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.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.
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.
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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.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.
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.
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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.”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.
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.Trump supporters got that immediately, of course, before he spelled it out for them.
“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.
The woke partisan media, though, can’t help themselves. Everything that is wrong in the entire world is all down to Orange Man Bad.
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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.