatures, a good portion of that snowpack froze into a solid mass.

On Saturday it was sunny, on and off. It was about 7ºF when I got up, having slept in to 6:30am. We had some light snow in the early afternoon, with just enough to give a very thin coating on the driveways and roofs.

We did see a few minutes of very heavy snow as a squall line came through late in the afternoon, with the visibility dropping to zero. Just as quickly as it started it faded away and stopped, leaving a little more of a coating on the driveways and roofs.

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Have you noticed that YouTube has been increasingly censoring videos? It seems some subjects and content that was devoutly ignored in the past have become taboo, either limiting the age of people allowed to view them, delisting them so the don’t show up in a search (but they can still be viewed if you have the link), or deleting them entirely. They have also gone so far as to demonetize some YouTube channels because the busybody (and woke) censors don’t like the content. There is nothing wrong or prurient about the content, but the knownothing censors disagree with the content and spike it. (This is the same thing that has happened on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, just to name two.) This has led more content providers to move to other platforms like BitChute, Rumble, or Locals.com, just to name a few. While not as large as YouTube nor quite as user friendly, they are not censorious like YouTube. (There is some content these sites will not allow. You can probably guess why.)

Some of my favorite YouTube channels have already made the move though they still post content on YouTube, but they don’t post nearly as much as they have in the past and what they do post tends to be heavily edited so they don’t offend the perpetually offended censors.

As more social media sites become ‘woke’ and increasingly stifle free speech, I expect we’ll see more folks moving to sites like the YouTube alternatives and others like MeWe (a Facebook alternative) and Gab or Parler (Twitter alternatives).

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Seeing the standoff between Russia and Ukraine, I have been wondering if any of this would have taken place if Trump were still president. My gut reaction is “Nope. No way. Putin knows Trump isn’t a pushover.”

I can’t get past the idea the reason Putin is making this move because he knows SloJo and WRBA are weak and will likely fold. He understands our leadership is a paper tiger and that the only place they are ‘strong’ is with harsh language.

One of the side effects of the standoff? Rising oil and natural gas prices.

We have to keep in mind that should hostilities start and the West slaps sanctions on Russia, Russia can retaliate by choking off energy supplies to Europe by more severely restricting natural gas flowing through their pipeline. They can restrict oil and LNG shipments.

We have already seen the effects of the possibility of hostilities at the gas pump, with my local station (the one I use as my reference) listing regular at $3.559. Two weeks ago it was $3.329. Two weeks before that it was around $3.159.

Gee, if only we could supply our own oil and natural gas so overseas actions wouldn’t affect the supply and costs of those commodities. Oh, wait! We used to be able to do that until SloJo signed the Executive Orders which made that impossible and took us from being energy independent to dependent on foreign oil and natural gas supplies from countries that don’t like us very much!!

If anyone were a stooge for Putin, I’d say it is SloJo and WRBA. They certainly seem to be doing what Putin wants, despite the claims by the DNC-MSM that former President Trump was supposedly in Putin’s pocket.

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The Winter Olympics have ended. From what I can tell most people don’t care. Most didn’t care that they took place. I know I haven’t.

One of the ‘controversies’ had nothing to do with China or athletes or judges or the IOC. Instead, it was the Climate Change faithful who decided they had to stir things up by pointing out there was no natural snow at the Beijing Olympics, in turn blaming man-made climate change. The problem?

There usually isn’t much snow in that part of China, with maybe an inch or two each winter. But it’s quite cold there so making snow is easy, which is exactly what the Chinese did. This certainly made some things easier since they could control the amount of snow at each venue and didn’t have to deal with the vagaries of Mother Nature.

Call it Yet Another Climate Change Fail.

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Are Justin Trudeau’s days as Prime Minister of Canada numbered? If a petition to the Governor General of Canada goes through, Parliament could be dissolved and new elections would have to take place.

That would also mean that Trudeau would likely lose his position as PM, something he has proven should happen.

The worst thing that could happen for Canada if things go sideways is a number of Provinces decide they’d be better off becoming independent or petitioning the US for statehood. (The maritime provinces – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, and Newfoundland - had threatened to petition for statehood in the past when Quebec was seeking independence from Canada a few decades ago. Alberta had also expressed interest of joining the US at one point when they felt Ottawa was ignoring them and their problems.)

I am hoping the Canadian patriots succeed with their petition to the Governor General and new elections will take place.

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Just a reminder: Neither Jeffrey Epstein or Jean-Luc Brunel killed themselves.

Neither will Ghislaine Maxwell.

