News broke recently about New York City’s Growing Migrant Crisis (GMC). The Sanctuary City that never sleeps is feeling put out and  seeking sanctuary from the teeming mass of Illegals landing on its ‘shores.’

Mayor Eric Adams has been keen to blame southern governors for this bombardment of human flesh, but the UK Daily Mail has another story to tell. It involves the Salvation Army in California, putting Illegals on planes to New York and paying for it with tax dollars laundered through FEMA.

 

The Salvation Army has been facilitating the rampant migration of refugees into New York City, funding their efforts using FEMA emergency cash, and adding to the Big Apple’s crisis.

Reports emerged this week the charity has been helping migrants fly into New York City despite the asylum seekers already being inside the United States.

Assistance documentation printed by the organization was shared to X on Wednesday, showing TSA airport staff are handed a note saying the migrants ‘must cross the country,’ where they will await ICE check-ins.

 

Under whose authority? The Pfederal government.

 

‘At the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The Salvation Army provides services to migrants released into the country by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency,’ said David Jolley, Director of Communications at The Salvation Army USA.

‘The services are fully funded by federal dollars as part of FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program.

 

As everyone tries to figure out what to do, Joe Biden has announced that becasue of the law, or some such thing, he can’t just stop building a wall that Congress already funded. We are entering an election year. Perhaps his handlers think he must pretend to follow the law for at least a while.

While he’s at it, Biden should meet with Mayor Adams and Mayor Johnson (Chicago’s Brandon) and look at “the law.” Will they be surprised to find that Congress also requires the government to control entry into the United States and that asylum rules are outlined, as are the conditions for the return of illegal entrants?

It’s all in there. All you have to do is read it, and then – this might be confusing to the people in the Executive Branch – Execute the was as passed.

Mayor Adams best not hold his breath except to then use it to ask FEMA to launder your money to him instead of the Salvation Army. He could say ‘separation of church and state’ or some such thing. The Pfeds have been sending billions to Religious charities over decades to relocate illegals relabeled as refugees, and not a peep from the Wall of Separation folks.

Maybe this new man-caused disaster will have them rethinking their tack.

Who am I kidding? This is all deliberate. Overwhelming the system. Mayor Adams will have it suck it up, especially after his trip to the border. He thinks he has problems.

 

The post NYCs ‘Migrant Crisis’ Worsening Thanks to … The Salvation Army? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Apparently, in Prince William County, Virginia, the school board has been looking for ways to cut down on the number of angry comments made by angry parents at their public meetings.

Here’s what they came up with:  They limited the number of speakers to 20 at any one meeting.  The speakers have to sign up ahead of time.  If one of the first 20 to sign up doesn’t show up, or doesn’t speak, his slot can’t be filled by anyone else.

So what happened?

Teachers’ unions orchestrated an effort to have teachers (who are in the middle of renegotiating a contract) sign up for all the spots and then refuse to speak at the meetings — effectively eliminating the public comment sections of the meetings.

You can read more about this here.

I always have mixed feelings when reading about this kind of thing because of my time on the select board of my town.

We had our own share of disruptive behavior at meetings, and at some point, we had to recognize that a board meeting is different than a board hearing and organize our meetings accordingly (holding public comments until the end and limiting comments to three minutes).

The purpose of a board meeting is to do the work of the board — get the bills paid, make decisions about roads and equipment, decide which grants to apply for, and so on.  In order to keep things transparent, meetings are open to the public so that anyone can come and listen.

The purpose of a board hearing is to solicit input from residents regarding things like proposed ordinances, changes to the structure of town government, and so on.  In order to fulfill the purpose of such a meeting, anyone can come and speak.

The thing is, the right to listen is not the same as the right to speak.  If you have any doubt about that, try asking to stand up and speak in a court proceeding or during a session of the legislature.  Those bodies are there to do work, not to listen to input.

I also think about the old joke:  If a tree falls in the forest, and Helen Keller is the only person there, does it make a sound?

If you speak to a board that doesn’t care what you have to say, have you made a sound?  You have — but not because the board is there.  You’ve made a sound because of the other people who are there and the people who will watch the video later on.

I’m surprised that no one has thought of doing this:  Hold a public meeting, put effigies of the board members at the front (possibly with fingers in their ears), and let parents rage — preserving the whole thing for YouTube viewers, who are really the intended target anyway.

(A picture of the effigies would make great fundraising T-shirts. Be sure to send GraniteGrok a share of the proceeds, please.)

The real issue isn’t that you aren’t being allowed to speak at board meetings.  It’s that the board members don’t want to hear what you have to say. And you can’t make them hear it.

But that doesn’t mean they should be able to keep anyone else from hearing it. And the only place they can do that is in a board meeting.  So go to those meetings to listen, but when it’s time to speak, have your own damn meeting.

 

The post If a Comment Drops at a Board Meeting, Does It Make a Sound? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Since the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Democrats have crouched in their lairs or stopped over cauldrons brewing up some response. We must disarm the people, they say, so given that decision, what should we do?

Ignore the decision. Deny the right to self-defense or the Constitutional Amendment enumerated to keep the government’s hands off it—business as usual.

The product of their mulling and stewing is the private building consent rule. Legislators would use any leverage found from prohibiting firearms in places like Hospitals, transportation hubs, schools, and government buildings and restrict more public places. Any public places which was an infringement too far. A District Court has stomped on the idea and left it a mess.

Emphasis in the original.

 

“The biggest win was stopping the ‘private building consent rule,’” which declares all private property that is open to the public to be a prohibited place — unless the property owner expressly allows individuals to enter the premises with a firearm.

“These private building consent restrictions were cooked up by anti-Second Amendment advocates to effectively nullify the Bruen decision. They are the heart of the states’ response to Bruen. And courts are having nothing to do with them. Today’s ruling was the fourth on enjoining these private consent rules from taking effect,”

 

Much like the debate over may issue and shall issue, progressive states or their left-leaning political subdivisions throw everything at the wall and hope some of it sticks. From there, they then grow their infringement. Trying to make any list of  “public spaces” a gun-free zone would make legal carry cumbersome to impossible, which is the same thing as an effective ban.

In a surprise ruling, a Maryland court and an Obama-appointed judge have made it clear that this doesn’t work.

 

[District Court Judge George L.] Russell wrote that “The Second Amendment ‘presumptively guarantees’ citizens the right to carry arms ‘in public for self-defense” and that in his opinion, under the proposed law the citizens suing the government “have suffered an injury in fact.”

“State Defendants mischaracterize Plaintiffs’ injury — it is not merely the inability to carry in privately-owned buildings,” he wrote.

“Rather, their injury is the threat of prosecution for carrying firearms in places that, under prevailing law, they have previously had the presumptive right to do so absent express prohibition by the property owner,” Russell wrote.

 

One small step for natural rights, one giant leap for… similar legislation to appear as states return to doing whatever they think of as the people’s business. That’s the thing about Democrats: they don’t stop until your rights are dead!

