It’s the deposits. Bankers never used to worry about the money customers left in their banks. When deposited, the money was lent out while depositors could come and get their money anytime if it was a demand deposit.

Thus, the depositor and the borrower had the use of the same money at the same time. Murray Rothbard called it fraud.

Now it’s 2023 and Scott Hildenbrand, the chief balance sheet strategist at Piper Sandler, tells Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast,

And so if you had told me, Joe, or Tracy five years ago, you had me on here and you said, “There’s a bank and all they’re going to do is buy treasuries and all of their deposits are in checking accounts. And by the way, they’re going to fail,” I would’ve laughed at both of you. I wouldn’t have come back. I would have been like, “You all are crazy.”

Rothbard wasn’t so crazy after all.

Hildenbrand was on Odd Lots to explain how tough things are for small community banks. Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan has all sorts of revenue streams, but the community bank has to take deposits, lend them out, and live on the difference in interest rates. Silicon Valley Bank was “not like the WAMU days or not It’s a Wonderful Life. It was three hours and $42 billion. That’s what happened.”

Hildenbrand made a point that’s never mentioned: banks don’t make money lending; banks make money because “they don’t pay at market rates on the deposit side.” Banks don’t typically pay anything on checking account deposits. That is where banks earn their spread. It didn’t matter because it used to be that bank customers were very loyal. Bankers could count on that checking account money staying in place. Not so much anymore. Money moves fast for two reasons according to Hildenbrand: technology and demographics.

Back in the day customers were very loyal but had very little trust. Today, “there’s a ton of trust. They’ll move money around on phones. They don’t even know the name of the bank they’re banking at,” Hildenbrand said. “They’ll move it so quickly. But there’s very little loyalty. And therein lies the difference in why we’re struggling with how to determine how to manage and hedge a balance sheet from a deposit perspective.”

Bankers didn’t realize the effects on deposits of technology, social media, and demographic changes from a liquidity perspective in a higher rate environment. A decade or two ago a community bank had almost half of its deposits in CDs. And, as Hildebrand says, “That gave banks time.” Now bankers won’t get that kind of time due to demographics.

Hildebrand interviews lots of young people for Piper Sandler who come to New York to learn about community banking. As smart as these young people are, he quipped, “I always have a question they can’t answer. Do you know what a CD is? And they’ve never heard of it, whether it was banking or music.” A certificate of deposit (CD) is a savings product that earns interest on a lump sum for a fixed period of time. The money must remain untouched for the entirety of their term or penalties or lost interest may apply. As an incentive for lost liquidity, CDs usually have higher interest rates than savings accounts.

Nowadays, “people want CD rates with money market flexibility and operational flexibility,” Hildebrand told Alloway and Weisenthal. “We have no contractual liabilities on most bank balance sheets anymore.”

Since the spring spate of regional bank failures, only one bank has failed—the $139 million Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, Kansas. But more failures and consolidations are coming. Hildebrand said half the banks in the country are trading at less than book value (assets-liabilities/shares). That means investors don’t trust the loan and investment values on bank balance sheets. He believes from the four thousand banks the United States has now, the number of banks will shrink to two hundred over the next ten to fifteen years.

Rothbard wrote in Making Economic Sense, “The banking system, in short, is a house of cards.” The house of fraud will have fewer cards going forward.

 

 

Douglas French | Mises Wire

Douglas French is President Emeritus of the Mises Institute, author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply, and author of Walk Away: The Rise and Fall of the Home-Ownership Myth. He received his master’s degree in economics from UNLV, studying under both Professor Murray Rothbard and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Mises Wire We heartily encourage reprints and shares of Mises Wire articles. If you wish to reproduce an article in your blog, magazine, radio show, newspaper column, classroom material, textbook, discussion group, website, or any other venue, please do so. The original publication source must be included in an appropriate place.

The post Is the US Banking System a House of Cards Waiting to Topple? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The Fox News headline reads, “New Hampshire Democrats defy Biden, DNC ultimatum to ditch first-in-nation primary: ’embarrassing situation.” What it should say is, “NH Dems watch from the sidelines as Republicans leave them no other option.”

That’s the real-world meat and potatoes of the article. The DNC blessed Biden’s primary Calendar, but no one in the Granite State has any control over that, so they are on board with ignoring their political matters – even though it will cost them half of their delegates to the convention.

What, you may ask, does accepting that fate sound like?

 

“Granite Staters appreciate and respect the responsibility of the over 100-year tradition of the First in the Nation New Hampshire primary. They understand New Hampshire has a special place in the history of American politics and their place in it. We look forward to continuing that tradition here next year and in the years to come,” longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley said this summer.

 

This from the party that fixed not one but two primary seasons to ensure Bernie Sanders wasn’t the nominee, and perhaps every other before it, for all we know. I mean, other than putting on a show, is there truly any point?

To their credit, NH Dems were vocal in opposition to Biden’s proposed changes, mostly becasue it abrogates any relevance they might have politically, but it’s their own damn fault.

 

 

As I also noted here,

 

Instead of building an inclusive and diverse bench to elevate candidates of color, [NH Dems] went all white all day and night. At the same time, those “racist” Republicans were nominating people of color almost every cycle, while Democrats were defending pasty white incumbents even when polling suggested it was time for a change on the Democrat side.

Dems accused Republicans of white guilt when they nominated not-so-white candidates, but we don’t have that. They do, and they still couldn’t bring themselves to walk the talk. They chose power and politics over rhetoric which, ironically, has been our position with regard to their white guilt narrative all along.

 

But it’s not just New Hampshire that is telling Biden and the DNC to stuff it.

 

South Carolina Democrats are on board, but Palmetto State Republicans will hold their primary later in February. Nevada Democrats are game, but the Silver State’s GOP — after an unsuccessful legal push to opt out of a Feb. 6 primary — is aiming to hold a Republican presidential caucus two days later. And Georgia’s Republican secretary of state this spring set the state’s primary date for May 12 of next year, rebuffing the DNC.

Iowa, which was left out of the DNC’s early voting states calendar, is still looking for ways to remain the leadoff contest without violating party rules.

 

 

It’s almost as if these places think this is a Republic, and they can do whatever they damn well please? Oh, look, it is!

As for the NH Dems, it’s cute how they are acting like stalwart defenders of New Hampshire’s over one-hundred-year tradition, but it is only becasue they have no choice. Nothing irks a progressive more than tradition and history, and riding them of it – all of it – is at the top of every bucket list next to getting rid of us.

 

The post New Hampshire Dems – We Won’t Be Following the DNC Primary Schedule ‘cuz Reasons … appeared first on Granite Grok.

This is my testimony to the Nashua Public Library Trustees’ September meeting.

After the June Trustees’ meeting, I went to the children’s room to see what was on display, and I found the book “Grandad’s Pride” featured prominently for Pride month.

Related: The Nashua Library is Not Welcoming to Religious Families

I checked it out, and when I got home, I was horrified to find that this picture book, which is targeted to kids aged 3 to 6, has an overtly sexual image of a partially naked man in leather bondage gear. The image portrays a man wearing a leather codpiece molded tightly around his crotch, along with garters running down his thighs, thigh-high boots, and a dog collar. Bondage gear is worn by people who practice BDSM sexual fetishes. BDSM means bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

I can’t imagine what could be more inappropriate to be in a book for small children or what the author or publisher was thinking by putting this image in the book and why the children’s librarian selected this book for the collection and then put it on display for small, impressionable children to look at. It’s really, really inappropriate and sick.

This is especially concerning since former state rep Stacie Laughton was recently charged with soliciting and distributing pornographic images of local toddlers, and the authorities are investigating whether he had sexual contact with those toddlers. Children need to be protected from sexual deviants and not exposed to them in innocent-looking picture books in the children’s room.