Even the family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is still imprisoned, now allegedly "fears for her safety" after the second death of a high-profile offender related to the case who was in a highly secure facility.

The NYPost reached out to Maxwell's brother, Ian Maxwell, who told the New York tabloid that his family is extremely concerned after Brunel's death - allegedly suicide by hanging, circumstances similar to those surrounding the death of Epstein himself.

Maxwell is due to be sentenced in June. The family added that it's unconscionable that Brunel wasn't on suicide watch, and reiterated that Maxwell has never expressed being suicidal.

Epstein had never expressed being suicidal, either.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the temperatures are cycling up and down like a yo-yo, the ice on the lake has become problematic regarding safety, and where tomorrow is a holiday...for some you.

Canada - The Anglosphere's Second Dictatorship

First, Australia went fully Covid totalitarian, whittling away at one right after another. Covid was used as the excuse to make the Australian people prisoners in their own country and their own homes. Nearby New Zealand almost went as far, but has backed away from full totalitarianism.

Next, it’s Canada, with the PM invoking the Emergency Act, unleashing the police on peaceful protesters - actual peaceful protesters rather than the mostly ‘peaceful’ protesters we’ve seen here in the US – with police using horses to move them and, in a few cases, trampling some of them. Police struck others with batons while they were trying to help those who had been trampled In another case a trucker was struck by a police officer with the butt of his rifle. Threats have been made against some of the pets the truckers have with them, in this case confiscating and euthanizing them.

It seems Prime Minister Fidelito Trudeau cannot fathom the idea that there are Canadians who actually believe in freedom, in making their own decisions, in their rights, and questioning the government when they believe it’s wrong.

This begs the question, “Are we next?”

Goodness knows we’ve seen the governors in a number of states have used Covid to exercise powers that have not been granted to them by their state constitutions. The people in their states have pushed back, sometimes with lawsuits, and in at least one case, a recall election to unseat their governor. Washington has also tried to flex its muscles as well, trying to curtail the rights and freedoms all in the name “the public good”. The problem is that none of those things do the public any good.

We’ll have to wait until this coming November to see which direction our nation will take.

This Certainly Explains Things

(H/T Knuckledraggin)

Thoughts On A Sunday

We had three days in a row that saw temps near or at 50ºF. It made for a lot of melting, specifically of the ice and compacted snow on driveways and some lesser traveled roads. I used the warm temps to chop away and shovel the now loose snow/ice off of the driveway at The Gulch as well as cut back the berms and snowbanks to make room for more snow. (As Katy texted me about that yesterday, “It’s only mid February. There will be more [snow].”

Of course temps today never made it above freezing and we’ll be back below zero tomorrow morning. However we may see the mid-40’s towards the end of the week.

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Another thing I did yesterday that I would have normally done this morning - due entirely to the above normal temperature – was run pre and post church errands. An early morning trip to Walmart and early afternoon trip to BJ’s (an equivalent to Sam’s Club and Costco for those unfamiliar with the chain). All kinds of chores were completed yesterday that would have been spread over two days. There are still a few chores that need to be done today, but they are short and minor in nature.

I certainly don’t mind.

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I don’t know about you, but I know I have been devoutly ignoring the Winter Olympics. The WP Mom has been watching, but most of her attention has been towards the figure skating events.

I haven’t feel the need to support either NBC or the genocidal CCP by watching the Olympics.

There was a time when our family spent hours watching the Olympics. (That was back in the days when ABC was the go-to network, covering the Olympics start to finish.) It was an exciting time and we watched American and Finnish athletes compete in the various summer and winter games.

But over the past few decades the games became more politicized, the coverage less complete and spottier, and the commentators less restrained. With the games having lost the luster they once had, we became less interested as they aren’t what they once were.

Have I seen any of the Olympics? Sort of, and then only because I was in the same room as the WP Mom as she watched skating. I was usually reading, watching movies on my tablet, or writing on the Official Weekend Pundit Laptop. The Olympics were more in the way of background noise rather than something to which I needed to pay attention.

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Oh, it’s SuperBowl Sunday? Really? Hmm. I hadn’t noticed.

Like the Olympics, I shall be devoutly ignoring the SuperBowl. I haven’t been paying attention to the NFL since it caved to a small vocal minority and went woke.

The NFL has been losing fans and TV viewers as they shifted their focus from football to placating people who aren’t fans and never will be. They made the stupid decision to change the name of the Washington Redskins because the woke a**hats decided it was denigrating and racist despite the fact that Native American groups and the tribe who created the logo (based upon one of their historical figures) didn’t want the change and resented the a**hats pushing this down everyone’s throats. But the woke and the NFL knew better.