Here in New Hampshire, where we’ve had recent success protecting the natural right to self-defense from gun grabbers (by rolling back infringements), we should expect to see a few bills that lean in this direction despite the ruling.

It’s annoying, but Republicans could learn something from it.

 

HT | Tactical Sh!t

The post Maryland’s Attempt to Flank the Bruen Decision Has a Bad Day In Court appeared first on Granite Grok.

This week, Republicans and Democrats got together to avert a government shutdown. Too bad. There’s so much that ought to be shut down.

Useless Cabinet departments, for example, like Housing and Urban Development, Labor and Agriculture. Agriculture employs almost 100,000 people. Why? Independent farmers grow our food. They don’t need a giant department.

Let’s get rid of the Department of Education, too. Why does it even exist? Education is a local responsibility and none of the federal government’s business. Yet its spending is up 300% over the last 10 years.

The department didn’t even exist before 1979. Has education improved since then? No. Government’s grand plans, like No Child Left Behind and Common Core, helped no one but bureaucrats. (RELATED: SUZANNE DOWNING: Tell Me Government Is Too Big Without Telling Me It’s Too Big)

Trying to justify itself, the department funded studies of everyone’s favorite government program, Head Start. The “experts” were surprised to learn that the much-praised program has no effect. By third grade, there was no difference between kids that attend and those who don’t.

Education is best left to local governments and parents.

We don’t need a Commerce Department. After all, commerce just happens. Get rid of the bureaucrats and sell the buildings.

Get rid of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

I know, Medicare is popular. “Free” stuff always is. But government’s current health promises are unsustainable. As we live longer and want the newest and best medicines, Medicare is on track to go broke.

I’m on Medicare. I get everything my doctor suggests. I never even ask about price. That’s insane.

Medicare and Social Security take money from the young and give it to those of us who had decades to invest and save. That’s just unfair.

Let people shop for free-market plans. Let the market work.

Once people pay their own bills, competition will drive prices down. Health care would be less confusing and bureaucratic.

Abolish the Food and Drug Administration. It’s a big reason drugs are so expensive. It was created years ago when people were hurt by quack medicines. But today we have the internet; sites like Drugs.com let us decide for ourselves if we want to risk taking a drug.

Get rid of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the destructive War on Drugs. The DEA spends $3 billion a year and does little but raise the price of drugs, switching users from drugs like heroin to deadlier things like fentanyl.

Did we learn nothing from alcohol Prohibition? Banning liquor created Al Capone and organized crime.

Today there are no beer gangs or vodka cartels only because alcohol is legal.

The drug warriors’ rules don’t protect us from drugs. They mostly enrich murderous drug cartels.

Get rid of subsidies for NPR and PBS.

Kill the Export-Import Bank and the Small Business Administration. Businesses should operate on their own. They shouldn’t get handouts and dubious advice from government bureaucrats.

Privatize air traffic control. Canada and dozens of other countries already did, and their systems are safer and work better. That would save $2 billion, and your flight would be more likely to arrive on time.

Likewise, privatize Amtrak. Save $7 billion.

Privatize the post office. Today there are lots of better alternatives. (RELATED: REP ANDY BIGGS: Congress Can’t Continue The Budget Insanity. We’re Standing Against A Continuing Resolution)

Of course, I’m dreaming. Government programs don’t get shut down. They just grow.

Washington claims every one of its activities is crucially important. But that’s nonsense.

If the Nov. 17 deadline isn’t met and the government shuts down, will you even notice?

Few outside the media and the Washington bureaucracy noticed the last shutdown.

Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, air traffic control, the passport agency and irresponsible lending to college students will continue during a “government shutdown.”

Democrats, sleazily, say they’d close national parks. That’s a government product that people definitely like. But they are outdoors! It’s stupid to close the gates (Donald Trump didn’t close them during when government shut down during his term).

They’ll close parks because Democrats and many Republicans want to convince us that everything good comes from government.

It doesn’t.

Go ahead. Shut most of it down.

 

John Stossel | Daily Caller News Service

COPYRIGHT 2023 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The post If The Government Shut Down, Would You Even Notice? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The world is a more dangerous place with Joe Biden in the White House, or this case, Delaware. We have been watching our status as a world power erode since January 2021, when Biden raised his hand, took the oath, and began his destruction of America.

We have been watching a futile battle for survival by Ukraine and the rise of China and Russia as evil players on the world stage. We have been watching as Taiwan is under constant threat of assault by China. We have been watching North Korea flex its muscles and strengthen its relationship with Russia. And we have watched as Iran continues to race toward a nuclear weapon. Joe Biden released $6 Billion last month of Iran’s frozen assets, and he tried to get us to believe they could only use the money for humanitarian aid. Joe Biden also thinks that it was a real rabbit that pushed him around the White House lawn at Easter time. Joe Biden is a fool, and now, his fingers are on a deadly attack on Israel.

As we slept on Friday night, militants from Gaza invaded Israel, killing and taking hostage civilians on the streets. These invaders dragged Israelites, both dead and alive, back into Gaza while 2,200 missiles lit the sky above Israel. Fortunately, the Iron Dome effectively intercepted many of the incoming missiles, but it could not hit all of the deadly projectiles, and many hit their mark in the Holy Land.

Israel is always on high alert as they are the target of many of its neighboring countries. It is all hands on deck for Israel as they call 10,000 young men to bolster their active military. Hamas promises to carry the battle deep into Israel, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, calls this attack Israel’s 9-11.

Surprisingly, Israel was caught off guard and was not prepared for Friday’s attack. As Gaza troops attacked the defensive boundaries of Israel, they took control of small villages and are now in control of land within Israel’s borders. This attack is the worst on Israel in fifty years, and the consensus is that Iran backs this effort by Hamas. The lax policies of the Biden Administration have paved the way for the aggression by Iran. Trump had crippled Iran with sanctions and slowed their quest for nuclear arms. Biden erased all of those restraints and gave Iran the green light to raise money by selling oil to Russia and speeding up their nuclear program.

Biden said that we pledge our support to Israel sounds hollow and meaningless after allowing Iran to work with Hamas to stage this attack. Every move that Biden makes proves Robert Gates correct when he said it best: Joe Biden has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy debate in decades.

Joe Biden is the wrong person at the wrong time to be behind the desk in the Oval Office. He is harming us at home with the economy and the Border, and now we see how dangerous he is on the international stage. Joe Biden is wrong for America, and Republicans have to unite in their effort to make Biden a one-term President. No more infighting. Unseat Biden and save America.

 

The post When You Give 6 Billion Dollars to Iran … appeared first on Granite Grok.

In the inception of our nation, Pastors played a key role. Unfortunately, that is often overlooked in the annals of recorded history. This week, I want to focus on that role as recorded in history from various sources.