 

The post Book Promoted by Nashua Library to Small Kids Features Bondage Gear appeared first on Granite Grok.

Some new research from two Japanese scientists has discovered, or at least posits (using science), “That the Omicron variants are formed by a completely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology.” What they mean is that they do not appear to have occurred naturally.

 

To determine the order of mutations leading to the formation of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, we compared the sequences of 129 Omicron BA.1-related, 141 BA.1.1-related, and 122 BA.2-related isolates, and attempted to clarify the evolutionary processes of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, including the order of mutations leading to their formation and the occurrence of homologous recombination. As a result, we concluded that the formation of a part of Omicron isolates BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2 was not the product of genome evolution, as is commonly observed in nature, ..

 

So, the data (The Science!) suggests that those COVID-19 variants that keep hiking to the top of media headline mountain whenever the Public Health Industrial Complex needs them appear lab-generated, just like the original.

Mark Styen has  more pull quotes and his top-shelf snarky insight here, and I don’t want to detract from the science he’s already explored, but (as a quick aside) the phrase from which I can’t seem to achieve escape velocity is “a completely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology.”

You mean like transwomen. A mental projection of self – you decide if or how unhealthy – that can’t be explained by previous biology because biology has nothing to do with it. No amount of hormone treatments or surgery will alter the underlying genetic truth. If you were born a man, you’d die one, no matter how many times you replace the carpet or the drapes. That’s the science. But politically driven culture (with apologies to Mr. Breitbart, may he rest in peace) is forcing biology, much like it has geology, climate, and others, to ignore the truth.

That, I suspect, is what the Japanese scientists cited by Mr. Steyn (neither of whom are transwomen) have done. While they claim that the data shows them that the variants could not have occurred naturally, (“The fact that most of these mutations occurred without synonymous mutations (Fig. 2) suggests that none of these mutations arose as a result of trial-and-error random mutations in nature,”) they feel it necessary to ask, “is there any reason to artificially create these mutants, which are unlikely to have occurred naturally, given the current SARS-CoV-2 epidemic?”

Is there? Any reason?

If you ask the transwoman party, the answer could be upcoming elections, flagging booster uptake, creeping liberty, the depopulation agenda, or becasue they can. And yes, they can. It is widely accepted that the original SARS-CoV2-WIV was created in Wuhan and escaped or was released deliberately. So why is it unlikely that the same process was not applied to variants that appear to rise in prevalence when needed most?

Becasue,

 

It is inimical to virus research to consider that artificially synthesized viruses were deliberately spread throughout the world… Furthermore, we do not conclude that these viruses were artificially synthesized and distributed based on malicious intent.

 

For what other purpose were they synthesized? Better yet, why or how do these artificially synthesized variants of the killer COVID virus (created for non-malicious purposes) keep escaping from the lab?

Good questions.  Mark Steyn has an even better one.

 

As I mentioned the other day, when this thing got going, my initial assumption was that, as with SARS, the Chinese were lying to the world. It then became plain that, in fact, the Americans – Fauci and the public-health bureaucracy – were lying to the world, about taxpayer-funded “gain-of-function” research offshored via a CIA front to Wuhan. Among the more curious details in the new Japanese paper is this:

The following results presented in this study may support the hypothesis that the Omicron variants may have been artificially synthesized rather than naturally occurring:

1) the presence of Omicron variant-associated isolates with one mutation site being Wuhan-type;

2) the almost complete absence of synonymous mutations in the S protein in these isolates;

3) the Omicron variant, which should have been first reported to WHO from South Africa on November 24, 2021, was already endemic in Puerto Rico in 2020, and that there were isolates that were recombinants between Omicron strains BA1 and BA2. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

How about that? Puerto Rico is a territory not of Japan but of the United States. Yet it takes a couple of guys in Osaka and Kyoto to reveal that the Omicron was endemic on American turf over a year before its official release date? Is it really credible that Fauci & Co didn’t know that? And, if not, do they know where it came from?

 

Nothing to see here. More conspiracy theories from a pair of Japanese domestic terrorists. Medical misinformation. Just move along.

No, I don’t think we will.

 

The post New Research: Omicron Variants Appear to be Lab-Made Pathogens Too! appeared first on Granite Grok.

Wasting money on electric buses when what we need is school bus drivers.

Vermont has a school bus driver shortage. We have for years. Google “Vermont School Bus Driver Shortage” (as I did for this story), and the number of news hits you get is astounding. I was looking for “a” story I recently read and came across around thirty, spanning half a decade.

It’s a real problem. In one case down in Bennington, the public schools actually had to close for a period of time because they couldn’t get the kids from their homes to their buildings. (This is something the anti-school choice people say is an issue when parents choose independent schools, but the independent schools never seem to have this problem. Hmmm. Another story for another time….)

At the other end of the state, Essex/Westford kids have to spend over an hour and a half on the bus each way to school because there aren’t enough drivers to cover all the routes, which then must be combined into longer routes.

According to WCAX, “At one point, we had five rolling cancellations a day that were going through our system and just creates havoc on family schedules and all the way across the board,” said Brian Donahue, the chief operating officer of the Essex Westford School District…. Kids were not coming to school, and their parents and family were reporting, ‘Without a bus, my kid cannot get there.’”

Three hours a day sitting on a bus? To get to and from a school that’s less than ten miles from your house? This can’t be a healthy situation for young bodies or young minds.

So, when Vermont received over $18 million in a legal fraud settlement with Volkswagen, our erstwhile policymakers used a big chunk of that money to retain existing drivers and to attract and train new bus drivers to solve this real problem affecting children and families in a practical way.

BWAHAHAHAHA! Gotcha, didn’t I! No, of course, they didn’t. They blew the money on a pilot program to replace our existing diesel school buses with electric buses – for which we still don’t have enough drivers. Who cares about “the children” when you can pretend to be “saving the planet”?

Never mind that these electric busses don’t work particularly well in cold weather and in hilly terrain – or, in other words, Vermont during the nine months of the year school is in session – and occasionally just burst into flames. According to a report by VEIC, electric buses generally cost more than double the cost of a normal diesel bus, $330,000 to $350,000, as opposed to $125,000 to $150,000. In addition, the electric buses require between $15,000 and $30,000 in new charging infrastructure costs.

So, let’s just say if we simply bought new diesel buses – or kept the diesel buses we already have, assuming they don’t really need replacing — instead of buying new electric buses, the school district would have somewhere between an extra couple/few hundred grand – per bus – to spend on… I don’t know, training and hiring more bus drivers.

To be fair, policymakers aren’t entirely neglecting the bus driver issue. WCAX reports, “As of an April school board meeting, South Burlington will now pay around $23 an hour. According to the district website, Essex Westford School District pays around $20 an hour.” Seriously? This is what the salary was INCREASED to? What was it before, a crust of bread and a bowl of gruel at the end of the day? And you wonder why nobody wants this friggin’ job?!

Driving a vehicle that big is skilled labor under any circumstances. Doing it on Vermont roads while being simultaneously responsible for not a bunch of chickens but our most precious children – who, bless them, are probably more loud, unruly, and likely to do something stupid than a truckload of chickens – deserves a certain measure of hazard pay. Just for a little comparison, UPS full-time drivers recently won a contract raising their pay and benefits package from $145,000 per year to $170,000 for delivering bubble-wrapped toothbrushes in boxes big enough to hold a mini-fridge. Albeit, school bus drivers are not required to carry each kid from the bus stop to their doorstep, and UPS drivers don’t generally have the hours between 9 AM and 2 PM off.