You don’t remain successful by pissing off your fan base. The NFL is learning that lesson the hard way.

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Is it just me, or does it seem our electrical grid has been becoming less stable and less reliable?

While I haven’t seen any major outages here for a number of years, I have seen warnings by the local Independent System Operator (ISO), ISO New England, warning about increasing demand and decreasing generation capacity. Baseline capacity has been decreasing as various generating facilities have been decommissioned. New ones aren’t coming online at a rate that replaces the lost capacity. Some renewables – wind and solar – have come online but neither can make up for the capacity lost.

It doesn’t help that New England has an inadequate natural gas infrastructure, with only a single pipeline providing natural gas coming in from Pennsylvania. All of the rest comes in via LNG tankers bringing natural gas from hostile nations like Libya, Yemen, and Russia, and doing so at prices well above those of US natural gas. The ‘green’ morons have blocked every attempt to construct a new pipeline, in some cases using the claim that the only reason for the pipeline was “to make money”. Really? It wouldn’t be likely anyone would build a pipeline to lose money, right?

In any case, the increasing instability/unreliability of the electrical grid has been driving sales of generators in the US, both portable and standby types. While the generator manufacturers have no issues with increased sales, the reason for those increased sales does not bode well for us.

One of the people aiming to get a new generator for their home is my friend, K., who lives near Houston. (K. asked me not to use her full name.) She and her husband are spending $11,600 on a new 24-kilowatt Generac generator. (She sent me the receipt.) They put half of the money down last December, but don’t expect to get the machine delivered and hooked up to their home until the end of this year. They recently got an email update telling them that more than 2,500 people are in line ahead of them.

The reason why K. and so many other people in Texas and across the country are buying generators is obvious: the reliability of the electric grid is declining. According to data from the Department of Energy, between 2000 and 2020, the number of what the agency calls “major electric disturbances and unusual occurrences” (read: blackouts) on the U.S. electric grid jumped about 13-fold.

I learned the lesson of having a generator decades ago when I lived in an old farmhouse in a town near Manchester, NH. I and two of my roommates were renovating that farmhouse for the owner and in return we had extremely cheap rent. The farmhouse was on a back road in the hinterlands of the town and whenever there was really bad weather we lost power. That meant no water since the farmhouse used a well for water. After a lengthy power outage that lasted 4 days, we decided it would be a good idea to get a generator. Since then I have always had a generator of some kind. At The Manse we had a standby generator that ran off the 500 gallon propane tank which would give us weeks of run time if needed. Here at The Gulch it’s a portable 7kW dual fuel (gasoline and propane) genset which will handle a good portion of the electrical load. It won’t cover the oven or the clothesdrier, but it takes care of the lights, furnace, refrigerator, chest freezer, microwave, TV, and computers with some capacity left over.

The new house (tentatively named ‘The Redoubt’) will also have a generator, a standby generator setup similar to the one at The Manse.

Unless the trend for dismantling power plants and replacing them with unreliable non-dispatchable sources ends, everyone is going to need a generator. Ironically, these generators will create more CO2 than the ‘green’ energy sources are supposed to eliminate. (The same thing has been seen in South Australia in great numbers because the grid has become so unreliable.)

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After some shenanigans at Dartmouth College where the antifa a**hats decided they weren’t going to allow the Dartmouth Republicans to hold an event which author James Lindsay to speak, the college Republicans moved the event off-campus and over the border in Vermont. The same group of a**hats also blocked journalist Andy Ngo from speaking on campus recently.

To those closeminded intolerant wannabe totalitarians I can on offer the following:

(H/T Knuckledraggin)

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been shifting from moment to moment, the annual Ice Fishing Derby is winding to a close, and where it’s going to get even colder on Monday.

The Canadian Trucker Protests

Watching the trucker protests in Canada it has become quite apparent to anyone paying attention that it is more than just a protest about Covid vaccination mandates. It’s also about basic human rights the government has been eroding away over the past decade. The trucker protest is just one symptom of Canadians disdain for that erosion.

The freedom of speech has been diminished one step at a time, using the ‘hate speech’ excuse to whittle away the ability to express dissent, disdain, or dislike. One grievance group after another has appealed to the Leftists in the government, demanding the government limit free speech and the government has done just that.

The trucker protest has been vilified as racist, a tool of the extreme right, and worse, the action of terrorists wanting to overthrow the government. But what it is is a signal to the government that they have gone too far and the folks have had enough.