The reason perhaps that their influence is not given the prominence it deserves is because it was not an organized force that could be numbered, and neither was it set forth with a list of goals to be achieved.

However, the pulpits of colonial America were the voice of opposition to loyalty to the Crown.  In fact, King George III said, “This colonial opposition is nothing but a Parsons (pastors) rebellion.”

Independence was boldly preached from scripture in all of the 13 original colonies. The address from the pulpits brought about enthusiasm, and their prayers caused courage to arise in the hearts of the congregants. 

These humble Pastor’s produced the minute-men, who took to arms against the tyranny of the King. The first army of the American Revolution was birthed in the hearts of these men from continual exhortation to resist oppression. The battle of Bunker Hill was the first, and the battle at Lexington and Concord sounded the battle cry of these men to take up arms.

One great example of Pulpit Polity was the preaching of Pastor Peter von Muhlenberg, who was known as “the fighting parson of the American Revolution.” He was the Pastor of the German/English-speaking Episcopal Church in Woodstock, Virginia. He had received a circular letter from General George Washington requesting that military regiments be raised for the army. His famous Sunday sermon was taken out of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. At the end of his message, he made an appeal to the congregation by stating that “there is at time for war and a time for peace, there is a time to pray and a time to fight.” He then pulled off his clerical robe, and underneath, he was wearing the uniform of a colonel in the Continental Army. His parishioners readily enrolled in the army. He served for eight years.

In 1774, the First Provincial Congress of Massachusetts gave credit and appreciation to the Pulpit ministry as loyal friends of civil and religious freedom. Their address to the clergy is as follows.

“Reverend Sirs: When we contemplate the friendship and assistance of our ancestors, the first settlers of this province (while overwhelmed with distress), received from the pious Pastors of the churches of Christ, who, to enjoy the rights of conscience, fled with them into this land, then a savage wilderness, we find ourselves filled with the most grateful sensations. And we cannot but acknowledge the goodness of Heaven in constantly supplying us with preachers of the gospel whose concern has been in the temporal and spiritual happiness of the people. In a day like this, when all the friends of civil and religious liberty are exerting themselves to deliver this country from its present calamities, we cannot but place great hopes in an order of men who have ever distinguished themselves in their country’s cause; and do, therefore recommend to the ministers of the gospel in the several towns and other places in the colony, that they assist us in avoiding that dreadful slavery with which we now are threatened, by advising the people of their several congregations, as they wish their prosperity, to abide by, and strictly adhere to, the resolutions of the Continental Congress,” at Philadelphia, in October of 1174, “as the most peaceable and probable method in preventing confusion and bloodshed, and of restoring that harmony between Great Britain and these colonies, on which we wish might be established not only the rights and liberties of America, but the lasting happiness of the whole British empire. 

Resolved, That the foregoing address be presented to all the ministers of the gospel in the province.”

So, as you can see, there was no conflict between church and state. The Pastors were respected and received as viable instruments to help in the massive changes that were occurring in the colonies.

In closing, I am providing a list of titles of the numerous ELECTION SERMONS that were preached throughout the colonies during the American Revolution:

1. Government corrupted by Vice, and recovered by Righteousness. A sermon preached by Samuel Langdon, D.D. President of Harvard College in Cambridge.
2. The Sermon preached before the Honorable Council, and the Honorable House Representatives, of the State of Massachusetts-Bay in New England at Boston, May 27, 1778.
3. A Sermon preached before the Honorable Council, and Honorable House of Representatives of the State of Massachusetts-Bay New England, May 31, 1780, by Simeon Howard, A.M.Pastor of West Church in Boston
4. The United State elevated to Glory and Honor. A Sermon, preached before His Excellency Jonathan Trumbull, Esq., L.L. D. Governor and Commandeering Chief, and the Honorable Assembly of the State of Connecticut, convened at Hartford, at the Anniversary Election, May 8th 1783. By Ezra Stiles, D.D., President of Yale College.

These sermons were spoken directly to the need for character in civil government. You can look them up online and read them for yourself. Again, now amazing that secular culture, if you will, was open to the spiritual guidance and input directed to the culture of the day!

Happy Reading!
Pastor Allen Cook
Grace Ministries International
Brentwood NH

 

Pulpit Polity is a regular Sunday morning feature on GraniteGrok.com.

The post Pulpit Polity – The Parsons Rebellion appeared first on Granite Grok.

A consortium of ‘experts’ is making a case for Climate Change. To get there from here, we need a “71 percent reduction in personal vehicle ownership.” Why? All that rare earth metals mining is bad for the planet.

That’s refreshing. Someone who thinks they know everything has come to a conclusion we’ve been sharing with each other for years. The Net Zero fantasy is little more than emissions offshoring. This battery fetish thing is wrecking the planet, local ecosystems, and – to borrow from the Democrat Dictionary, indigenous peoples.

Their solution?

Smaller Lithium batteries, smaller and fewer vehicles, and even smaller homes. Have Less, Do, Less, Be Less. A phrase we attribute to the Democrat party. It’s the Left’s agenda boiled down to a bumper sticker. And they don’t mean them. They mean you.

 

“Making bus routes, metros, and electric bikes faster, safer, and more convenient will disproportionately support low-income and non-white community members – who are more likely to live near high traffic areas and bear the environmental health burdens of relatively poorer air quality compared to higher-income and white counterparts,” the group further said.

 

The dream as marketed is impossible, so we, the consortium, are here to tell you that even as you pretend to promote climate justice, you are doing it wrong. Large, comfortable vehicles with increasingly longer range are not the answer.

 

“This report intends to empower people and policymakers across the country with the arguments, evidence, and proposals they need to advocate for a maximally just transportation future,” the report reads.

 

At least they’re semi-honest about it all. The cost to forcibly transition everyone from fossil fuels needs to be reimagined, and they are the new Pied Pipers of Net Zero; come to lead your children away from the world you live in and place them in Climate Cult foster care where things get increasingly smaller, less useful, and unreliable.

And they are not going to give them back, your children or modernity, even if you agree to play along.

 

The post Climate Consortium Says EV Batteries Need to be Smaller, Their Range Shorter appeared first on Granite Grok.

The title of this article is a question that leads to many others. First, it assumes we are off track, and half the country may think we haven’t gone far enough down the Progressive trail. The followers of Barack Obama and Joe Biden would tell you we have a long way to go to transform America.

I bet they cannot tell you what America should look like, but they know we are not there yet. These folks either do not watch the news or view a filtered version and never see the violence, crime, corruption, and evil permeating our big cities and even our suburbs. I recall a reporter doing a live shot during the Summer of Love. Standing in front of a building engulfed in flames, surrounded by gangs of people throwing objects at the police, he tells his audience that the protests were peaceful and orderly. Please don’t trust your eyes. Trust me as I tell you the truth. What the reporter does is sad, but the fact the technique works is sadder.

