The Democrat Party in the USA is traditionally a party that intentionally sits in opposition to the Republican Party, which represents a continuation of the ideologies that established the country in 1776.

US Democrat politicians are essentially trained to understand that the things they say are intended to create the conditions for national dialogue. They know that they are taking stances on many issues that are wrongheaded or ultimately anti-constitutional.

In many ways, due to this intentional contradictary approach to politics, the Democrat Party requires the backing of the US intelligence community. The stance the Democrats take on issues is intended to produce a section of the national population that is incredibly misinformed on all manner of current affairs. The purpose of this initiative, historically, has been to ensure that a national debate and a constant discourse must take place in order to make decisions. It is a fake production of a theatrical and forced discourse.

The foundations of this approach to governance were drawn from the 1800s when the Democrat Party was founded and created. For all intents and purposes, this ideological approach to governance is somewhat of a relic today of a bygone age. The societies of the 19th century were drastically different than today— nuclear weapons were not present, people did not carry their own individual supercomputers around in their pockets, the internet did not exist, and international travel was much more limited. There were many other critical differences.

Today, the US Democrat Party, for whatever reason, has been empowered by foreign-born and foreign-based forces. The Party has deep connections to China, Iran, Ukraine, and several other foreign governments that do not necessarily or realistically have the USA’s well-being as a core interest. In fact, many countries want to use the USA for some purpose or another— to drain its wealth, to serve as a bad guy for fearmongering authoritarian leaders, to be a stand-in military police force. The US Democrat Party is happy to sell and forfeit US sovereignty and its citizens’ wealth for their own benefit. They are ultimately individualist and will do anything for their own personal power and profit, including stealing from or killing.

The modern US Democrat Party frequently uses the phrase “good faith” to criticize people who do not treat them with a certain amount of respect. Yet, the Democrats have twisted the meaning of the English language to serve their purposes. They are not democrats (lowercase “d”) and do not support true democracy. They do not practice civility and have undermined the civil society. They have stripped civic education from public schools in areas of the country where they hold power. In the past five years especially, the Democrat Party has metastacized, spurned to total tyranny by COVID and the threat posed to their ideology by figures on the political right.

This Democrat Party is not one that should be followed or supported. The people in power in that party require removal by scalpel. They have become a disease on the USA, and mostly, their policies and existence as politicians pose a dangerous threat to the safety and well-being of US citizens. Their leadership has intentionally drained and squandered the wealth of US citizens, transferring it overseas to non-US citizens and to themselves and their families.

The Democrat Party requires a hard reset. Everything that its leaders say and do should be seen as the tantrums of a spoiled child, who needs to be sent to the bedroom for a timeout to reset and rest. There is no need to comply with a spoiled child. Or they can be likened to the death throes of a dying animal— their ideology is out-dated and wrongheaded. It is not something that people need to accept or agree with. In many ways, it comes from an ideological foundation that is intended to provide disagreeable ideas simply to generate discourse.

For a democratic society to function, such deliberate state-supported misinformation does not need to be created or spread. There are plenty of issues that are present on the planet today to consider in order to plan the direction of the US society, our society. There does not need to be a forced wrongheaded agenda violently shoved on the people. It is dishonest, immature, and uncivil.

Force the Democrat Party to reset. If the current leaders can’t do it themselves, the US citizens must assist. It is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of cultivating a healthy national political culture.

The post The Democrat Party Requires a Hard Reset appeared first on Granite Grok.

By the middle of 2022, it was already become apparent that the US military was having problems meeting recruitment goals. In August last year, The AP reported that the Army would have to cut force size, and an army spokesman admitted the Army was facing “‘unprecedented challenges’ in bringing in recruits.” This came even with new larger enlistment bonuses. The problem, however, wasn’t as acute for the Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps.

Since then, things haven’t gotten any better for recruiters. Now, recruitment shortfalls have spread well beyond the Army.  The New York Post reported last week:

Much of the military will fall short of recruitment goals by as much as 25% this year …

The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard are all expected to fall short of their recruitment goals this year, they told The Post. …

A spokesperson for the Air Force said they will likely miss their goal of 26,877 new recruits by 10%. The Coast Guard said they will likely only fill 75% of the number of full-time, non-commissioned recruits they need.

And as of April, the Navy, which has over 300,000 active duty personnel, was behind by 6,000 new recruits this year, and the Army by 10,000 out of their 65,000 goal.

2023 is the first time the Air Force has missed its recruiting goals since 1999.

Apparently, potential recruits aren’t buying whatever it is the military is selling these days as reasons for signing away one’s freedom to federal bureaucrats for a period of years. After all, the military is the only job that one can’t quit at any time, so any intelligent person will think long and hard before signing up.

There are many reasons for the recruitment problem. The decline in mental and physical fitness is real, and many young people are disqualified from a military job even before applying. Many others are put off by what appears to be an overtly politicized and partisan military. Pentagon leaders appear to be doubling down on ideological crusades more and more. Even while it faces a recruiting crisis, the military still refuses to provide back pay to service members who were forced out for declining the experimental covid vaccines. Unquestioning compliance with vaccine mandates, of course, is a cause near and dear to the current administration. Then there are the “woke” crusades in which military brass use drag queens as Navy recruiters and create recruitment ads tailor-made for LGBT personnel. The military wants to let you know they’ll affirm your gender transition—unless, of course, that gets in way of conscription. (The Pentagon claims the “woke” issue isn’t having much effect on recruitment.)