Still, this is just another example of if you want practical solutions to real problems and a decent return on investment for our tax dollars, we need to usher in a new crop of political decision-makers in Vermont. The alternative is to be continuously thrown under the electric bus.

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!

The post Another Example of Climate Hysteria Leading to Dumb, Misguided Policy appeared first on Granite Grok.

As promised in the last Memestream News: Monday Edition, I have an overflow. My meme cup runneth over.  And yes there will be a Friday edition too.

Let the mayhem, mockery, and ridicule resume:

 

*** Warning, a few possibly off-color ones, in case tender eyes are about ***

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

NO time today to do a full post – separated and commentary too – so just a massive meme dump.  Work, and dealing with the “honey do” list.  Ugh.  Hopefully I can catch up so that by Friday I’ll have a “normal” post.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

By someone named “WhiteTroll”

Vaxxer, Vaxxer, so obsessed, Wore your mask and took your tests.

Still got Covid, every strain, Spike proteins inside your brain…

Short of breath at twenty four, “Dr. Fauci, give me more!”

Proteins tangle and misfold, Myocarditis taking hold…

Swollen heart at twenty five, “Thank Moderna I’m alive!”

But there’s no cure for the micro-clot, Getting worse with every shot…

Heart attack at twenty six, Prayed to Pfizer for a fix.

Vaxxer, Vaxxer, death is lurking, Doctor says, “That means it’s working.”…

Died of SADS at twenty seven, All good Vaxxers go to heaven.

Obituary headline noted: “Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid

His family are quite upset, but they are alive , at least as yet.

And they say its for the better.

Without the vax, he would be deader.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

 

 

I still vote for decapitation followed by heads on pikes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Need to verify that he has that same tat on the neck.  Sorry, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of people in Israel are waking up.  While I like Bibi on defense, his subservience – and continued “oral servicing” – of Pfizer is a deal-breaker for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the GOP bigwigs still see them as honorable people?

 

 

 

 

I’m assuming that’s a male on the left?

 

 

No no no.  After SHTF we’ll need those.  Gang 4-5 cinderblocks together; that will work too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Pick of the post:

 

 

Remember, for so many, they viewed this as a Rite of Passage into having meaning and significance in their lives.  This is one of the big reasons why they’ll never give up their allegiance to The Jab.  You must – MUST – understand the psychology of their commitment.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Collected links with commentary, very mildly organized:

 

None this post.  As I said, I lack time.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Palate cleansers:

 

—

—

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

The post Memestream News: Wednesday Edition appeared first on Granite Grok.

I recently posted Edelblut’s Decision Not To Run For Governor Reflects The Reality Of Blue Hampshire … which makes the, in my opinion, undeniable and unremarkable observation that New Hampshire has become and will remain for some time a BLUE STATE. Unsurprisingly, one of the commentators suggested that there is an immediate, easy fix … we just stop out-of-State college students from voting in New Hampshire! If you look at the numbers from 2022 … the Communists Democrats’ margins of victory show that the problem is exponentially bigger than just out-of-State college students voting in New Hampshire. It will take … realistically … decades to fix the actual problem.

The actual problem is that the Communists Democrats control all the major institutions in New Hampshire. For example, our public education system is controlled by Communists Democrat bureaucrats whose mission is to indoctrinate Cultural-Socialism. Guess how these kids are going to vote once they reach voting age?

If you want to understand the real problem, follow Christopher Rufo on X. And read his new book. From the Federalist’s review:

… after their street violence didn’t inspire the large-scale revolution among America’s lower class they expected in the 1960s and ’70s, American communists chose another strategy: working into American centers of cultural influence, especially education and media. The Marxists switched from economic class warfare to cultural warfare. …

… 79 percent of school districts with more than 100,000 students have hired a ‘chief diversity officer’ and implemented university-style ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programming,” …

… Every Fortune 100 company has adopted DEI practices as well, making at least lip service to Marxist religions an essentially inescapable requirement for academic and professional advancement in the United States. …

How successful has the takeover of our institutions been? Well … the “leaders” of the NHGOP … SUCH AS SUN-KING CHRIS SUNUNU … wholeheartedly embrace DEI.

The NHGOP leaders will also tell you the fix for public schools is school choice. It’s not. Most students will continue to be educated in the public schools AND many private schools are WOKE. The only solution is taking back control of the public education system (and our other institutions). But that will take years, and the results won’t be seen for decades, … and conservatives are obviously NOT as patient as Communists Democrats.

 

 

 

The post Not Possible To Fix The Problem (Blue Hampshire) … If You Don’t Understand (Or Refuse To Accept) The Cause Of The Problem appeared first on Granite Grok.

Contributor John Klar on 2-Sep lamented that the agricultural sector is “in decline” if measured by manpower. As is the manufacturing sector, though in both cases, output is up. America is producing more with less — that is what we do — and, all other things being the same, that is the only way that real pay rises.

Compare India, which maintains a caste of farmers, each working their own one acre of land and, if they’re lucky, having an arrangement to rent someone else’s tractor at key times of the year or have large enough families to rely on manual labor.

“Larger farms on ever-pricier land” implies that ag consolidation is pushing up the price of farmland. Of course, the real culprits are the depreciation of the dollar (which means some pricier things aren’t pricier at all, notably gasoline, still way under 2 silver dimes per gallon) and galloping land-use regulation.

Yes, the manufacturers of industrial farm equipment, including unmanned tractors, make extravagant claims that are sometimes false. But in a voluntary economy, they eventually have to deliver. And every farm still has a human owner who, under capitalism, has an incentive to preserve the value of the land rather than let machinery prevent it from growing future crops.

Mr. Klar’s fundamental complaint is social, that we are drifting away from a “community” that esteems its farmers, “to a time when a man is no longer valued for his labor.” Baloney. Surely there was a craft behind the skilled making of buggy whips, and the watchmaker with his eyepiece was especially prized, but break open a watch or a computer now and gaze at the etches that no human could have drawn. Here too, we are better off.

And will be, provided we resist various people’s laments that strangers don’t seem to share my values, and resist responding with coercion. Surely Mr. Klar does not support the drafting of youngsters to be farmhands — no matter how many lessons in simple living they would learn. But what he does advocate for are “regulatory, tax, and fiscal benefits” (subsidies!) to support the small farm — that is, that we do for the farm what we have already done for the electric vehicle: Coercively make prices wrong, to induce people to make decisions that don’t benefit them, as though they shared our values.

It is nonsense that “dependency on foreign…foods…threatens… international competitiveness.” Access to foreign goods, especially where foreigners can produce more cheaply than Americans (repeal wage-and-hour laws, including the remaining Obama-care mandate!) is how we remain competitive — combining the best values the world can provide into American products. Government impeding commerce is how we ruin this process — even before farmers start spending their time flocking to Concord and DC to beg for favors rather than cultivating their land and studying the market for their products.

And yes, farmland speculator Bill Gates does not care about either farming or our values; he is sneaking around to impose his own values on us. But the billions he made enriching our lives with software that made us more productive, belongs to him, and not only if he spends it in ways that please us.

We will be best off under liberty. Eliminate government obstacles to land ownership. Eliminate obstacles to modernization and consolidation, leaving it to the farmer to decide what suits him. Eliminate “Marketing Orders” and other federal policies that tell the farmer what and how much to grow, so he can spend his time studying the market and deciding how to please the customer. Eliminate the Department of Agriculture, ignoring arguments, including this one, that we first must prove we “care” about the farmer.

* * * * *

Now, nearby, Ian Underwood suggests that we adopt a collective goal for government schools of achieving 95% literacy. He’s absolutely right that clearly stated goals, like JFK’s moon-shot goal, are essential to focus large groups of people. What he omits is that America stopped worrying about a huge waste of money only when JFK was shot to death.