If you are in the other half of society, you see and believe we have drifted far off our path. You have traditional values and believe in the reasons our forefathers fought for and worked to draft a blueprint for our incredible nation. Unlike the Left, who see America as evil and needs to be torn down and replaced with something more pure, those on the Right think we have won the lottery being born in America. The Left is disgusted with America, and the Right is thankful for all America offers. The Left cannot forgive our past, and the Right recognizes we have made mistakes but puts them in the context of the time and strive to be better.

Assuming readers of my articles lean right, let’s discuss what it will take and how long it will take to right this ship. Unfortunately, the answer to the second part is much longer than it took to get us to where we are today. The indoctrination of our children took time. Reversing that impact on a generation will require an admission of the indoctrination and then a reprogramming of the majority of our younger people. Our education system has affected the culture of the ages, and getting these people to return to our way of thinking will be tedious and challenging. It is presumptuous to say our way is the right way, but it is certainly better than what we see today and where we are heading.

Our culture has changed in the last forty years. Respect, discipline, and the ability to communicate and have relationships with others is gone. We no longer want to work hard and think we are owed a good life supplied by the Government. We want an education that prepares us for nothing to be paid for by anyone but the student. We have no idea where the money will come from; just keep it coming. We enter businesses by force, strip the shelves of merchandise, and deny accountability, for this is reparations for the harm spread on us by an oppressive elite.

Brick-and-mortar operations are abandoning large cities or putting their merchandise behind glass, lock, and chain. These stores close, leaving the now unemployed staff behind and taking their attraction and tax dollars with them.

Until we can modify this new culture to be more like the nation’s culture of the 60s and 70s, then we will continue to slide towards the slow, painful death we are inflicting on ourselves. The Government cannot solve the issue, but it can work with families, schools, churches, etc, to ensure we are all on the same page. We need to get back to the simplicity of human interaction. The younger generations need to find purpose and relevance if we are ever to get this mess turned around.

 

The post What Will It Take To Get Us Back On Track appeared first on Granite Grok.

On October 10, there will be a rally at the capital for the abuse victims of the Sununu Center from 2:30-6 PM. There was a rally on September 27th, and at that rally, victims shared their stories, and a whistleblower shared her story.

Cases of sexual and physical abuse date back to the founding. What the victims want is a federal investigation into the case.

According to many of the victims, the state was notified about abuses repeatedly and did nothing, so it isn’t prudent for the state to investigate the state. Instead, the victims want the federal government to intervene and handle the case.

Last year, around this time, I interviewed both Frank Staples and Adam Cordero, who are victims of the center. Adam’s story is harrowing. He was sexually abused every night by a night guard, and then the night guard was allowed to take him from the center to his house, where he had full access to abuse him. The individual who okayed that transfer, Evelyn Blaze, became the head of DCYF. She is no longer the head, but she has not faced any consequences for that decision.

At the September 27th rally, there were just about 50 people at the rally, but we hope for a larger turnout for the October 10th rally. Come to show your support and sign a petition to have the federal government investigate the crimes. Let’s shoot for 100 people at this rally.

The post Sununu Center Rally 3.0 appeared first on Granite Grok.

In a blow to due process safeguards that protect Americans against reckless and wrongful arrests by government officials, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hold police accountable for misidentifying and wrongly arresting an innocent man twice in five years, then jailing him for three days before taking a few minutes to verify his identity.

Although David Sosa shares the same name as a man from another state named in an outstanding warrant more than 20 years old, he has a different date of birth, height, weight, and social security number, and did not have any tattoos, unlike the suspect listed in the warrant. Nevertheless, police failed to take the necessary, fundamental steps to confirm Sosa’s identity before arresting and jailing him. Weighing in before the Supreme Court in Sosa v. Martin County, Florida, The Rutherford Institute warned that if police are not held accountable for violating Sosa’s rights, then nothing will deter law enforcement officers from wrongfully arresting him over and over again or from committing similar reckless behavior toward other innocent citizens.

“What this case shows is that we have no real due process,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the powers-that-be want to lock you up, then you’ll be locked up, whether you’re innocent or guilty, with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.”

Related: 11th Circuit Says Police Can Detain Anyone for Three Days If They Have the Same Name as The One On Their Warrant

In 2014, David Sosa was stopped for a traffic violation by a sheriff’s deputy for Martin County, Florida, which is where Sosa lived. Sosa worked in research and development of airplane engines. The deputy discovered an arrest warrant for a “David Sosa” from 22 years earlier out of Texas for selling crack cocaine. Even though Sosa had a different date of birth, height, weight, and social security number, and did not have any tattoos as listed for the accused in the warrant, the deputy arrested him anyway. After three hours, the sheriff’s department confirmed Sosa was not the same person named in the warrant and released him. However, four years later, another deputy from the same department made a traffic stop on Sosa and found the same outstanding warrant. Once again, despite the identifying information on the warrant not matching his description and Sosa informing the deputy about the previous misidentification incident, the deputy arrested Sosa on the same warrant. But this time the jail held Sosa for three days before taking just a few minutes to run his fingerprints to confirm his identity and release him.

After his release, Sosa sued the sheriff’s department for violations of his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable seizure and to not be deprived of liberty without due process, but the trial court ruled that the deputies had not violated Sosa’s rights and dismissed the case. On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the case, likewise ruling that Sosa’s constitutional rights were not violated, and a concurring opinion reluctantly claimed that the sheriff’s department would be protected by qualified immunity anyway. In refusing to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court lets stand the lower court rulings, which failed to hold police accountable for their reckless actions.

James C. Martin and Taylor A. Marcusson of Reed Smith LLP helped advance the arguments in the brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

 

| The Rutherford Institute

The post In a Blow to Due Process, Supreme Court Gives Police the Green Light to Misidentify, Arrest and Jail Innocent Americans appeared first on Granite Grok.

We hear time and time again how New Hampshire voters are so engaged, so informed, blah, blah, blah. But there are only two explanations for why New Hampshire voters continue to elect mediocre grifters like Jeanne Shaheen, Annie Kuster, Chris Pappas and MAGGIE HASSAN. Either they are not so engaged, informed, blah, blah, blah OR they are lunatics who support funding actual Nazis … see tweet below where grifter-Hassan pledges unending, unlimited support for the Nazi-infested, Corruptocracy called Ukraine … believe  unborn seven, eight even nine month old babies are NOT human, want to live in a Police State, etc., etc., etc..

The post Maggie Hassan Supports Nazis appeared first on Granite Grok.

There are people (including readers of GraniteGrok) who claim that a school choice program that is funded by taxes is a ‘free market solution’ to the problem of educating children.

I find this odd.  Whether you think school choice is a good idea or a bad one, as long as taxes are involved, it cannot sensibly be called a ‘free market solution.’

Why?

There are lots of possible ways of defining ‘free market.’  Here is Milton Friedman, for example:

The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it.