But there are other more deep-seated problems as well. There is growing evidence that the American public no longer reveres the military as it once did. Moreover, it is more abundantly clear than ever that military service has nothing to do with defending the United States or its people. And then there is the often-seen “problem” of low unemployment and the fact the private sector is drawing the best workers away from military careers.

The Public Is Losing Faith in the Military

Compared to institutions like public education, public health, and Congress, the military remains quite popular. However, the historical trend in public views of the military is clearly downward. In 2021, “About 56 percent of Americans surveyed said they have ‘a great deal of trust and confidence’ in the military, down from 70 percent in 2018.” The trend hasn’t changed since 2018. According to a Gallup poll, people who say they have a “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in the military fell from 69 percent in 2021 to 60 percent in 2023. The all-time low, accoriding to Gallup was in 1981 in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate.

The dwindling regard for the military is certainly not alien to young potential recruits, and talk of the recruiting crisis regularly features concerns about current young men and women being insufficiently “patriotic” or willing to “serve their country.”

This presents a real economic problem for recruiters. A potential recruit who regards military service as ideologically distasteful cannot be easily enticed with a few offers of recruiting bonuses or a GI Bill. After all, the military has long relied on convincing recruits they will gain psychic profits on top of whatever monetary pay they receive. To capitalize on this, recruiters will say things like “you’re serving your country” or “you’re fighting the bad guys” or “you’ll make your father proud.” But what if people stop believing that stuff? It’s going to take a lot of money to sweeten the deal for potential recruits who are smart enough or well-educated enough to have other options.

Moreover, it’s easy to see why many young people don’t find military service especially enticing. The US military lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hasn’t won a major war since 1945. More clever potential recruits are likely to notice that the US invasion of Iraq was no more morally justified than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Potential recruits with critical thinking skills might also notice the military is itching to turn American soldiers into fodder for Russian artillery. In previous ages, the usual regime propaganda might have worked to convince potential recruits that “we’re fighting the Russians in Ukraine so we don’t have to fight them in Kansas City.” It’s a variation on a common lie that warmongers tell Americans. But now, the military can’t even take for granted that conservatives—historically a key demographic for recruiters—will believe it anymore. Thanks to a shift in foreign policy views among conservative populists, many young men in middle America see a disconnect between the regime’s latest wars and actual defense of the “homeland.”

National Guard Troops Are Exploited by the Regime

This brings us to another problem recruiters face. Even those who doubt the regime’s latest imperial adventures oversea might nonetheless be convinced to join the National Guard. But even there, better-informed potential recruits are learning that the National Guard has degenerated into a reserve force for the regular military. The old “two weeks every summer” slogan about the National Guard has been exposed as a lie, and potential recruits seeking to “serve the community”  now know that they may end up fighting wars 10,000 miles from home. In 2021, National Public Radio reported on how the National guard exploits recruits. One Idaho National Guardsman described the new reality:

My entire life, the recruiting National Guard message has been one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer. And when we served, we used to say one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer, my ass. You know, when we went to Afghanistan, we were gone for 18 months…

NPR further noted:

There has been a lot going on that the National Guard has been brought in for—hurricanes, floods, protests, Iraq, Afghanistan. Last year, more than a third of the National Guard was on active duty. That’s the highest utilization we’ve seen since World War II, and some service members are getting fed up.

Once upon a time, National Guard forces could not legally serve overseas at all. This was why many young men in the 1960s managed to avoid a pointless death in Vietnam by signing up for the National Guard. Then, it was established they would not serve overseas without a declaration of war. Then the Pentagon and Congress decided it can do whatever it wants with National Guard members. A young many or women would have to be pretty desperate to sign up for that sort of treatment.

Unemployment Is Low

And that’s the thing. Workers right now aren’t desperate. The United States is currently in the middle of an employment bubble. Billions of dollars in new money created since 2020 has flooded the economy, driving up demand and producing countless malinvestments in the labor markets. Monetary inflation has driven increases in wages, and workers—for now—simply don’t need a military job. This relationship between low unemployment and low recruitment, of course, has been known for a long time. As a 2010 report from the Department of Defense noted:

Recruiting and retention are sensitive to the state of the economy. Studies indicate that a 10 percent decrease in the civilian unemployment rate will reduce high-quality enlisted recruiting by 2–4 percent. Retention also declines when unemployment decreases, but appears to be less sensitive to the state of the economy than recruiting. The recent economic downturn has improved recruiting and retention and has allowed the services to reduce use of enlistment and reenlistment bonuses. However, this improvement is expected to diminish as civilian economic conditions improve.

We’ll only know how truly severe the recruiting crisis is for the Pentagon once the unemployment rate starts to head up again. We likely won’t have to wait long. We can point to half a dozen economic indicators right now that point to a thoroughly slowing economy in the next year. As we see in the survey data, however, it is likely that views of military service have changed considerably in recent years. That means older relationships between joblessness and recruitment may no longer apply to the same extent. It may be that rising unemployment may not drive as many new recruits as may have been the case a decade ago. Recruiters may find that members of Gen Z are not enthusiastic about losing yet another war—regardless of the size of the enlistment bonus. We’ll find out soon enough.

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

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 Three Reasons Why Military Recruitment Is in Crisis appeared first on Granite Grok.

You’ll have noticed the absence of something almost daily. Content from Skip. He is up to his eyeballs in family matters that have consumed nearly every waking moment and many a sleepless night. It is not, we suspect, forever, but it has dragged on much longer than he expected.

Hurdles he’d jumped with an eye on getting back to writing have been cleared, only to find more. He’s working on it as you may have noticed today.