Mr. Underwood describes the government schools as “one of the largest enterprises in New Hampshire” that lacks a single mission statement. But the schools are in fact a gunpoint monopoly (you have alternatives but only if you pay for both, even with Education Savings Accounts), staffed by employees with tenure and a national, Marxist labor union resistant to innovation and willing to cripple students to support a political narrative about a chest cold that didn’t threaten them.

Yes, sure, let’s mandate that the schools teach, and honestly measure how well they do it. The only problem is that we are not the majority at School Town Meeting — and if we briefly find we are, the Moderator recesses the meeting while those who receive, benefit from, or massage the loot get on their phones and bring out reinforcements.

We are faced with competing mandates that schools drive COVID infections to zero, encourage cross-dressing and recruit kids for sodomy, teach a corrosive view of American history when they aren’t advocating that we ignore it altogether, harass and assault prom-goers if they seem to come from conservative families, and throw athletes off sports teams for privately questioning orthodoxy.

Yes, the state constitution says education is “essential to the preservation of a free government”. So are shoes, which enable us to walk to the polls; neither means the government ought to be the sole or dominant provider; nor that, failing this, education or shoes would not exist at all. Part 2, Article 83 of our constitution of 1783, which Mr. Underwood quotes, is full of such platitudes, which have been corrupted by a mischievous judiciary; above all, the one for future legislators “to cherish the interest of…schools” — to have specific values, no matter what their voters prefer — which supposedly dictates equal funding in every town.

But what if we had a Republican legislature? Alas, no. Instead, we now have Donor and Recipient towns which, if they do anything other than goose campaign contributions, direct the money of strangers toward districts that our best measurements show are failing. Rather than cut through centralized mandates, we have simply added healthier mandates. Cursive writing and multiplication tables?

This is the bureaucratic and legal environment we are dealing with, and Mr. Underwood has not shown how his appeal for the schools to do a simple job well will prevail against all the other “stakeholders,” including some who don’t want the job done at all. What we need to do is undercut the bureaucracy, starting by striking at least the first half of 2:83. After 4 years, repair the 2019 vandalism to the SB-2 procedure, so the decision to take power away from Town Meeting no longer needs the approval of Town Meeting. Let us underfund the government schools until dozens of attractive and competitive alternatives emerge. Those that achieve 95% literacy will thrive — if that is what the customers want.

* * * * *

Whether farming or schooling, we don’t especially need a clear call for gunpoint agencies to “act like a business” and deliver against specific values that we are to embrace as a collective. We would do better to rediscover the benefits of individual liberty.

The post Two Grok Articles: Make Mine Liberty (a Commentary/Riposte) appeared first on Granite Grok.

Notch another win for Marxist state-run health care and its inherent depopulation agenda. Doctors in the UK have decided to unplug a 19-year-old girl from medical support equipment even though she is considered legally competent, self-aware, and doesn’t want to die.

Related: Slippery Meet Slope: Woman Asks for Help with Suicidal Ideation, Her ‘Therapist’ Recommends Euthanasia

 

[The woman, known only as] ST is suffering from a rare genetic mitochondrial disease that is progressively degenerative. The case has similarities to that of Charlie Gard, an infant who was removed from life support at the insistence of doctors despite objections from the parents. The Gard family was seeking to take Charlie to the United States for experimental treatment.

ST has been in the ICU for the past year, requiring a ventilator and a feeding tube. She also requires regular dialysis due to chronic kidney damage from her disease. She wants to be allowed to travel to Canada for an experimental treatment but the doctors oppose the plan and say that she is not accepting the realities of her terminal illness. They say that she is “actively dying” without any hope of resuming life outside of intensive care.

 

Her desire to live under any circumstance is unrealistic, so her State-employed doctors, buttressed by state-employed judges, have decided it is in her best interests to die. “Medically” assisted suicide without your consent. Why? “The judge found that she is mentally incapable of making decisions for herself because “she does not believe the information she has been given by her doctors.”

The confluence of the medical misinformation narrative and socialized medicine.

Therapists had deemed her mentally competent and capable of expressing herself. Still, becasue that was based on opinions outside the UK’s approved medical industrial complex narrative, they don’t matter. And neither does she.

The bottom of the slippery slope is closer than you think.

While ST had a rare disorder, we must assume that mentally competent individuals will increasingly be “peacefully” executed by the state, against their will (for their own good), in the name of compassion and the bottom line – be it financial or political – becasue the state can no longer afford to have you breathing.

 

 

Read More Slippery Meet Slope Articles here.

 

The post Slippery Meet Slope: When the State Decides That it is in Your Best Interest to Die appeared first on Granite Grok.

Labor Day is the holiday when we celebrate the American Worker. It is celebrated on the first Monday in September to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the work and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United States.

This definition sounds like a union mantra, but today, we celebrate every worker contributing to this great country’s incredible success and growth. We are still a very young nation on the global stage, and looking at how far we have come as a technological and industrial powerhouse is mind-boggling.

This country was fueled by the investment of brilliant entrepreneurs willing to risk their fortunes for progress and the middle class who supplied the workforce to turn the ideas into reality. Though we have celebrated Labor Day for more than 140 years, it was really the post-WWII era and the Greatest Generation that set the pace and standard for how successful the American workforce could be.

The middle class and the American worker have been under incredible pressure in the last few years and suffering greatly under Bidenomics. We are gaslighted by Joe Biden and his administration that the Biden economy is on the rise and that Americans are enjoying prosperity as a result. These people are out of touch with reality and could not be more wrong. They use manipulated statistics to support their narrative, but reality exposes the charade. Slight of hand does not help us stretch the dollars in our wallets. Forget the inflation numbers, and let’s instead talk about affordability.

The push to increase the minimum wage has certainly put more money in the pockets of entry-level employees. What this effort has actually done is force small businesses to scale back their staffing and increase prices. Unfortunately for many of these small businesses, the one-two-punch of COVID and increased labor costs has driven them out of business. Combine these increased costs with a shrunken labor force, and you have a very difficult economy for owners, workers, and consumers.

The White House points to recent inflation numbers in the threes as a triumph of administration policies, but it is a fake statistic and a significant lie. First of all, the inflation number is a comparison of certain costs this year to last year. The 3% they brag about today is higher than the nearly double-digit inflation numbers of 2022, which were increases over 2021, and so on. This compounded effect is what Americans feel when the money earned does not cover the expenses paid. That is reality versus fiction. The government has also pulled energy, housing, and food out of inflation calculations, which is a disservice to Americans. That is the difference between the theory of inflation and the reality of affordability.

Biden says he is the man who will put the middle class in a better place and prepared for the future. With rising costs outpacing wages and the negative impact of the economy and inflation on our 401k accounts, the middle class will not have to worry about raising the retirement age because we will all be working into our eighties. The economy is just another aspect of the job that President Joe Biden has not a clue. If he would like some insight into affordability, he only needs to ask a member of the middle class who has four days of expenses ahead and eight days to go until payday.

The post A Few Post-Labor Day Thoughts … appeared first on Granite Grok.

David Vicinanzo defends government corruption and represents survivors of government corruption. Currently, he is a lead attorney, bringing over 1000 civil suits against the State of New Hampshire and its Youth Detention Center for decades of cover-ups of child abuse that happened under state care.

However, after reading David Vicinanzo’s bio, you have to wonder why he is allowed to bring any cases against the State of New Hampshire since his background is protecting against inquiries of Government corruption — precisely what led to the cover-ups of the child sex abuse at the State’s youth facility.