So people will say:  The exchange of school choice funds between a parent and a school or other provider of services is voluntary.  That makes it a free market exchange, right?

Wrong.  It leaves out a third party to the transaction:  the taxpayers from whom the money was taken against their will.  That is, it’s not a two-party transaction,

X purchases something from Y.

but rather a three-party transaction:

X purchases something from Y, using money taken (by the threat of force) from Z.

If all the parties aren’t participating voluntarily in the transaction, then it’s not a free market.

At least, that’s what I thought until recently.  What I’ve realized, though, is that we’re seeing one of those redefinitions of terms that happen every so often and which turn things on their heads.

That is, the free in free market once referred to something like free will.  It described the voluntary nature of an action.  But now it refers to something like free lunch, where you don’t pay for something because someone else is paying for it.

Note that this makes robbery into a free market transaction.  Suppose I take money from you through the threat of force, then give it to someone else in exchange for a meal.  Or I give it to someone else, who then exchanges it for a meal.  This is a pretty exact analogy to the free market transaction that we call ‘school choice.’

We’ve seen this kind of redefinition before, as when the word right ended up being used as a synonym for the word entitlement — which is actually the opposite of a right in that it requires rights to be violated in order to provide it.

For example, X’s ‘right’ to high-speed Internet or gender-affirming surgery requires violating Z’s right to property in order to pay for it.

It’s like using the word ‘customer’ when you really mean ‘beneficiary.’

There are good reasons to drop this line of argument entirely.

First, it’s misleading, which makes it hard to have sensible discussions about school choice.  This is reason enough to avoid the use of the term.

But perhaps more importantly, when school choice fails to fix any of our actual problems — as all subsidies ultimately do — having spent years describing it as a ‘free market’ program will provide ammunition for people who want to argue that that free markets can’t work.

But if we want people to stop using free market to describe situations where one person is robbed in order to enable two other people to engage in commerce, we need to have a different term to describe those situations.

How about freebie market?

 

The post Freebie Markets appeared first on Granite Grok.

Nikki Haley is going to “stand up to China,” blah, blah, blah. It’s all bullish*t. The way to deal with China is to decouple the American economy from China. But Nikki has NO INTENTION of doing that … the GOP-donor class, her real constituency, makes far too much money from China. More telling perhaps is that Nikki never talks about standing up to the Communists in DC … who are much more of a threat to America, at this point, than the Communists in China.

“Reeducating” Trump-voters? Treating Trump-voters as domestic terrorists? THE DYSTOPIAN FUTURE IS HERE. But if you listen to the GOP-hacks whose living is grifting … the real threat is Matt Gaetz.

Hillary Clinton calls for Trump Supporters to be reeducated: "At some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members." pic.twitter.com/ao3foysSL4

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) October 6, 2023

The Newsweek piece on the FBI’s targeting of Trump supporters as terrorists confirms what has long been clear: The Global War on Terror has morphed into a Domestic War on Wrongthinkers.

It’s about Regime security, not national security. https://t.co/jRUFwGdS2F

— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) October 6, 2023

 

The post The Police State Of America (Part __) … WrongThinkers Are TERRORISTS appeared first on Granite Grok.

On September 22, members of the Canadian Parliament provided a standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a member of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS during World War II.

The event surrounded a visit to Ottawa by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In their hysterical rush to praise all things anti-Russian in 2023, some of our social democratic elites in the West have taken to praising literal Third-Reich Nazis. Specifically, the Speaker of the House of Commons described Hunka as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”

Shortly after Canadian politicians showered praise on Hunka, some observers on social media began to point out Hunka’s Nazi past, and the matter became an embarrassment for Canada’s PM Justin Trudeau and for the Speaker, who resigned days later. Moreover, the affair has highlighted a longstanding pattern of tolerance for Ukrainian SS members demonstrated by the regimes in both the United Kingdom and Canada.

These reminders of Ukrainian collaboration with the Third Reich have provided another Nazi-themed black eye for the Ukrainian regime, which has already been accused—with good reason—of supporting neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, which has long employed Nazi symbols such as the wolfsangel, the swastika, and the black sun. Ukrainian nationalists like those in the Azov battalion have also sought to dismiss criticism of Ukraine-Nazi collaboration while portraying pro-Nazi Ukrainians as mere innocent anti-Russian freedom fighters. Yet, Hunka’s unit and other Ukrainian nationalist groups are notable for crimes inflicted against ethnic Poles and Jews, and reminders of such past crimes are likely to further raise tensions between the Polish and Ukrainian regimes. Warsaw and Kiev are presently denouncing each other over war funding and the importation of cheap Ukrainian grain into the EU.

Current allies of Ukraine, however, have likely noted the danger posed to the pro-Ukraine narrative by the Hunka fiasco. Thus it is not surprising to see headlines from Western media attempting to excuse Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. On Monday, for example, the European version of Politico published an article titled “Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi.” The article is by committed Russophobe Keir Giles and makes the case that at least some Nazi soldiers weren’t really all that bad since they were fighting Russians.

One of Giles’s chief “arguments” is simply that “it’s complicated” and Ukrainian SS members have been judged unfairly. Meanwhile, Canada’s military history magazine Legion tells us to consider the “nuance of history” before casting aspersions on these Nazis. The CBC makes a similar claim that the Hunka situation “reveals a complicated past” and that Ukrainian Nazis were simply choosing what they perceived to be the lesser of two evils.

Legacy media journalists—many of whom spent the last three years denouncing any opposition to the establishment narrative as “racism” or “misinformation”—are now telling us that we must approach the nuances of Nazi volunteers with an open mind.

The Record of Ukraine’s Waffen-SS Nazis

Attempts to downplay the Nazi status of Hunka’s unit conveniently ignore a variety of facts that hardly add “nuance” to the situation. It is important to keep in mind, of course, that the Waffen-SS was not the Wehrmacht, the “regular army” of Germany. Rather, the Waffen-SS was the combat arm of the fanatical and ideological paramilitary group Schutzstaffel (SS) tasked with carrying out the Holocaust and the German regime’s many other efforts to murder enemies of the state. The SS was under the command of Heinrich Himmler, and the Gestapo answered to the SS.

The unit was known officially as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS or the “1st Galician” unit. German commanders often called it simply the “SS Galizien.”  Hunka was a volunteer in this unit, as were many other Ukrainian nationalists.  It was only in 1944, after the unit suffered devastating losses in battle, that the unit was rebuilt using conscripted soldiers. Indeed, thousands of Ukrainian nationalists volunteered for service with the Nazis, with 52,000 men enlisting. Among these, about 13,000 were inducted into the SS. Many other volunteers went on to serve in the German concentration camp system, especially at the Trawniki concentration camp. The camp served as a forced labor camp for Jews and others under the watchful eyes of Ukrainian “freedom fighters.” The camp also served as an SS training camp, mainly for Ukrainian recruits.