In his absence, I have had to lean more heavily on third-party content shared from places like Mises Wire, the Daily Caller, The Rutherford and Ron Paul Institutes, and even our own Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy. We appreciate policies that allow us to share what is certainly top-shelf filler, but the Grok has long prided itself on original content—our take on the news and opinion of the day, not someone elses.

That continues to be the goal, and when possible, the daily menu will include op-eds and other local fare no one else has. But until Skip can get his feet under himself for more than five minutes, I’ll be adding the third-party stuff almost every day, along with a hat tip and thank you to our cast of volunteers: Groksters that provide regular news and opinions you can only get at GraniteGrok.com.

Looking forward

If you’ve not heard, my departure from my full-time job finally has a hard date. Sept. 29th is my last full day in the office. After that, I will begin relying on our donations and will be able to focus almost entirely on GraniteGrok and projects proposed or started but not finished.

On that point, we have someone looking into the best way to add the promised ad-free VIP version for subscribers and donors. The upgraded search feature is also actively under study. We already have the tools to add video content and podcasts, and I will be trying to get that back on track. In other words, there will be improving the experience and diversifying the content.

Vermont Grok has new content, if not every day, than several days a week, as we look for ways to grow the content and audience. We’ve also contemplated expanding into Maine – maybe next year.

We are also organizing a rather significant fundraising event at the Londonderry Fish and Game Club on October 28th (Save the Date!) to help keep it all moving in the right direction: live music, local and national speakers, a gun raffle (perhaps?), and more – details will follow as we finalize things.

So, we are not sitting on our hands or giving up publishing space. Any shift toward third-party content is temporary, and with any luck, Skip will be back on track in a week or two.

One more note. I’ve been summoned for jury duty at the beginning of October, so my full-time affections could be delayed depending on whether I actually get picked and when, for how long, and so on. Skip may have to heave-hoh in my partial absence, so I hope he’s ready for that.

Thanks so much for your patience, your financial support, and, as always, for reading GraniteGrok.

 

Reminder: If – at any time – you’d like to give or give more, start or increase a subscription, you can use the GiveSendGo campaign page (no fees) or donate through the website (PayPal). We also accept checks; you can email me for the address if this is your preferred method of support.

The post What’s All This Then? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The July military coup in the west African country of Niger has once again brought attention to the fact that the US government runs a global military empire that serves Washington’s special interests, and not the national interest.

Before the coup made news headlines, most Americans – including many serving in Congress – had no idea the US government maintains more than 1,000 troops stationed on several US bases in Niger. But it’s even worse than that. A recent report in The Intercept suggests the Pentagon repeatedly misled Congress about the extent and the cost of the US presence in Niger.

According to The Intercept, “in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of US Africa Command described Air Base 201 (in Niger) as ‘minimal’ and ‘low cost.’” In fact the US government has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on the base since construction began in 2016.

So when did Congress declare war so as to legalize US military operations in Niger? They didn’t. But as Kelley Vlahos writes in Responsible Statecraft, US troops have been “training” the military in Niger since 2013 and the US government has constructed a number of military bases to “fight terrorism” in the country and region.

Does that mean that the Pentagon is operating in Niger under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) meant to track down those who attacked the US on 9/11? It’s a good question and thankfully one being asked by Sen. Rand Paul in a recent letter sent to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Senator Paul first pointed out in the letter, “the Administration’s limitless interpretation of the 9/11 AUMF and frequent use of Title 10 authorities results in military operations abroad conducted with little Congressional oversight and even less public scrutiny.” Such actions “undermine our Constitution,” he writes as he asks, “in how many countries are US forces conducting operations authorized by the 2001 AUMF.”

Ironically – or maybe not – one of the coup leaders in NIger had been trained by the Pentagon at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. What is the US government training foreign military officers to do, exactly? Overthrow their own governments?

Whatever the case, it appears the coup government in Niger may be seeking a withdrawal of foreign military on its soil. Mass protests against French military presence has led the French government to begin talks with the coup government on withdrawal. There are rumors that the coup government may next request US troops to leave the country.

We should pre-empt their possible request by withdrawing all US troops immediately from Niger (and the rest of Africa) and closing all military bases. The claim that the US government is fighting terrorism in the area is doubtful. After all, in both Libya and in Syria the US government backed terrorist groups against governments it sought to overthrow. President Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan famously wrote to his then-boss Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 that, “in Syria, al-Qaeda is on our side.”

Congress must step up and exercise its oversight authority to end the counter-productive US military presence in Africa. Our military empire is bankrupting us and turning the rest of the world against us.

 

Ron Paul | Ron Paul Institute

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.

The post Why Are We in Niger? appeared first on Granite Grok.

If you ever wanted to witness the real-time evolution of a traditional faith system from one of meaning and purpose to a pointless Sunday Garden Party, the Church of England has your ticket.

 

The biggest news story to come out of the church’s gathering was that some within the Church of England are calling for 2000-year-old references to God as He, Him or Father to be banished, instead using gender-neutral or female alternatives.

Leaders at the synod took written questions from those attending. One question came from the Reverend Joanna Stobart, an Anglican minister, who wanted to know what steps were being taken to offer alternatives to God with male pronouns. Specifically, she hoped “to develop more inclusive language in our authorized liturgy.”

The Bishop of Lichfield, Michael Ipgrave, serving as Vice Chair of the church’s Liturgical Commission provided a reply that excited those seeking the change. “We have been exploring the use of gendered language in relation to God for several years in collaboration with the Faith and Order Commission. After some dialogue between the two commissions in this area, a new joint project on gendered language will begin this spring.”