The ability to defend themselves has also been greatly diminished, with a defacto ban on the ownership of many types of guns. Canadians are now dependent upon the police to defend them, an impossible task. The government knows this but doesn’t care because the Leftist narrative must be maintained at all costs. (We’ve seen the same thing in Australia, only it’s worse there.)

The trucker protest appears to be crossing the border with a number of protest convoys supposedly planned for the US. One is reportedly targeting LA during the SuperBowl tomorrow. Others are supposedly going to head for Washington DC.

It will be interesting to see if those protests will actually materialize.

Small Town Democracy - 2022

It was the start of our annual exercise in small town democracy.

Tuesday night saw the deliberative session of our little town’s School District Meeting. The members of the School Board and the School Moderator presented the warrant articles, with all but one of the warrant articles dealing with our town’s school budget. Considering there were only six warrant articles presented, the deliberative session didn’t last long. Only one person asked questions about the monies being spent, and then for clarifications. (This was her first time attending the School District Meeting as best I could determine. She did the right thing, asking questions about things she didn’t quite understand.)

In about half an hour it was all done and the session adjourned.

Then on Thursday night our town held its deliberative session of our Town Meeting. The members of the Board of Selectmen, the Town Administrator, and the Town Moderator presented all 26 warrant articles. Most dealt with the town budget, funding of outside agencies, and fiscal items outside the annual budget like capital reserve funds for a number purposes, including the Department of Public Works for highway equipment purchases, the Fire Department for things like fire engines and tankers and related equipment, building repairs for town buildings, maintenance and repair for our town’s public docks on the lake, and so forth. Some of the non-monetary warrant articles dealt with changing a town ordinance and two about selecting an official town flag. (The flag articles garnered the most discussion and even a couple of amendments.)

With the exception of these last three warrant articles, only one person asked any questions about some of the budgetary items, in this case the same women who asked questions during the School District Meeting. A few other attendees spoke, either answering her questions or asking for a clarification of her question(s) or the answers given. Again, she did the right thing by asking questions about articles she didn’t quite understand. I believe her questions helped some of the attendees attain a better understanding of the articles in question.

After about an hour and 20 minutes our Town Meeting adjourned.

Neither of these meetings decided anything but were held to present the school and town warrant articles for discussion, and if needed, amendments.

The real decisions will be made on the second Tuesday of March when the townsfolk will vote to elect town officials and school board members and for or against the school and town warrant articles. The townsfolk will decide how much the town will spend this year and on any changes in town ordinances.

Some folks may not be pleased with the outcome of the second sessions – voting day – but that’s not unexpected. But as I have asked anyone who has gone so far as to complain about what the town or school district is spending or doing, “Did you vote at Town/School District Meeting”? If the answer is ‘No’, I tell them that if they couldn’t be bothered to vote then they forfeited any right to complain.

They usually don’t like hearing that.

A Sign Of The Times

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was another below zero night here at The Gulch. It helped freeze the sleet and snow that fell on Friday into a solid mass which means that moving any more of the last storm’s leavings more difficult. It will take more than just a snow shovel to move it, meaning a spade or ice chopper to break the mass of snow and sleet into pieces that can be moved. Not that I really need to do any more of that since I took care of it yesterday, scraping the driveway in front of The Gulch down to the pavement and pulling snow down from the edge of the roof to prevent ice damming. (We had a problem with an ice dam earlier last week which cause water to leak inside our home.)

The Weather Guys^TM have said we have some more snow coming on Monday or Tuesday, though they haven’t said exactly how much we might get.

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It was 44 years ago the Blizzard of 78 hit New England.

I remember the high winds, whiteouts, high snowfall rate, snowdrifts that reached the eaves on some houses, roads that remained impassible for days, a town on the Cape Cod coast (Hull) that became an island when the only bridge in and out of the town was under water because of the storm surge, summer homes on the Manomet cliffs being washed away when the stormy seas undermined the cliffs and they collapsed which too the homes on top with them, Route 128 – the circumferential highway around Boston – turning into a parking lot with thousands of cars and trucks stuck in the snow and drifts.

I was living just south of Boston back then I was busy during the storm and the days afterwards, working with the state civil defense and local amateur radio groups to coordinate transportation to and from the local hospitals, delivering medications to snowbound people, and manning one of the shelters for those who lost power and had no heat.

I and the others were busy for five days dealing with the blizzard and its aftermath.

While the blizzard’s impact here in New Hampshire wasn’t quite what was seen in the greater Boston area, there were still the heavy snows, wind, and snowdrifts to deal with. There wasn’t nearly as much snow, but what’s the difference between 1-1/2 feet and 3 feet of snow if there’s a lot of drifting snow?

