Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been snowing very lightly since dawn, barely accumulating between then and noon.

I did my usual Sunday morning Walmart shopping run – most often around 8 A.M. - and I saw a lot of the ‘Pickup’ shoppers making the rounds with their mobile racks and shopping lists. A lot more than usual. Then I remembered the oncoming snowstorm and it suddenly made sense.

Snowstorm panic shopping.

In this case it was people who sent their shopping lists in to Walmart and letting their shoppers do all the running around.

What gets me is that it isn’t like we don’t have snowstorms up here. It is New England after all. It isn’t like this is a monster storm. At best (or worst, depending upon your point of view), we’ll see 10 inches before it winds down late Monday. It’s an amount barely worth mentioning, at least up here. But that didn’t mean some folks around here – think ‘folks from away’ – might believe they’ll be house bound for days and days, so are doing their panic shopping by proxy.

I bought a few cans of cat food, Dr. Pepper, Half-and-Half, and a few more of the items I usually buy there every Sunday morning.

The only concession I have made to this coming snowstorm is moving the Official Weekend Pundit Generator from one part of the garage to another to make it easier to deploy if the power goes out...again.

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Are you better off than you were two years ago?

I know I’m not. I have no doubt you aren’t either.

As one commenter put it:

Am I better off than I was two years ago?

Not even close.

I'm still paying more for electricity, gasoline, propane, food, clothing, construction materials, car/truck parts, and a whole host of other things. Any pay raises I received were canceled out in only a few months because of inflation.

Despite the Democrat Propaganda Machine is cranked up to ‘11’ trying to sell the idea that the worst is over, no one but the ‘faithful’ are buying it.

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I’ve come across yet another definition of woke that I find works as well as mine, in this case by way of GraniteGrok:

“A state of awareness only achieved by those dumb enough to find injustice in everything except their own behavior.”

Or as I have put it in one form or another, “Delusional narcissists offended on behalf of people they think should be offended, but aren’t offended...which offends them.”

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I keep hearing about an impending Spring offensive by Russia into Ukraine. Some have claimed Russia will employ 600,000 troops in this offensive.

I have a question about this: Where the heck is Russia going to get those 600,000 troops?

Those 600,000 troops would be a little over half of Russia’s entire military. (This depends upon whose numbers you believe.)

At the end of 2021 the Russian ground forces had about 400,000 men while the navy and air force each had about 150,000. About a third of air force personnel were paratroopers or air mobile infantry. The navy had about 12,000 marines, who guarded naval bases in peacetime. Right now that means the heavy Russian losses since the invasion began, and failure to mobilize many replacements, reduced the army to about 250,000 personnel. The airborne forces and marines also suffered heavy losses but more of them are still in service.

--snip--

Russian armed forces were supposed to have over a million men but that goal has never been met and at the end of 2021 the total was about 750,000. That is now about 400,000, including the air force and navy. Mobilizations of new conscripts and men who had served the one year of conscript service failed to replace all the losses, in part because the mobilized men knew that the war in Ukraine was not going well and most men sent there had little training, equipment or leadership. Most of the junior officers were killed or disabled during the first months of the war and replacements take months to train.

So where are the 600,000 troops for this impending offensive going to come from? Troops Я’ Us?

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For decades we’ve seen all kinds of things being smuggled across the border from Mexico into the US: drugs, guns, liquor (during Prohibition) and people. We can add something new to that list:

Eggs.

Traffickers are attempting to sneak thousands of Mexican “huevos” across the border per week after skyrocketing prices have made them a hot commodity, costing up to $8 per dozen in certain parts of America.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said they saw an uptick of 108% in egg seizures in the last three months of 2022, according to Border Report and violators end up having to shell out for a fine of up to $10,000.

Between the avian flu that decimated chicken flocks and inflation fueled by the Biden Administration’s economy destroying policies, is it any wonder eggs have become something new to smuggle?

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That’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where more snow is coming, the lake still hasn’t frozen over yet, and where yet again Monday is returning...