 

In America, they call it the Episcopal church, with which I’m somewhat familiar. My uncle was an Episcopalian Bishop, and until his passing twenty-plus years ago, we’d get the odd bit of inside baseball. But most of the migration away from traditional church doctrine has occurred since then, so I’m more of an outside observer – which is not a bad thing. Much of what I write is from outside whatever institution is the object of my bleary eye. You come here to read my thoughts about this or that, and I have a few about the Synod, which has already been pointed out here.

 

The story of Jesus Christ may be the best known and certainly the most read of any man to have ever set foot on planet earth. Christians believe Jesus was born to the ever-virgin Mary, sometimes referred to as “the mother of God.” She conceived Jesus through a miracle, thanks to the Holy Spirit. While some doubters have questioned her virgin status, virtually nowhere in history has there been any credible debate that Mary was Jesus’ mother. At no point has there been a serious discussion that Mary herself was God.

With those two points undisputed, it seems illogical that Christians could take to referring to God as She or Her. If one believes Jesus was the son of God and that Mary was His mother, and that she wasn’t God, simple logic tells us God can’t be referred to as She.

Far more importantly, though, are the words of Jesus himself. He spoke frequently about his Father in Heaven. He gave us the Lord’s Prayer, which begins with the words “Our Father.” He was not ambiguous.

 

There is, of course, no limit to the ways in which they/them can massage anything to fit into whatever shaped hole needs filling, but doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Judeo-Christian doctrine is filled with stories about every sort of person/people wandering off the morality plantation only to have bad things happen to them. It’s almost as if someone accurately observed human behavior and came up with a way to explain how not to suffer quite so much as a result. With a slight bit of prompting, almost anyone can manage to live productive, meaningful lives during which we prepare the future generation for similar success, unburdened by the absolute inevitability of death.

The rest of it might be window dressing, and while the carpet doesn’t have to match the drapes, at some point, you’ll have wandered so far away from the foundation that there’s hardly any point to any of it. With nothing upon which to stand, what little there was that made sense ceases to function as anything other than an increasingly lousy reason to get up early on Sunday morning.

And I think that’s exactly what the Secular Humanists infiltrators have been after all these years. And maybe you’d rather side with them, but modern totalitarian societies make it a point to ensure that the only higher power you recognize is the state, and while some people and some faiths have had a spotty record when it comes to morality, rights, and humanity, the depots are still batting zero, and we’ve no reason to believe that will ever change.

The Church of England is headed in the wrong direction, and I think everyone knows it.

 

For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011; despite this decrease, “Christian” remained the most common response to the religion question.

 

Membership in The Church of England is in a demographic spiral and being woke by pretending that more inclusive language will help is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

.

The post The Church of England Looks for Ways to Escape the Burdens of Christianity appeared first on Granite Grok.

Yeah, not a fan at all. If you are in or familiar with the Lakes Region, this car was parked in the Shaw’s parking lot across from Lowe’s in Gilford/Laconia. I had driven over from Lowe’s to pick up a couple of items and found this selfish Flatlander believing they could inconvenience people with their Bright, New, Shiny Subaru Forester with Massachusetts plate 187-D30.

 

(click to embiggen)

 

Parked right in the middle of two parking spots, as you see above. I’m not even sure I could have gotten it more dead-center if I was really trying hard:

 

 

(click to embiggen)

 

Entitlement, for sure. You backwoods, rednecked, toothless NH denizens, behold my magnificence….

I have to admit – if we hadn’t had to get home to take the Grandson off the bus, I would have parked right behind them. TMEW wasn’t amused at the idea, but I sure was.

After all, an opportunity to take a nap at Mr/Mrs/Miss Entitlement’s expense of time. And to let them know that’s why many of us “from around here” don’t like those that are “from away”.

 

The post Cloud and Sun – Great and Calming. On the Other Hand: Entitled Massachusetts Driver. MA Plate 187-D30 appeared first on Granite Grok.

Milk. You can get it from lactating mammals, but PETA would like you to believe that the cow-assaulting farmers aligned with the American Dairy-Industrial Complex are perpetuating a White supremacist milk culture. People who drink cows’ Milk are … systemic racists.

Are they, really? Or are the Almond ‘Milk’ people paying PETA to make up crap like this? I wouldn’t put it past them. The (cows’) Milk is racist narrative has been brewing for years, during which (coincidentally?) Almond Milk – which is actually creamy nut juice – has increased its market share among people who want Milk without the Milk (or the racism?) in the way Democrats want America without freedom.

They want it more than they can say.

I don’t drink much of either, and there is room for discussion about the Dairy Industrial Complex or the Almond Industrial Complex using this or that to secure its cartel, but we’re not here to discuss that, are we? The question is whether Milk is racist or, to be more specific – per the lactating mammals at PETA, cows’ Milk.

 

This can’t be real. Please tell me this isn’t real. pic.twitter.com/lm623VEgxB

— Libby Emmons (@libbyemmons) September 8, 2023

If it ever concerned you, it shouldn’t, the answer is no. It is not a symbol of anything white or supremacist, and a few seconds of research proves that point. Brown people milked first!

Domesticated “Cows” (Aurochs) and their Milk have been a part of human diets and cultures dating back to 8000 BC. That means, among people of all races, though not likely consumed as a liquid until about 6000 to 4000 BC when someone figured out how to process gut-wrenching dairy (raw Milk) into yogurt and cheese. That appears to have happened somewhere around 4000 BC.