A trial lawyer, David A. Vicinanzo serves a broad array of clients — from Fortune 100 to pro bono — in New England, New York, the Washington, DC, area, and elsewhere. He practices primarily in the area of government investigations and the representation of organizations and individuals in complex civil and criminal matters, and in representing survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

The first tab next to David Vicinanzo’s name is a link to Nixon Peabody’s expertise in:

“Government Investigations and White Collar Defense”

“Rely on our customized defenses and proficiency in counseling, investigating, and litigating all forms of government inquiry

We know how government cases are made and what it takes to get them resolved. We are best positioned to conduct internal investigations; defend you as a target, subject, or witness in an investigation; and handle crisis situations to protect your brand.

In addition, our compliance measures help prevent and detect violations and minimize the risk of government action.”

Another tab leads to:

“Public Corruption”

“Managing personal, professional, and financial exposure before litigation can be as critical as courtroom defense.

Representing government officials, their staff, and others, we explore all options to avoid indictment on public corruption charges in grand jury proceedings and complex investigations and build effective defense strategies to mitigate immediate and future consequences.

Our team of former prosecutors and criminal defense trial lawyers, many of whom have held supervisory positions in DOJ and various state AG offices, brings in-depth knowledge of the complex federal and state laws underlying public corruption offenses, including those brought under the Hobbs Act, Travel Act, RICO, the program bribery statute, and mail and wire fraud statutes.

As a result, we resolve matters successfully, confidentially, and quickly.”

Another tab leads to:

“Congressional Investigation”

Our team has decades of experience in federal oversight matters and has played key roles in numerous high-profile inquiries — a critical advantage if you are involved in a complex and unfamiliar process.

We guide your engagement with Congressional investigators from the start, all the way through providing statements and testimony.

When David Vicinanzo joined Nixon Peabody, he was chosen by Edward Arsenault (the Diocese’s “compliance” officer) to be the attorney for Father Gordon MacRae to make an appeal. The law firm (in what appears to be at Father Edward Arsenault’s direction) had replaced another one that had long been representing the Diocese. “Sheehan, Phinney, Bass + Green.”

Edward Arsenault (who later pled guilty to defrauding the Diocese) told the incarcerated priest (in a recorded call to the prison in 2002) to forward his files so he could pass them to the attorney. There was a condition, however — that Father Gordon would cease contact with the Wall Street Journal, whose forthcoming exposé by Dorothy Rabinowitz would show that the priest was framed and wrongfully convicted.

David Vicinanzo didn’t contact Father Gordon MacRae even though his partner, Gordon MacDonald, did — to ask him if he would object to the law firm making a settlement with an accuser whom the priest had never met nor heard of, just for the sake of a quick deal. David Vicinanzo was briefly announced (in the early 2000s) to become the Attorney General of New Hampshire, and then suddenly, he was no longer mentioned.

In 2017, David Vicinanzo’s name appeared again — this time as the first candidate suggested to replace Robert Lynn, who was retiring from his position as New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Chief Justice. Then Gordon MacDonald, Vicinanzo’s partner from Nixon Peabody and who was the AG, became the candidate. The New Hampshire Executive Committee rejected MacDonald’s first application even though it was supported by Brian Harlow- one of the victims of the Diocese of Manchester, and Amanda Grady Sexton of the NHCADSV. The second time round after the 2020 general election, Gordon MacDonald was appointed as New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Chief Justice even though he had no experience as a judge, and he had to recuse himself from police disciplinary cases since he had fought to keep the list of corrupt police officers (which included James F McLaughlin — the police officer who framed Father Gordon MacRae) withheld from public access.

In 2022, David Vicinanzo and Russ Rilee wrote a letter to AG John Formella — Gordon MacDonald’s successor — about the State’s cover-ups of child abuse at the State’s Youth Detention Center. What he didn’t mention is that he was well aware of the State’s cover-ups because when he was representing Phillips Exeter Academy, which had been covering up child sex abuse, the DCYF admitted to deleting files relating to this.

When it came to a judge for the Youth Detention Center cases, Vicinanzo was quoted:

“And while Attorney General John Formella and the victims’ attorneys agree that John Broderick was the best choice, the attorney representing most of the victims, David Vicinanzo, says the process as written will fail because it is deeply flawed.”

Someone pass David Vicinanzo a mirror, please…

The AG’s office under Gordon MacDonald rejected the first class action suit against the Youth Detention Center filed by Russ Rilee on behalf of David Meehan and hundreds of others. He referred plaintiffs to the NHCADSV (David Vicinanzo’s client). Then David Vicinanzo, Gordon MacDonald’s ex-partner at Nixon Peabody, and Russ Rilee joined forces. Suddenly, the cases against the YDC were allowed to go forward.

Russ Rilee forwarded a letter I wrote to him — after he filed the original (and rejected) David Meehan class action lawsuit against the YDC — to explain that I believed there was a kids-for-cash scheme going on.

In my letter, I stated that I believe that the NHCADSV, Amanda Grady Sexton, and Gordon MacDonald were involved in it along with others, including the police. My letter was forwarded to the NHCADSV and Amanda Grady Sexton, who then instructed Timothy McLaughlin at Shaheen & Gordon to send me a letter threatening me with a defamation suit if I did not recant my statements. They wanted me to remove the reference to Amanda Grady Sexton and NHCADSV — especially while Amanda Grady Sexton was running for re-election as a Council Member for the City of Concord (and Chair of the Public Safety Committee to whom the police report, have their budgets approved). Timothy McLaughlin also wanted me to stop contacting three-letter national agencies about the corruption — I had filed a complaint with the IRS, FBI, and others.

I believe the reason Shaheen & Gordon wanted me to remove my statements was so that the NHCADSV could work with Russ Rilee & David Vicinanzo on the suits (and get kickbacks from the settlements). David Vicinanzo had acted as special prosecutor for a case between Shaheen & Gordon clients and mortgage specialist Mike Gill. The relationship between Vicinanzo and Shaheen & Gordon is, therefore, tight. The relationship between David Vicinanzo and the three letter agencies I had contacted about my beliefs in a kids-for-cash scheme is also tight.

David Vicinanzo’s expertise is defending against Government and White Collar corruption probes. Shaheen & Gordon have this expertise as well, coincidentally. The NHCADSV calls itself a private non-profit that is funded by over 99% public funds. It advises on Governors’ commissions and is involved in oversight committees. It creates and controls media for the AG, police, prosecutors, DCYF, Governors, and selected “victims” of institutional abuse — institutions paid for or receiving public grant money.

How is David Vicinanzo allowed to represent plaintiffs of YDC abuse with this background? He knew the Government agency DCYF deleted files because he witnessed it for his own client, Phillips Exeter Academy, and he said nothing. AG Joseph Foster declined to prosecute. Police were told not to arrest. There was a media blackout. Governor Maggie Hassan’s husband was the principal of Phillips Exeter Academy, and she was running for a position in the Senate. His client, the NHCADSV (and Shaheen & Gordon’s client), got a contract out of it.

David Vicinanzo’s client, the NHCADSV, also got a contract with St. Paul’s School out of the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation, which they lobbied for to his ex-business partner, Gordon MacDonald, when the latter became AG. MacDonald declined to prosecute St. Paul’s School, the records were kept secret despite the school’s waiver of privacy. David Vicinanzo praised Judge Richard McNamara in his decision to withhold the report from public scrutiny. He had represented members of the school’s faculty/administration who had been named in the investigation. Nobody went to jail. His client, the NHCADSV, got a contract with the school.

The NHCADSV’s Lyn Schollett praised the settlement agreement with St. Paul’s School, calling it a model for other schools. An attorney in Massachusetts said he’d never heard anything like it — allowing the Government in to monitor a school.