As for the Galizien unit, it has been implicated in several specific war crimes, especially the massacre at Huta Pieniacka, where approximately 700-1,200 ethnic Poles and Jews were killed.  A 2003 investigation by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance into the massacre concluded that “the crime was committed by the 4th battalion of the 14th division” (i.e., the Galizien division.) In 2005, the Institute of History at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences agreed with a Ukrainian nationalist who, at the time, declared that “Ukrainian SS-men wiped out the entire village.”

But this is not surprising as the Galizien unit worked closely with notoriously brutal Waffen-SS units. As Per Anders Rudling noted in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies:

The Waffen-SS Galizien worked alongside one of the most brutal counter-insurgency units of Nazi Germany, the dreaded SS-Sonderbattalion Dirlewanger, a unit which included rapists, murderers, and the criminally insane, which carried out brutal anti-partisan activities in Belarus and Poland, and the no less brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. Waffen -SS Galizien and Dirlewanger transferred officers between their units.

The idea that the Galizien unit had no interest or complicity in killing anyone other than Russians is dubious at best. After all, anti-Polish sentiment was common among Ukrainian nationalists at the time, as western Ukraine had long been a conquered territory under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the Second World War, the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) engaged in numerous massacres of Poles designed to prevent them from asserting sovereignty over western Ukraine at the end of the war. Ukrainian nationalists had long clashed with the Polish state in western Ukraine, often in and around the Polish city of Lwów—now Lviv in western Ukraine—which was heavily Ukrainian in the interwar years of the Second Polish Republic. Anti-semitism was common in Western Ukraine as evidenced by the energetic participation of local ethnic Ukrainians in the 1941 Lwów pogroms.

The SS Galizien unit came into being in this milieu of anti-Polish nationalism. Yet, virtually no article on Ukrainian nationalism in the corporate media since 2022 mentions Poland’s conquests in what is modern-day Ukraine or the anti-Polish reprisals that followed.

Members of the Galizien, including Yaroslav Hunka, also took an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, which read:

I swear before God this holy oath, that in the battle against Bolshevism, I will give absolute obedience to the commander in chief of the German Armed Forces Adolf Hitler, and as a brave soldier I will always be prepared to lay down my life for this oath.”

Lest anyone think these Ukrainian nationalists thus limited themselves to strictly combatting Bolshevism, we must keep in mind that Waffen-SS troops hardly granted their victims fair trials before executions and massacres were carried out. Rather, Jews were often regarded as communist collaborators in general and treated accordingly. Ethnic Poles who proved inconvenient to “anti-Bolshevik” activities were killed in large numbers.

Contrary to the now-preferred myth that the Galizien unit was just a bunch of misunderstood good guys, Rudling concludes, “There is no overt indication that the unit in any way was dedicated to Ukrainian statehood, let alone independence. The volunteers committed themselves to a German victory, the New European Order, and to Adolf Hitler personally.”

However, even if Hunka’s unit had not been involved in war crimes, it is remarkable that the Canadian parliament would give a standing ovation to a man who, for all intents and purposes, fought against Canada and its allies in the Second World War. As British historian Mark Felton sarcastically put it in a recent video:

Now if any Canadian members of Parliament are watching, this next bit might be rather difficult to understand, but the Red Army, commonly referred to as “the Russians,” were our allies in World War II while the Ukrainian SS was fighting for somebody called Adolf Hitler who, according to Wikipedia, wasn’t very nice.

Nowadays, we’re supposed to applaud anyone and everyone who kills a Russian. But during the Second World War, the US regime under Franklin Roosevelt wholeheartedly embraced the Soviet regime as an ally. Roosevelt was personally fond of Josef Stalin, calling him “Uncle Joe.” The Americans and other Western Allies coordinated efforts with the Soviets in the fight to encircle and crush the Third Reich. Moreover, it was the Red Army that did most of the heavy lifting in the land war in Europe. As the Red Army pressed further toward eastern Germany, this forced the Germans to send ever larger numbers of its best recruits to the meat grinder on the eastern front. Had this not been the case, it is likely D-Day in Normandy would have been futile for the Allies, or at the very least an Allied bloodbath far worse than that which actually occurred. As historian Ralph Raico has pointed out, many of the German troops at Normandy were young boys and old men. The best troops were dealing with the Soviets in the east.

Yet, the Canadian Parliament applauds a man who was helping the Germans fight off the Red Army, which, in effect, allowed the German army to kill more Americans, Brits, French, and Canadians.

When Western Socialists Defended Nazis

The global establishment’s sudden discovery of the “good” Nazis has its precedent. Let it not be forgotten that in the late 1930s, Nazi Germany courted the Soviet Union as an ally, culminating in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the “Nazi-Soviet Pact”) of 1939. As a result, communists in the West praised and defended Hitler and the Third Reich while blaming the war solely on British and French imperialists. Then in 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR, communists in Britain and the UK turned on a dime and suddenly decided that Nazis were the bad guys again.

The Left is apparently back to defending Nazis. Now that anti-Russian hysteria is supposed to be the guiding principle of “global democracy,” we’re told that we are to applaud former Waffen-SS soldiers for fighting against the Allies.

It’s quite an interesting turn of events, but given the current realities of relentless regime gaslighting and propaganda, it’s not terribly surprising.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy and international relations from the University of Colorado. He was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

 

Ryan McMaken| Mises Wire

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The post The Left Is Now Telling Us (Ukrainian) Nazis Aren’t So Bad After All appeared first on Granite Grok.

McCarthy losing the speakership; Voltaire: “In this country it is thought necessary to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others”; should Trump become speaker? sould trump accept such an offer? Ian Freeman of Free Talk Live (NH) being sentenced to 8 years in federal prison for selling bitcoin; the trial against Trump in NYC. Newsom’s appointment of a Senator who doesn’t live in California; RFK running as an independent and how it will affect the election; Mike opines that Biden will not be the nominee; the Eds disagree;

The post The Conservatarian Exchange Podcast #174 appeared first on The Liberty Block.

I reported here that Lauren Doukas made a PUBLIC statement before the Goffstown School Board on September 11th (39:00) where she mentioned she worked as a paraprofessional at an elementary school in Manchester.

In her statement, she mentioned that in the school where she works, kindergarten students were learning about transgender pronouns and different families and structures.

At the next Goffstown school board meeting on October 4th, several weeks after the September 11th meeting, Doukas followed up with additional comments you can listen to here. (1:55:40)

Doukas claimed that she was targeted after the September 11th meeting through an OpEd, and that it included untruths and disinformation.  However, I included the video from the September 11th meeting so everyone could listen to what she said during public comments. (39:00)

I reported that she was a resident of Goffstown who brought up her professional role as a paraprofessional at the school where she worked in Manchester. She then went on to inform everyone at the September PUBLIC school board meeting that the kindergarten students were learning about pronouns, and about different families and structures. Based on her presentation, she appeared to be quite proud of what they were teaching to young children.