 

According to scientists, the ability to digest milk was slowly gained some time between 5000-4000 B.C.E. by the spread of a genetic mutation called lactase persistance that allowed post-weaned humans to continue to digest milk. If that date is correct, it may pre-date the rise of other major dairying civilizations in the Near East, India, and North Africa.

 

Also,

 

People with the mutated gene would have had a better chance at survival and producing children with the same ability.  Soon, 80% of early dairying cultures in the Middle East and Europe carried this gene.  Dairying became a cultural and dietary mainstay.

 

In other words, Milk from the ancestors of our (for lack of a better term) European dairy cow was consumed in many forms by Sumerians (Archaeological evidence shows that the Ancient Sumerians drank cow’s Milk and also made cow’s Milk into cheeses and butters.), Egyptians (the cow was a goddess in her own right, named Hathor, who guarded the fertility of the land.“),  The Vedics (who ruled Northern India from about 1750 BCE to about 500 BCE, relied heavily upon the cow and the dairy products that it provided), and others, none of whom were “white” like Milk.

If people of color have been drinking and using cows’ Milk for longer than the “white man,” this, at best, suggests cultural appropriation, if anything. And if we’re talking about the Americas, you can start by blaming the Spanish.

 

“The first cattle to arrive in the New World landed in Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1525. Soon afterword, some made their way across the Rio Grande to proliferate in the wild. They became known as ‘Texas Cattle.’ Soon after, some of the [Spanish] settlers transported cattle to South America from the Canary Islands and Europe. More followed, and cattle multiplied rapidly throughout New Spain, numbering in the thousands within a few years.”

 

I’m still unclear why descendants of European Colonialists from Spain get an exception. The Spaniards erased the local Mesoamerican and South American culture, murdered the indigenous population, and replaced their language, and their descendants are victims of paler Europeans.

So, Cows’ Milk is racist and white supremacist even though brown people broke the seal on that whole business long before northern Europeans brought cows to North America, and the term white fragility was invented by people who probably drink nut juice.

Feel free to celebrate that reality by drinking… a beer that was thought to have been first crafted in Mesopotamia about 4 – 5,000 years ago.

 

The post Got White Supremacy? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The opening article of this series, published in the September 9 edition of the Eagle Times and in Granite Grok, examined test results from the Croydon Village School in light of comments made by its principal, Nicole Lackie, who also shared her belief that schools do not know how to teach reading.

The conventional wisdom says that the pandemic shutdowns affected student performance in public schools. In Croydon, this proved not to be the case. Now, we take an in-depth look at what happened to student achievement at the state level before and after the pandemic shutdowns on the New Hampshire Student Assessment System (NHSAS) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress test.

The NHSAS

The New Hampshire Student Assessment System (NHSAS) is administered yearly to students attending traditional public and charter schools in grades 3 through 8. The SAT is administered to NH students in grade 11; it’s free, and it’s required, whether you are college-bound or not.

Despite RSA 193-H:2 requiring public schools to have “all pupils at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment,” no school in New Hampshire has achieved this result or even come close. One might ask what purpose is served by these tests or this statute, but that is not the purpose of this review.

The New Hampshire Department of Education (NHEd) has a record of statewide assessment data since it started using the NHSAS in 2016. Tests were not administered in 2020 because of the pandemic shutdowns.

In what follows, we use the phrase “the score” to refer to “the percentage of students performing at or above the most basic level of proficiency” on any given test.

Summary of NHSAS Scores Since 2016

The NHSAS Reading chart below shows the percentage of students scoring proficient or above in reading on the state standardized tests in grades 3-8 and 11 from 2016 through 2022.

 

 

Reading scores have been dropping linearly since 2016, when nearly 40%, 4 out of 10 students, performed below grade level.

In 2022, the number of students scoring proficient had fallen to about 50%. There is no evidence of an extra drop in reading performance because of the shutdown. In other words, reading scores seem to be just where they would have been anyway, had the shutdown never happened. But let’s break that down more by looking at student performance in each grade.

We’ll start with students who were in kindergarten in 2018 and see how they performed through 2023. This group was in 2nd grade during the 2020 shutdown. They started testing in 2021 as 3rd graders, where 44% of them were proficient in reading. In 2023, their 5th grade scores showed that 54% were proficient. These numbers seem to disprove the prevailing narrative.

 

 

Similar to the 2018 kindergarten chart, each group of bars in the Reading Group Progression chart (below) shows how the different sets of students performed in the 6-year period from 2018 to 2023.

 

 

Those same kindergarten students are shown in the first set of bars on the left. Students who were in 1st, 2nd or 3rd grade in 2018 all showed about the same levels of proficiency throughout their testing. Around half the students are reading at grade level.

Those who were in grades 4 and 5 in 2018 showed some decline after the shutdown. These two groups of students seem to be the hardest hit by the pandemic shutdown when they were in 6th and 7th grades, respectively. Even so, about 50% of students across the board read below grade level and always have.

It seems that the pandemic has distracted us from the larger problem: that half our students have been reading below grade level for a long time.

Since one score could be questionable, let’s see how a national test measures New Hampshire student performance.

NAEP: The Nation’s Report Card

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, pronounced “nape”) is called “The Nation’s Report Card.” Since 1969, NAEP has been designed and used by the education establishment to let everyone know how well the United States is educating its children. They report results for each state for grades 4 and 8.

According to this test, New Hampshire is near the top of the United States.