The NHCADSV had hired Brian Harlow, a solicited victim of the Diocese of Manchester priest sex abuse, to expand its business in 2012. Harlow endorsed David Vicinanzo’s partner, Gordon MacDonald, to be Supreme Court Chief Justice. So did the NHCADSV, and none of them said anything when Gordon MacDonald dismissed the abuse at the Youth Detention Center as “victim negligence”. None of them criticized the DCYF for deleting files at the YDC or Phillips Exeter Academy.

Who is David Vicinanzo? A Government operative (he was a federal prosecutor) or the person who steps in to smooth over Government agency fraud and keep it all behind closed doors in the secret society club atmosphere that is NH Bar?

The post Who is David Vicinanzo, Lead Attorney for the Victims of Youth Detention Center Abuse? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG) rattled the cages of the Republican Party in DC promising to vote against a Continuing Resolution to fund the government unless the House passes impeachment inquiries against President Joe Biden and to protect President Trump from the Democratic weaponization of the Courts and agencies attacking him. Wow! That got folks’ attention but before you jump up,  clearly understand two things.

First, MTG said this more for effect on the news cycle than any real possibility that a Continuing Resolution would not be passed. Republicans may try to make some modifications to such a bill but how successful they would be remains to be seen.

Second, understand that such a failure to approve such a Resolution would affect the whole government and not just the weaponized FBI, DOJ, and leftist District Attorneys trying to jail Trump. It would effect every federal agency including the Social Security Administration, and Medicare; all of it. I can’t imagine handing Democrats a bigger club to pound Conservative candidates with.

But don’t worry, MTG isn’t stupid she knows there isn’t a snowball’s chance that any such nonvote will happen Party-wide this bombastic declaration. It was aimed for the media’s consumption and to raise awareness of the corruption Democrats have created in our government agencies.

I do fear that it may backfire as the Left will certainly use this as a reflection on all Republicans. Thus, we just need to laugh it off

The post Vote Against the “Continuing Resolution” to Continue Spending Us Into Oblivion appeared first on Granite Grok.

Tax dollars were handed out to states, hospitals, organizations, and the media (primarily as advertising) to promote the COVID vaccines as safe and effective. The Pfeds also bought the silence of the Machine media and most of the medical community.

One of the many stipulations of acceptance (strings) is that the recipient must do or say whatever the Pfeds demand. Compliance and silence, in this case, where wandering off that scripted plantation could require them to return the ill-gotten gains.

Buying hospital and media compliance was easy. They didn’t even put up a fight. But how about the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)? The largest American organization overseeing the health and safety of moms and their unborn babies.

To borrow from Edward Longshanks’ care of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

 

I gave Mornay double his lands in Scotland, matching estates in England. Lochlan turned for… for much less.

 

Eleven million. They turned for 11 million.

 

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests reveal that the main professional organization of obstetricians and gynecologists (OB-GYNs) in the United States accepted over $11 million in taxpayer money to promote the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines and claim that they are safe for pregnant women and their unborn children.

 

You can imagine how this went at the office, probably much like the experience shared before the Texas State Senate by Nurse Jennifer Bridges.

“When I worked the COVID unit the whole time until I was fired (she refused to get the mandated vaccine), bad in the beginning, they did use hydroxychloroquine in the hospital for the first couple of months. It worked very well. Patients were seeing improvement. All of a sudden they pull it, and witch it for the very expensive drugs like remdesivr … We would question the doctors. We should ask, well, why did this happen? They all said the same thing. I have no idea this is just the new hospital protocol.”

 

 

One day, out of the blue, the ACOG passed down a fatwa announcing that COVID-19 was safe for pregnant women and their unborn babies. Many, perhaps most members just took it at face value. The ACOG was supposed to ask questions and ensure accurate information to doctors in their organization.

Anyone who questioned it was putting all that easy money in danger.

 

In an interview with COVID-19 vaccine expert and Big Pharma critic Dr. Naomi Wolf, Thorp laid out how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) created what he called a “covenant of death” with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) – the largest professional organization for OB-GYNs in the United States and the rest of the Americas – in exchange for $11 million.

“What’s in this covenant of death? … They took well over $11 million. They signed the covenant with death, and they’re not allowed to deviate one iota from the lethal narrative of HHS. If they do, they will be liable for paying back every single penny, which they’ve already pocketed,” said Thorp.

 

As you’ll know from our reporting and that of other outlets that were not or would not be bought out, post-COVID-19 vaccination miscarriages soared by hundreds of percentage points. It was not only not safe or effective but unsafe for women who were pregnant or planning on getting pregnant.

Pre-born babies that did not die post-jab have or could expect any quality of health and life issues as a result, for a sum that is less than a rounding error on the average Pfederal Budget. And the Pfeds spent a lot of money to buy compliance and silence, but I get the sense that the ACOG “turned for… for much less.”

 

HT | CDC.News

The post The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Sacrificed Moms and Their Babies To the COVID gods for 11 Million Dollars appeared first on Granite Grok.

One of the most insidious aspects of the political left’s strategies is the creation of a new language. In the past year or two, this has been epitomized by the campaign to remove gender-related language indicating the two-sex reality.

The Democrat-led leftist US Congress in Washington has pushed for the removal of the word ‘woman’ from the legal lexicon. Playing along with the verbal nonsense of the culture warriors is usually not worthwhile.

No term is more idiotic to accept than the phrase ‘people of color.’ This little gem spawned in the late 1990s and grew in popularity through the ‘00s, taking firm root by the time the Obama presidency kicked off in early 2009.

The term is essentially dualist, splitting all people by race into two groups— Whites and everyone else. This moronic conceptualization of identity is inherently politicized by wokist nonsense like the theory that all of the planet’s societal ills are caused by Whites. Therefore, everyone else should team up because they are, by default ostracized altogether by the White race.

Nothing could be further from the reality of the civilizations of the planet, and painting in such a broad and childish linguistic brushstroke seriously stigmatizes anyone who plays into this ridiculousness.

To begin with the deconstruction, White, in the usual stupidity of the US political Left, means European Caucasian. While many ethnic groups in the Asian races are actually often whiter than the average Caucasians, Asians are typically lumped in with people of color. Furthermore, Asian societies today are some of the wealthiest on the planet, and Asia-based empires have historically played a very powerful role in world history— consider the Japanese empire in the mid-20th century, the line of Chinese dynasties, and the current strength of Singapore, Beijing, and Tokyo. The term people of color does not take this into account because the Europeans and Americans who have bought into its use have mostly never lived in Asian countries and have no conceptualization of what life is really like there.

Furthermore, the racial stratification of the planet is roughly balanced between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, Semetic/South Asian, and Far East Asians— to paint in broad strokes. Race is a very poor and unsophisticated way to accurately develop an understanding of socioeconomics and politics. That is why “people of color” is a cudgel, but one better totally deconstructed and destroyed. Jews, for example, are Semitic— just like the Emirati and Saudi, yet these three very powerful ethnicities are unaccounted for by people of color.

In the USA, many Blacks and Hispanics have become very successful— millionaires and billionaires. They are well-respected celebrities and leading figures in society. Yet they still pretend that they are oppressed by Whites in some way. These people consider any relationship with Whites where there is a fair exchange of value— goods and services in exchange for money or vice versa— to be a form of White Supremacy. It is total idiocy.

Keep in mind that idiocy is a vulgar expression for ideologue— someone who is dogmatically enslaved to an idea or ideology. These people who use the phrase people of color are obsessed with a conspiracy theory that Whites are oppressing them to the extent that they see racial oppression and race in everything that they do, from using silverware to walking down the street to buying groceries.