Is she under the impression that when you attend a PUBLIC school board meeting, where you make a PUBLIC statement, that this information will not be shared? Doukas made a public statement that we can all respect. However, one can respect her opinion, and offer a difference of opinion, too. Teaching kindergarten children about transgender pronouns or different sexual lifestyles, may not be what all parents believe is appropriate for their children.

Other residents who attended the September Goffstown School Board meeting cited state law RSA 186:11 -IX-c when directing the administration to remove the bulletin board. Parents have the right to opt their children out of controversial materials, and state law also requires notification. You can hear one resident cite those state laws at (35:00).  Goffstown appeared to be violating state law by not giving parents notice, which would allow parents to opt out of this kind of material.

In the second presentation (1:55:40) before the Goffstown School Board, Doukas attempts to clarify her presentation to the board as if the information I reported on was somehow distorted. Once again, all people have to do is go to the Sept. 11 Goffstown school board meeting (39:00) to hear exactly what she presented. Mills Fall Charter School lists Doukas as a paraprofessional on their website. All of this information is factual and public.

At the September Goffstown School Board meeting, Doukas stated in her PUBLIC comment, “I speak to you as a paraprofessional in an elementary Manchester school.”  Doukas stated her name at the beginning of the school board meeting as everyone must do. She very clearly stated she was speaking in her role as a paraprofessional at an elementary Manchester school. Public meetings are recorded which is why I included the link so readers could hear the testimony directly from the person speaking. Nothing was distorted as it was originally reported.

Doukas then publicized that the Mill Falls Charter School had taken complaints against her from the Department of Education.  At the board meeting in September, she could hear the other residents reference state laws that govern schools when presenting the kind of content posted on the bulletin board. Knowing that this kind of controversial content must be presented to parents to review so they can opt their children out, Doukas chose to make a public statement that her school in Manchester  (Mill Falls) was providing similar content to kindergarten students. Instead of boasting about all of this, administrators at Mills Fall would have been better served if Doukas came back to them to discuss the possibility of Mill Falls violating state statutes too.

Where is the tolerance?

Everyone knows that gender and sexual identity, as it is presented to children in a public school, will be a controversial topic. That is why the law is in place. To show respect to parents who have a different viewpoint. Some parents may share the same viewpoint on sexuality, but maybe they want the topic introduced when their child is more mature.  There are many different reasons for making sure parents are informed, and have the ability to opt their children out of this content.

Doukas never mentioned anything about respecting different viewpoints parents may have when it comes to these topics. She made it clear that parents better get used to it. That’s not how public education works. Public schools are subjected to regulations per state statute. No one gets to push a sexual narrative on children in New Hampshire. Parents must be informed, and then parents have the right to opt their child out of that content.

Doukas called this a targeted attack on a large group of people, and she now feels the Goffstown School Board is in the crosshairs. She appears to be ignoring the laws that are in place that require action by district personnel. No one presenting to the board can push their narrative on students.  She does not speak for all in the LGBTQ community, either. Parents of LGBTQ students may also wish to be informed on what their children will be learning in school. This law respects all parents. Parents get to decide what is appropriate for their children.

With the mass exodus we are seeing in public education, these kinds of laws show respect for the parents and students. Families are less likely to remove their child from public school if their viewpoint is respected.

There was no targeted attack on anyone.  Doukas shared information at a PUBLIC school board meeting that the Charter School she worked in may be violating state law. In addition, her statement to the Goffstown school board appeared to support Goffstown’s violating state law because she supports the political and sexual narrative presented on the bulletin board.

Why not raise your four children the way you want, and show some respect for parents who want to raise their children the way they want to? That’s mutual respect between people who have different viewpoints.

To unify this community, this would be a good time to find some common ground. That can be done by following the law, and focusing on academics. Instead of pushing any political narrative on children, simply teach them to be kind and show others dignity and respect. This is something all parents can support.

Parents have reported that Doukas has herself targeted conservative elected local and state officials online for years. Maybe this is a good time for her to reevaluate how she has treated people with different viewpoints, and then model the behavior she expects from others.

 

The post Transgender Pronouns for Kindergarten Students Part 2 appeared first on Granite Grok.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has had an interesting couple of years. They demeaned a licensed, safe, and effective drug so they could issue emergency authorization for one that was not.

Ivermectin had to be destroyed, or at least knee-capped, or the magic voodoo juice would have never come out of warp speed and into the arms of hundreds of millions of Americans, where it did not stay. They put the rule-making in the hands of drug makers while Pfederal regulators acted as employees of pharmaceutical companies with a generous bonus plan. The approval process was reduced to the level of a show trial.

The public Health ramifications have been immeasurably bad, and it could be decades before the bill comes completely due, but none of that has dissuaded the “regulators” from continuing along the path they set.

You’ll have heard of Novavax. It’s the other, other, other COVID-19 Vaccine. Approved for emergency use in an attempt to get the vaccine-hesitant (people who didn’t want to risk a heart condition or death) to lift their sleeves and take one for the team. Novovax was not the hit they hoped for, but it was still available, but not “legally” after the public health emergency ended.

Related:  We Know Why The Public Health Industrial Complex Had to Discredit Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin

No emergency, no emergency use authorizations, but why let that stop you? After all, considering to whom you owe your allegiance, Big Pharma, the lack of an emergency is an emergency.

 

[Tuesday], amidst the frenzy over the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, the Food and Drug Administration amended the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Novavax COVID-19 “vaccine” despite the Public Health Emergency officially ending almost five months earlier on May 11, 2023, according to the CDC.  So how is the FDA seemingly able to approve an Emergency Use Authorization when, according to the CDC, there is no longer an emergency?

 

The sky isn’t falling, which is a “sky is falling” event. It isn’t falling, but it could, so we need to frame the state of fear in a new and meaningful way. Think car insurance ads. Flo, Jake, or the Emu in the Aviators. That’s what the FDA needs—a spokesperson. Maybe they can borrow Mayhem. He’s funny in a chaotic lifestyle-changing sort of way—the perfect pitchman. Put this crap in your arm as insurance. And when you need us, we won’t be there. We may even try to hide you, undermine your care, or deny your concerns.

But what do you call them?

Jab?

Our COVID vaccine mascot needs a name.

Karen?

Let me know what you think. And you’ve got time. The fearmongering isn’t working as well, but they are still trying as evidenced by the hijinks at the FDA. The lack of an emergency is the emergency. Code Red. DefCon 1. Watch for a readiness alert on your phones.

Nobody is afraid, and that’s the problem.

 

HT | Gateway Pundit

The post When The Lack of an Emergency is The Emergency appeared first on Granite Grok.

Before we figured out how to replace whale oil with cheaper, more efficient petroleum, we killed a lot of whales throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to light our homes and lubricate our industries, driving most species to the brink of extinction.