NAEP scores in New Hampshire tell a different story than the NHSAS and SAT scores. The NAEP Reading chart shows that scores for grade 4 had been rising (ever so slightly) since 1998 until they dropped in 2017, which was well before the shutdown. The grade 8 scores also started dropping after 2017.

 

 

What the data shows is that even when scores were at their highest, fewer than half of NH students have been reading at grade level since at least 1998.

Again, we should clearly state that all the NAEP scores are low. They show that even at their high in 2015, only 45% of New Hampshire grade 8 students and only 46% of students in grade 4 were proficient in reading.

Conclusion

The narrative that the COVID pandemic shutdowns made things worse academically for public schools is not supported by New Hampshire’s data. Reading scores were decreasing before the pandemic started.

More than half of the kids in public schools are performing below grade level in reading. This has been the case despite regular changes to pedagogy, curriculum, technology, funding, and other efforts to improve schools.

Perhaps other approaches should be considered, for example: Organizing students into groups at the same academic levels, using technology to help students learn at their own level and at their own pace, or only allowing students to attend school when they are developmentally ready to read.

Next, we will look at how Vermont’s students may have been affected by the pandemic shutdown, according to its state assessments and the NAEP test.

This article originally appeared in the Eagle Times on September 12, 2023. It has been slightly edited.

 

The post Did the Pandemic Shutdown Affect Student Performance in NH? Part 2 of 8 appeared first on Granite Grok.

The progressives with liberal privilege don’t live in inner cities, so when they defunded the police, the elites didn’t see how it made Black Lives worse. Open borders were the same—no contact with the misery until border Governors started bussing them to Liberal cities.

That chaos is exacerbated by the Pfederal effort to relocate border crossers all over the US. Now, states like Massachusetts have declared states of emergency over some illegal aliens in their midst, equal to a fraction of what crosses into Texas border towns every few days.

Whiners.

The solution to this growing problem is not to close the border or even fill the prisons (they are breaking the law) but to put the border jumpers up in motels and hotels at taxpayer expense (which led this Hotelier to bail on properties in NYC). Chicago, Boston, New York, you name it, and they’ve got a human trafficking problem. Too many humans are trafficked into their laps instead of being returned to their native lands.

And sure, maybe 1% of them have a legitimate claim to political asylum, but we are not obligated to accept anyone under any circumstance. We could be like every other control and control immigration, but instead, Chicago has blocked off at least one section of the airport and set up a Bidenville, where the illegals congregate and sleep.

 

O’Hare airport in Chicago has been turned into a shelter for illegals

The area is blocked by a black curtain and staff is refusing to let journalists in
pic.twitter.com/9DPxpB7g15

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 9, 2023

 

And the housing arrangements are legit. The Chicago Sun-Times has a piece in which  then adds,

 

After a long trek to Chicago from Venezuela and other South and Central American countries, hundreds of migrants have landed at O’Hare Airport in recent weeks to find overcrowded, unsanitary and unpleasant conditions.

Among the complaints in the airport shelter: poor quality food like instant ramen; lack of access to health care, showers and laundry; inadequate bedding; and no support for placing children in schools.

The migrants arrive at O’Hare after being flown from Texas and other states.

 

The Sun-Times claims these are temporary arrangements, but “The problems at O’Hare follow a doubling of the number of incoming migrants to Chicago seeking more long-term shelter. As of Thursday, that figure was 2,089. At the airport, the number was 411, up from just 31 at the beginning of August. That population is almost four times the capacity limit initially set by the city.”

Security is a concern, so what is the next housing solution, the wide walkways in shopping malls? Will they set up shops to sell wares or panhandle for change? Or can they shoplift with impunity until all the stores leave and the entire mall becomes a slum city within a city, as if this is better for everyone involved?

And while we’d like to think that these incursions into liberal air space might have some electoral implications, there’s no evidence. Chicago only has 2,089 they know about. That’s .0077% of the local population. Before the Dems pandemic, over 80 million people used O’Hare annually. A few hundred foreigners behind a curtain are not exactly an emergency.

Related: Mayor Lightfoot Saves Illegals From Chicago Gun Violence By Shipping Them off to the Suburbs

What is an emergency is that Nancy Pelosi is running for Congress again on San Francisco values. That place is a disease-infested dumpster fire. You could shoot episodes for a spin-off series from The Walking Dead with little set prep or makeup. And Pelois has almost no chance of losing despite decades of enriching herself and donors. At the same time, the people who elect her watch their city spiral into a physical and cultural disaster.

It is a problem that is well documented in San Fran and dozens of other Dem Run cesspools that in no way deter places (like, say, Vermont) from embracing the same failed policies (like open borders) as if they’ll do it better, but they can’t. There is no other end. So, you are either in on the scam and milking the populace dry for political power and financial gain, or you are a brain-dead, water-carrying stooge with the intellectual agility of a small soap dish for supporting it.

A homeless festering Gutamalan could defecate on your Dolce & Gabbana Floral Stretch Stiletto Booties, and you’d be like, “We need more government to do something about this”

The only place we could use some government is along the border, where they’ve abdicated their responsibility to keep America safe. But it’s not just that. The Pfeds don’t want the states or the people to secure the border. Their goal is to break the system, and whether urban Democrats realize it or not, their DC Democrat masters will break them first with a bit of help from border state governors, ensuring they get a taste of the policies they embrace.

 

 

 

The post Chicago is ‘Storing’ Illegal Aliens Like ‘Souvenirs’ at the Airport appeared first on Granite Grok.