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Will Washington State try to go the route California has talked about and try to impose a ‘Wealth’ tax as a means of taking even more money to spend on things those outside of the greater Seattle area could not care less about? It looks like they are.

They are going to make the same mistake a number of other countries have and drive the wealthy out of the state, the wealthy who will also take their wealth (and the jobs they provide) with them.

California has talked about doing the same thing for a couple of years now but haven’t gone forward with it (yet), perhaps because the wealthy – including many Progressives – have told Sacramento they would pull up stakes and leave, taking their money and businesses with them if they were stupid enough to pass such a tax. We know that isn’t an idle threat as we’ve already seen the flight of capital, businesses, and people from the Pyrite State for friendlier business/tax climates due to the already confiscatory tax and regulatory environment. A wealth tax would have seen that exodus turn into a flood of people and businesses fleeing California.

Do the Washington State legislators think the same thing wouldn’t happen in their state if they impose a tax that will have such broad implications? It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that they are only paying attention to the piles of cash the millionaires and billionaires in Washington represent and ignoring human nature.

What a bunch of morons.

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We’ve heard that the number of deaths attributed to Covid has passed 900,000 here in the US.

Sorry, but I’m calling Bulls**t on this one.

Again, the total includes the deaths for those who died who also tested positive for Covid (in other words with Covid), not just those who died from it. It would be easy to apply the same ratio Italy used when revising their Covid death total downward, reducing it by 97%. However, I will be more generous, using a 90% reduction for US deaths which would reduce the actual number of Covid deaths here to 90,000 over a 2-year period. That’s more akin to what we would see if we experienced two consecutive bad flu seasons.

I have to wonder if the CDC will revise the death toll by counting only actual Covid deaths?

Probably not. It wouldn’t serve the narrative.

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Biden has replaced Jimmy Carter and Obama as the ‘worst president ever’ and he managed to do it during the first year of his (hopefully) only term.

Obama wasn’t kidding when he said “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” If anything, he understated things. Then again, SloJo has been deteriorating at a faster rate than WRBA had planned on and their ability to cover it up has been dwindling, even with help from the DNC-MSM.

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I don’t know about you, but I know I am sick to death of the whole Covid thing. I am tired of it. I am tired of people who don’t know me or my circumstances deciding for me what I can and can’t do regarding things they should have absolutely no say about.

They want us to wear masks that both we and they know really don’t work.

They want to push the idea that the latest Covid variant is more contagious (it is) and just as deadly (it isn’t) as the previous variants, a means of extending their control of an increasingly non-compliant population. This control includes everything from mask mandates to draconian measures to ‘control’ the unvaxxed and unmasked.

I am tired of the government overstating the number of Covid deaths, the sole purpose of which is to justify the very measures people are increasingly coming to resist or ignore because they are tired of them, too. (The only exception to that are the so-called Karens who love to lord it over the rest of us, using our non-compliance as an excuse to pester and harangue us and to virtue signal to the rest of the Karens.)

I am tired of hearing stories about parents/teachers/child care workers being condemned because they can’t keep masks on their two/three/four/five-year olds or businesses banning children under 5 if they weren’t vaccinated. (The only problem is that at the time this was happening no children under 5 were vaccinated because none of the vaccines had been approved for children under 5.)

I am tired of the two-year running commentary from the news media, the daily totals of new infections, new hospitalizations, and new deaths. Rather than being informative it is now macabre. You can almost hear the excitement in the news clone’s voice if there is an increase in any of those numbers.

I am tired of it all. I’m sure all of you are, too.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s been wicked cold, we have a little more snow on the way starting late Monday evening, and where a number of the towns around the lake will start their town and school district meetings to decide how much they’ll be spending in the coming year.

It Wasn't A Nor'easter

Here it is, another weekend, and we’ve had another storm.

While not anywhere near what we saw a week ago, it was still a dangerous storm. It was an entirely different storm, with the majority of the snowfall up north rather than the south and along the seacoast. This time there was also a lot of sleet and freezing rain. Here at The Gulch we saw a couple of inches of sleet before it turned to snow. It certainly made shoveling more difficult.

The sleet and freezing rain certainly made travel difficult, but we know how to handle it up here. That didn’t mean there weren’t accidents, but there weren’t as many as one might have expected. Then again most folks stayed home rather than venturing out. Because so many already had the means of working from home and a lot of schools were still set up for remote learning, it made sense for people to stay home.

It’s winter up here in New England, and we get snow, sleet, and freezing rain during the winter, so none of these things are surprising. They are things to be experienced and, for some, endured.