A final point— white is a color, just like black, red, yellow, brown, and whatever other color the modern racist would use to describe people by the shade of their skin. One trite way to etymologically consider the word human is by breaking it down to hue, denoting a shade of color and man. That accurately frames the plight of mankind civilizationally in the present age. Some humans are stuck in a paradigm where the most important thing they see is the color of other humans. It’s past time more of us moved past that to a more enlightened existence. Many already have.

Above all, we should be clear— if we are going to uphold a civil society, we cannot let idiots define the rules of the playing field. That is why, under all circumstances, this rude and despicable phrase, ‘people of color,’ should be ignored and soundly rejected.

 

The post A Strong Rejection of the Racebaiters appeared first on Granite Grok.

Our country was created to protect life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This requires boundaries set by law and custom to keep people from interfering with other people’s rights.

When it suits their purposes, Democrat politicians allow these boundaries to be violated with few or no consequences despite the harm to innocent people.   Examples include the very destructive and deadly BLM and Antifa riots and the Democrats’ softness on criminals, which enables them to continue preying on innocent people.

Perhaps worse is how Democrats use their dominance in Education to, in addition to often providing poor educational outcomes, violate the customary boundaries of parental rights, harming children for Democrats’ ideological purposes.

Some teachers do what no decent adult would do without explicit parental approval by presenting graphic sex talk and images to young children (opening some to sexual exploitation).   Other teachers confuse children about gender, suggesting that maybe boys and girls are in the wrong bodies and should get life-changing hormone or surgical treatments.   Some teachers hurt innocent children by teaching that young white children are bad, and young black children can’t succeed, because of past injustices/crimes (e.g., Democrat Jim Crow laws and lynchings) done by and to others.

When parents, and others, rightfully demand that school policies stop these harmful teachings and violations of decency, Democrats, who banned the Bible and Judeo-Christian teaching of love and tolerance, slander them as attacking free speech, book banning, and jeopardizing children’s health.   Biden sent his FBI to investigate and intimidate parents who peacefully protested and petitioned for policies to protect their children.

For their political purposes, Democrats allow the protective boundaries between people to be violated resulting in harm to innocent people and our peaceful society.

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Nitz seems to be the ‘Grok Meme-Master” on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but I thought I’d put these out there as a comparison of the Looney Lefties to we normal people.

 

(HT: Powerline)

Okay, let me be the “political” engineer in that the “person” on the left may indeed have “daddy” issues but certainly is talking gibberish.  Guns don’t have Rights, but the people who “keep and bear arms” certainly do.  And that would include Transgenders – they certainly have the Right to exercise their Second Amendment Rights just like anyone else that’s an American citizen. In fact, they have ALL the Rights that the rest of us have.

However, they certainly want to deny us our Right to Free Speech and Free expression of religious values (mandatory “preferred pronouns” to coerce the speech of others, making a hot mess of any English set of paragraphs or news stories written by the weak-kneed scribblers that have given into this “social construct” by the Left (their first mistake, I might add). And, given their Leftward worldview set, I’m happy to state they are most likely wanting to destroy our Second Amendment Rights as well.

As to the guy on the right (who appears in many of these types of Left vs Right memes), he’s technically correct in making sport of the fact that most of the transgenders are cutting off their “barrel and magazines”- just pony up the sawbucks and head for that knife-room. Just provide your wallet that will be hoovered up.  Oh, wait!

They expect us, via insurance and government, to pay for their “barrel cutting”. And for the life-long care that comes with that transitioning. It’s their “Right” to be happy, they say (never understanding that a true Right is something that is innate to each of us; to have their “Right”, they cannot demand anything from the rest of us).

Meanwhile, various levels of government still have a “Daddy, may I” outlook in exercising our 2A Rights – including making a short-barreled rifle or shotgun. Yes, technically, we can, but we get “Government entangled” and have to pay the government in order to use that Right.

 

Next up:

(H/T: Powerline)

 

And this one is just a statement that gender is immutable – that’s MY “social construct” and biologically sound. We DON’T have to accept the Left’s repeated pronouncements (re: think propaganda to move your Overton Window). The pesky thing is that Biology proves that there are only two genders by deliberately marking us as different. Not unequal, just different.

But they really expect us to bow to their demands:

 

 

They are just Selfish and Narcissistic in doing so.

(H/T: Matt)

 

 

 

The post A Couple of Transgender Memes to Get Off My Chest appeared first on Granite Grok.

If you live in America, then surely by now you have heard about its desperate need for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Despite its historical reputation as the global melting pot and the land of equal opportunity, America has been recently outed by the really-super-smart types in colleges and universities as none of the above.

A brief survey of America’s history, which was desperately in need of revision, reveals the cold, harsh, and blindingly white truth that America was built on the backs of the BIPOC (re: Black-Indigo-People-Of-Color) community while the ashen complexioned Euro-centric “founding fathers” looked on with cold indifference, because hey, that cotton wasn’t going to pick itself and they needed some socks for those long cold winters and equally long toenails.

Despite the historical fact that nine out of the thirteen colonies had abolished slavery by the time the constitution was ratified and the founders, though writing openly about their distaste for the trade, some even having let their slaves go free, the systemic racism was already deeply ingrained because melanin guides the hearts of men.  The less you have, the worse you are – this is a fact.  Just ask the scientists like world-renowned race psychologist Dr. Robyn DeAngelo and Professor of Historical Blackness (who is currently totally black and therefore really, really good) Dr. Ibram X. Kendi.

As the vanguard of the new cultural call to “do better” by singling out the most populous and problematic demographic in the country, white people, the good doctors, and their comrades have developed a method of leveling the playing field by leveling the hopes and dreams of whitey so as to elevate the hopes and dreams of non-whities.  As Caitlyn Jenner used to say before, she was a cereal killer, “Don’t forget to eat your whities”!

This begs the question, how do you have diversity, equity, and includity when you are an evil white person?  Is it even possible?

Probably not, but we’ve got to try anyway because, just like climate change, this whiteness is going to kill us all if we don’t start doing something about it.  So take a deep breath, hold in that carbon dioxide, and let’s save the country from white folks!

How to Diversity

Webster’s Unabridgeable Woke Dictionary defines diversity as:

1. The condition of having or including people from different ethnicities and social backgrounds.
2. A variety or assortment.

Thus, when you are trying to create diversity, especially in the workplace, it’s important to look for people of different ethnicities and social backgrounds, just like the slave owners did, but not as racist.  Rather than buy them on the open market, you want to pay them to add their assorted and preferably highly melanized ethnicities to your place of business.  Now, this may sound like judging a book by its cover, but it’s not if you’ve already read the book, right?  Remember, it’s racist to think all black or brown people look the same, but it’s NOT racist to believe they should all think and act the same – it’s diversity.

Also, unlike the slave owners, you’re not there to boss them around but to learn about their lived experiences and honor their epistemological standpoint because this will lead to increased revenue thanks to Kendisian economics.  People aren’t coming to your business for a business experience. They want to hear about your employee’s lived experience.  Diversity = profit$$!

Speaking of economics, you’ll also want to build equity in the workplace.

How to Equity

The Oxford English How-To-Be An- Anti-White-Racist Dictionary defines equity as:

1. Something that is just and fair.
2. Justice achieved not simply according to the strict letter of the law but in accordance with principles of substantial justice and the unique facts of the case.

 

Of course, in order to understand equity, it’s important to understand the meaning of justice, so when we consulted the Grand Master P-Funk and Wagnall’s Social Justice Dictionary, we found:

Justice:

1. the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments

This definition of justice is problematic because it uses words like “impartial” and “merited,” both of which are horribly racist.  Do better P-Funk!