SMILE, everyone, SMILE!  Wonderment and reflection – it can do a body (and mind) good:

 

 

(Click to embiggen)

 

It was taken from the Gilford Middle School parking lot up towards the Belknap Mountain range. Just a quick smartphone snap but it pleased me and put a smile on my face. It would have been nice not to have the building so large, but I thought the rays emanating from the clouds, tipped with sunshine, just caught a part of me.

It was a welcome relief to see.

 

The post Palate Cleanser – Sometimes, Ya Gotta Look Up at the Sky and Smile appeared first on Granite Grok.

Did you realize one country is the home to 9 of the ten most deadly cities in the world?  it is also home to 11 of the 15 most violent cities in the world. It has been the most deadly country in the world for the last six consecutive years.  Which country is this?

We want to thank Mark Abear for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
You can review our ‘Op-Ed Guidelines‘ on the FAQ Page.

The answer is Mexico.

A Mexican organization, The Citizen’s Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (CCPSCJ), compiled the data laying out the murder capitals of the world.  Mexico is the country with which we share our open southern border.

The list of most dangerous Mexican cities in order of most murders per capita to least includes Colima, Zamora, Ciudad Obregon, Zacatecas, Tijuana, Celaya, Uruapan, Ciudad Juárez, Acapulco, Irapuato and Cuernavaca and two of these highly dangerous cities, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, are located just across the US-Mexico border.

Mexico is now America’s top trade partner, taking the top spot from China owing to its location, the USMCA trade agreement, and Chinese manipulation of USMCA.

America is moving its economic supply chain to a country that is the most deadly and violent in the world.  How smart is that?  And how smart is it when we consider more US companies are moving out of China and going to Mexico?

And how is it companies are moving out of China to relocate to the very dangerous region of the South China Sea, like Vietnam? Is that really out of Chinese influence and control?

This is not acting based on thoughtful analysis and consideration.

It’s not smart. It jeopardizes America’s security.  There’s no real meaty analysis being offered here, just some common sense and something to consider.  How did we get here?  Why is what we are doing making sense?  What questions does it raise in your mind?

The post America Is Shifting Its Economic Supply Chain to a Country That Is the Most Deadly and Violent in the World appeared first on Granite Grok.

The consolidation of smaller farms into sprawling industrial food-rearing facilities has been witnessed by a largely unaware or uncaring society. Americans rallied to save the bald eagle and the spotted owl but have mustered little more than a platitudinal Farm Aid concert to reverse the decimation of the nation’s food-producing backbone. However, failing to save local farms is similar to ignoring honeybee die-offs: Humans can live without owls but not bees and the healthful foods they pollinate.

Current Farm-Bashing

Media reports sow ideas of insects for dinner, soy-burgers replacing beef, and the elimination of traditional agriculture in favor of space-age “solutions” to the supposed climate crisis caused by agriculture. Similar promises of transforming the post-World War II food supply for the Green Revolution used technology, genetic engineering, ubiquitous chemical applications to the land, and cutthroat marketing to eviscerate traditional farming, reduce food quality, and destroy the nation’s soil and water.

The circular marketing that offers humanity the same poison twice is classic doublespeak: Technology and corporate consolidation created cheap, toxic food that is killing the ecosystem as well as the children suffering from diabetes, obesity, and cancer at ever-higher rates. The solution — per Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, John Kerry, and other globalist stooges for corporate hegemony — is to eliminate all farming by human hand and compel humanity to dine on patented synthetic creations churned from humongous factories.

The Allure of Cheap Food

Americans have been understandably dazzled by cheap food and promises of endless bounty. With an average household food budget of 9% of income — until recent inflationary pressures — the nation’s food is cheaper than any people’s in history. The selection of products from around the world and newfangled food creations, often flavored with chemicals lab-designed to stimulate taste buds or appetite, are additional temptations nurturing complacency about straw-hat farmers losing their intergenerational lands.

Now most of that acreage is gone forever. Commercial development and suburban creep have irrevocably absorbed huge swaths of former fertile farmland. Small farmsteads dropped first, but the greater impact on consumers has been the lesser-known demise of the medium-sized ones.

Much is made of the term “family farm,” but the label is illusory. Massive properties of hundreds of thousands of acres may still be “family-owned,” just as Cargill, Ford, BMW, and Walmart can be described that way. The USDA also counts all agrarian enterprises selling more than $1,000 in goods annually in its census data as “family farms” that, in GNP terms, contribute little. What counts is balanced operations, both economically and environmentally: Middle-sized farms serve that vital balance.

The Demise of Mid-Sized Farms

Much as wealth disparity has split the nation and withered the middle class, consolidation enabled by heavy subsidies and favorable regulation has erased America’s middle-sized farms. USDA reported:

“[T]he USDA said U.S. agriculture is increasingly divided into two groups: a large number of small farms that produce a small part of the nation’s food, fiber, and livestock, and a small number — fewer than 80,000 — of big operations that generate two-thirds of farm production. The number of medium-sized farms is shrinking … The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said the 2017 census showed that agricultural consolidation is driving medium-sized family farms out of business and concentrating wealth among large operators.

Subsidies for corn, wheat, soy, and other crops favor large-scale operators at the expense of lesser producers. These subsidies do not much impact farmers markets or roadside stands, which also avoid most of the costly and burdensome labor, environmental, and agriculture regulations that are easily borne by large enterprises but undermine the profitability of smaller operators.