And just like that, we’re back to killing whales to light our homes.

And now that we are choosing to move away from petroleum to so-called “renewables,” it looks like we’re back to killing whales for our energy. Not directly this time, but indirectly, which is perhaps even more tragic.

A new documentary, Thrown to the Wind, details how the underwater sound pollution and increased boat traffic related to the construction of off shore wind turbines is contributing to a massive spike in whale deaths off the coast of New England, New York, and New Jersey.  Longer term, the filmmakers worry that there is a danger that the wave effect created by the spinning blades will kill off plankton, the primary food source for the whales, including humpback and the endangered North Atlantic right whale, of which there are only a little more than three hundred left on the planet.

The high-decibel sonar mapping that is currently taking place can disorient the whales causing mothers and calves to separate. Young calves can’t survive long without access to their mother’s milk. In addition to the stress separation causes the animals, the confusion and panic is in some cases driving the whales to wander into boat traffic or poorer feeding grounds.

But what, you ask, does this have to do with us in Vermont way up here in the mountains and so far from the seashore? Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act and resulting Climate Action Plan are forcing us to electrify all sectors of our economy including home heating and transportation with so-called “clean” energy – that is if you consider a bunch of seventy-ton rotting corpses on the beach “clean”. To meet these goals, we need a lot more “renewable” electricity than anybody currently produces. And to that end, Vermont lawmakers were counting on importing a big chunk of that offshore wind electricity when it comes online. So, Vermont’s motto is “kill the whales to save the planet!”

But there is some good news for the whales of late, though it’s not an awakening of compassion for endangered species in the hearts of our so-called environmentalists. It just turns out that offshore wind power sucks.

According to an NBC Boston story on October 3, “With legal deadlines looming on the path to more clean energy, Massachusetts has now lost three-quarters of the offshore wind capacity once in its pipeline after regulators on Friday allowed another developer to back out of contracts for a major installation.” Developers of offshore wind in New Jersey and Maryland are running into similar issues. Across the Pond, the British government apparently got zero bids to build their latest round of offshore wind projects.

The reason for these companies backing out is costs. Planting these massive turbines in the middle of the ocean is a lot more expensive than anyone dared think. A big part of that expense is the inflationary policies of the Biden Administration, which led the developers to declare these projects are “no longer financially viable,” at the price they originally agreed to.

Whales aren’t the only beneficiaries of the dropped offshore wind contracts. Electric rate payers will enjoy a windfall (I think there’s a pun in there somewhere). In breaking their contracts, “SouthCoast Wind [developer] will pay $32.4 million to Eversource [electricity supplier], $27.3 million to National Grid and $591,000 to Unitil under the termination agreements, and the utilities plan to credit payments to ratepayers through contract adjustments.”

This relief may be short term, as the projects will now go out to bid again – but this time at even higher costs to ratepayers/taxpayers. If these wind factories do eventually get built and go online, the cost of the electricity they produce will be astronomical. Looking at the trends, “In June, the International Energy Agency reported that the cost of large-scale solar and wind power jumped by about 20% last year…. LevelTen Energy recently found that the agreed price on power purchase agreements for wind and solar projects more than doubled between 2020 and the second quarter of 2023.” (Robert Bryce, 10/4/23)

All this points to the coming train wreck our lawmakers are setting us up for – shortages of electricity supply because the kind of generation they are willing to allow can’t be built, and sky-high prices because the kind of generation they are willing to allow is crazy expensive (and will be scarce, driving up costs even more).

The lessons here are that wind power is not environmentally friendly, and it is not cost effective. And even if it were, its intermittent, weather-dependent generation isn’t particularly practical. It’s certainly not worth risking the extinction of several species to produce.

Hopefully the continued failure of offshore wind projects is enough to save the whales from the self-proclaimed environmentalists. But I still worry for the five species of endangered bats we have here in Vermont helping to organically control the insect population and pollenate our landscape. It will be harder to keep our politicians from killing them off with ridgeline wind towers in our own back yard. It’s definitely a bizarre way to “save the planet.”

 

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.

 

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If you were wondering what might happen in the wake of Kevin McCarthy’s departure from the House Speakership, here’s something trivial and amusing to start your day. The Speaker pro tempore has booted Nancy Pelosi from her “extra” office.

“Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be re-keyed,” an email sent to Pelosi’s office viewed by Politico stated. The email added that the room will be used “for speaker office use.”

Pelosi is currently using a hideaway office, which only a handful of members receive. Given that she is speaker emerita, McCarthy allowed Pelosi to occupy the space. McHenry, who is a McCarthy ally, is clearly less keen on it.

 

Tomorrow was last Wednesday, but Pelosi isn’t out yet.

 

“Sadly, because I am in California to mourn the loss of and pay tribute to my dear friend Dianne Feinstein, I am unable to retrieve my belongings at this time,” said Pelosi, who missed Tuesday’s vote in which McCarthy was ousted.

 

Wait, it gets better.

 

She slammed the move, calling it “a sharp departure from tradition.”

 

Isn’t the entire Democrat agenda a departure from tradition?

 

The post On Day One: Acting US House Speaker Kicks Nancy Pelosi Out of Special ‘Second Office’ appeared first on Granite Grok.

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• 24/7 Technical Support: You can rest assured knowing that CGMD Miner offers 24/7 technical support and a 100% uptime guarantee.

2. Register and Sign Up for an Account
   

Signing up and completing your registration on CGMD Miner is quicker than you think. All you need to do is simply provide your email address and create an account. Once registered, you can immediately begin your cryptocurrency mining journey.

3. Purchase a Mining Contract
   

CGMD Miner offers a range of mining contract options, each with its unique ROI and contract period. As another option for passive income, you can earn income the day after your purchase, and when your earnings reach $100, you can choose to withdraw to your encrypted wallet or reinvest in additional contracts.

In an era defined by digital intricacies that often deter newcomers from entering into crypto mining, CGMD Miner emerges as a true game-changer. It’s not just a platform, it’s your gateway to effortless cloud mining and generating passive income. Make the smart choice today and become a part of the CGMD Miner community, where cryptocurrency mining is no longer limited to tech experts with expensive hardware. With CGMD Miner, the future of mining is simplified, profitable, and accessible to all.

About CGMD Miner

CGMD Miner is a groundbreaking cloud mining company that has won the trust of over 385000 users worldwide. Our mission is to provide everyone with access to cloud mining, providing access to cutting-edge technologies and large industrial data centers from any device, anywhere. As a leading cloud mining platform, it contributes 5%-13% of the world’s cloud mining computing power.

With a team of seasoned professionals, including experts from top dotcom companies, there’s a strong focus on R&D and extensive technological expertise. The vision is to expand the business across the entire cryptocurrency industry chain, delivering technological innovations and exceptional services worldwide.

Website: http://www.365miner.com

CGMD miner can enter “CGMD” in the Google App Store or Apple Store to download the application.

 

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