So, we thought it prudent to apply the K.I.S.S. principle and change a couple words:

 

1. the maintenance or administration of equity especially by the use of partial adjustment of the claims made by those who have become woke whereby we assign present discrimination as merited punishment for past discrimination by non-woke, in particular, white people

 

Keep it simple simpletons!

Thus, the goal of equity is to level the playing field so everyone is equal because to truly rid ourselves of whiteness, we need everyone to be equal with white people, then they’ll stop being so, so….white! Like the old Chinese proverb says, two wrongs don’t make it white.

How To Includity

Of course, we don’t want anybody to miss out on these nouveau critical changes, which is why we wrap this social justice trifecta up in a big bow of inclusion.  As one of the great philosophers of our time, Kamala Harris, says, “Inclusion is where everyone who was excluded is no longer excluded… because we include the excluded… so now they’re included.  This is inclusion.” OMG, she should change her name to Vice President Crystal Clear, am I right?

Of course, inclusion doesn’t mean:

White people, or Trump supporters, or Christians, or cis-gendered, or heteros, or nationalists, or Tucker Carlson fans, or parents, or patriots, or Republicans, or libertarians, or the patriarchy, or orthodox Jews, or orthodox Catholics, or biologists, or female swimmers, or homophobes, or transphobes, or the unvaccinated, or truckers, or climate deniers, or Nazis, or anti-Ukranians.  Essentially 70% of Americans are not going to be included in inclusion because they’re either white or they act white, and that’s not how inclusion works.  Get it?

Just think of diversity, equity, and inclusion like you do, like a packet of Skittles, tons of color except no white ones. Better yet, a rainbow – all of the colors are represented, and they go together as one over-arching symbol bending ever downward, eternally, without a hint of whiteness.

If that’s not clear enough, then go read the 42nd chapter of Moby Dick, and maybe ol’ Herman “The Sperm Whale” Melville can reel it in for you.

 

The post Banana’s Guide To: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion appeared first on Granite Grok.

A California School District has had to cough up $100,000.00 to settle a lawsuit in which it is alleged to have coached an 11-year-old girl to socially transition to a male gender.

 

According to the Center for American Liberty and allegations in the lawsuit, Alicia [Konan] was recruited to join an “Equality Club,” where she was taught about bisexuality, transgender identities, and other LGBT concepts when she was in the sixth grade.

Alicia began to use a male name and pronouns and wore a chest binder under boy’s clothes.

School staff finally called a meeting the last day before winter break during Alicia’s seventh grade year and demanded that Ms. Konen refer to her daughter by a male name and male pronouns, she said.

 

Teachers and counselors first recruited and then indoctrinated Alicia, suggesting things like, “I was told by the counselor—it was brought up that I was sad because I wasn’t who I was supposed to be, and that’s kind of where it all started,” she said.

At the time, her mom was confused and trying to be supportive until …

 

Jessica Konen, the child’s mother, came forward after a leaked audio recording revealed the two teachers telling other educators about how they secretly recruited students into the school’s LGBT club at a California Teachers Association weekend conference in Palm Springs in October 2021.

 

Her daughter was having a typical tween life experience, but public “educators”  instead of helping her through it – used her normal emotional roller-coaster as an excuse to recruit her permanently into their gender cult.

I’ve posited in the past (a reader found the link) that this collusion reeks not just of a religious cult but one with RICO-like implications. The California Teachers Association, state and local unions, and even politicians and special interests are moving and sharing resources to irreversibly alter the lives of other people’s children.

The Konen’s win is a victory, but a small one. Alicia is happily a 16-year-old girl, and she and her mother have worked through it. And the money is nice, but it’s not enough. While the teachers were fired, the infrastructure behind what they did is unchanged, nor is the cultural price behind it.

Until this is viewed as an illegal criminal enterprise and people are brought up on conspiracy charges to permanently harm children, there is no incentive for the Pharisees of the gender cult to change course.

These stories will continue to make the news, and most of them will not have happy endings.

 

The post Mom Awarded $100K From School District That Tried to Regender her Daughter appeared first on Granite Grok.

You do NOT need to be a “scientist” … an increasingly meaningless term … to know that Fauci is full of sh*t. His latest? Masks work on an “individual basis” but not on a group basis. HUH?

A group of people is simply a number of individuals. So if masks work … as Fauci claims … on an “individual basis,” they would necessarily also work on a group basis.

Fauci and his ilk continue to LIE because they have never been held accountable for their past lies. Why, for example, is “Dr.” Chan still the “State Epidemiologist” when he spewed the same LIES about masks, etc. as Team Fauci?

If you want a more technical takedown of Fauci:

Today on CNN, after devastating study citations from the interviewer showing that masks don't work, Fauci responded: "but masks work on an individual level".

But this is nonsense. Here's why.

To do science on masks, you have a masked group and an unmasked group. You compare the… pic.twitter.com/MEsJ1RrNdJ

— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) September 3, 2023

The post More LIES From Fauci Because He (And Others) Have Never Been Held Accountable For Their Past Lies appeared first on Granite Grok.

New Hampshire is being blanketed in campaign ads. The current beatings come courtesy of Nikki Haley and Chris Christie. I liked Haley as a UN Ambassador, but she bailed on her boss when the rubber hit the road. Christie, on the other hand?

His latest ad focuses on how Trump’s presidency was centered on distractions and disruption. That’s not a lie. But Christie’s current ad ignores how all those distractions and disruptions resulted from Democrats and Republicans like Christie trying to prevent Trump’s electoral mandate from succeeding.

It was a 24/7/365 election denying doing business as collusion to unseat a duly elected President of the United States. From election night to his final day in office, the Uniparty threw mud, rocks, whatever it could imagine, which Trump batted back at them at every opportunity. He defended himself, his supporters, and America from these attacks.

Are we to assume Chris Christie would not? That he would sit on his hands (sorry, that’s an image that will be hard to forget) while the lies, conspiracy, and treason upon which most of that was founded are peddled as truth and investigated by the police state at great taxpayer expense. Trump’s responses were deliberate acts of self-defense to the distractions that Chrsite claims plagued Trump’s presidency.

Chris Christie wouldn’t just take it, and the same ad tells us so. His claim to fame was going toe-to-toe with teachers’ unions, which was never a distraction, not that his tenure lacked them. Two words. Bridge Gate.

 

For four days, school buses, ambulances, and infuriated motorists alike were trapped in gridlock for hours. Paramedics responding to 911 calls even had to abandon their emergency vehicles and walk.

Ultimately the public would learn that officers in the administration of Christie, the Republican governor, ordered the lane closure to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to endorse Christie’s re-election bid.

 

Christie, of course, claims he knew nothing about it, and in the end, the aides he “fired” were exonerated of fraud and corruption charges. Feel free to take any of that whichever way you like, but it was a distraction and not the only one. From a no-bid post-hurricane Sandy Contract to other less-than-stellar moments, he has more than a few distractions like most politicians at his level. The difference is in how much they mattered to the uniparty of which Christie is a card-carrying member.

Trump doesn’t have to be your guy, but Christie’s Campaign is pulling a fast one when it says the things the Uniparty did to a sitting President are that President’s fault. They could have let the people have their mandate and let the man work, and absent the non-stop harassment, it could have been a very productive and peaceful four years instead of a mostly productive four years. But that would not have addressed the real problem.

Trump could expose the dirty secrets of uniparty power and dismantle the foundation upon which it stood.

Donald Trump may never get a second bite at that rotten apple. Odds are no Republican will, even if they win the nomination. But Chris Christie will never be the answer to that problem, and outside New Hampshire, his polling is crap. But I’m sure he’ll spend his days much like Governor Sununu, another uniparty stooge, creating distractions and then blaming Donald Trump for them.

 

The post Something Misleading This Way Comes … appeared first on Granite Grok.