Another creeping destroyer has been tax inflation. As land prices have increased, real estate taxes in many states have become stifling for farm entrepreneurs unless protected by land use or other relief programs. A backyard gardener is likely paying taxes already on a residential parcel with a garden, so any small income from farm sales is essentially earned free of any increment in real estate taxes. Large tracts generally carry a lower per-acre real estate tax burden; medium-sized farms thus bear the greatest tax burden relative to income, as their lands will likely be valued at current residential development value rather than raw agricultural land. These pressures especially undermine mid-sized operations close to affluent cities or suburban regions.

The result of these combined pressures has been an inexorable loss of human farmers, as food is reared in chemical-soaked plains or concrete feed lots, processed in multi-storied smoke-stacked labyrinths, and packaged for institutionalized distribution and eventual human consumption. The same forces that destroyed the local farm now label cows as threats while constructing massive polluting factories to supply synthetic, patented meat products and insect patties to schoolchildren, shaping their tastebuds for the future.

The “family farm” label is unimportant: Essential is whether food is local and produced at a sensible scale for the climate, geography, and soil types of a region. Consolidating all domestic agriculture into an industrial factory-farm system is a step away from human health and liberty and devastating for the environment. Should Americans awaken from their near-comatose consumption long enough to view their plight, they would understand that the death of smaller farms represents their own demise. No farms, no food — or at least no natural, unpatented food.

 

John Klar is an Attorney, farmer, and author. Mostly farmer… And Regular Contributor to GraniteGrok and VermontGrok.

The post The Extinction of Mid-Size American Farms Hurts You appeared first on Granite Grok.

How about the survival of humanity as a good enough reason to impeach Biden? The Biden-Regime’s latest – long-range missiles to the corrupt, oligarch Zelensky. See thread below from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. I disagree, however, with RFK when he says that the problem is that Russia will retaliate. Putin will act preemptively to prevent the Biden-Regime … through its bloodthirsty surrogate Zelensky … from showering death and destruction on the Russian people – because Putin, unlike the America-hating Socialists running the Biden-Regime, actually loves his country.

And that’s what the Biden-Regime and its lunatic warmonger cheerleaders are counting on. The Regime, and probably most of the GOP “leaders”, will then label Russia’s defensive measures “aggression” against the United States, which the Regime believes will cause the country to rally around “War-President” Biden and reelect him (an outcome that the GOP “leaders” would prefer over Trump because he would end their precious forever-wars). These people are willing to risk World War III to maintain power. These people are SICK and TWISTED.

2022: President Biden “not prepared to provide” long-range missiles to Ukraine, given the “key goal” of avoiding “the road towards a third world war.”

2023: Biden administration preparing to send long-range missiles to Ukraine.

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 12, 2023

The post Biden-Regime Willing To Instigate World War III To Maintain Power … Long-Range Missiles To Zelensky appeared first on Granite Grok.

Comedian Larry Miller used to do a bit about getting back together with your ex. He said it’s like finding spoiled milk in the fridge and then putting it back as if it’ll be better the next time you check. A Hospital in Maine is the bad milk, and they want their nurses to come back.

Those would be longtime employees who had careers and relied on the benefits until Maine Gov. Janet Mills signed a vaccine mandate. Healthcare workers had to get jabbed, or they were terminated. In the case of Maine General, religious exemptions were not permitted.

 

Nurses and other healthcare workers at MaineGeneral Health, one of Maine’s largest healthcare providers, were unceremoniously fired two years ago if they refused to take the experimental mRNA injections touted as COVID-19 preventatives.

Some of those workers were even slapped with misconduct charges for refusing to comply with the mandate, many were later denied unemployment benefits, and no requests for religious exemptions were honored. …

 

An EEOC claim of discrimination was dismissed after the hospital claimed that “religious accommodations would impose an ‘undue hardship’ on the hospital.” Fired, ineligible for unemployment, health benefits gone, religious rights abrogated, and charged with misconduct. For what?

 

[Terry]bPoland was never opposed to vaccines, generally speaking. Though she previously used a religious exemption to avoid taking an influenza shot, she willingly took the other vaccines required to work in healthcare prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, including immunizations for Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Hepatitis-B.

She said she was concerned about the novel nature of the mRNA technology, a form of gene therapy, which prior to COVID-19 had not been used in the standard schedule of immunizations.

“I knew enough not to take it. I’ve been a nurse long enough to know I need to question what new products are,” Poland said. “I’m not going to be the first one to jump on board of an experiment.”

 

Terry and I have something in common. I’ve received all sorts of vaccines in my life. I expect that if I had to travel (not likely to happen) to places where you are advised to get vaccinated to protect against the local scourge, and it’s been around a long time, that would be fine. But I am on the record stating that I would wait until the COVID Vaxx-human test trials were completed before deciding about the COVID-19 vaccine.

That trial is ongoing, but the results thus far are not encouraging. I have pre-existing conditions (white, male, Christian, Conservative, happily married, parent, small government, low tax, pro-liberty, … sorry, wrong conditions). Cardiac Artery Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. They are managed well and of little day-to-day concern, but based on what has been pried from the FDA and Pfizer, among others, I’m still a hard pass.

Even if it had some value in preventing infection, which it does not, the Myocarditis and Pericarditis risks alone are a no-go, no matter what the cardiologists have been told by the Hospital to say.

As for work, I was fortunate that my soon-to-be former employer never implemented any mandates during COVID, other than the one where you show up to work on time every day and do your job like you always did. But you could ask yourself, what if? Your employer fires you over refusing an untested pharmaceutical and technology (mRNA) that has since been proven to be more dangerous than doing nothing. No benefits, no unemployment pay, and you’ve been effectively blacklisted by them as a bad apple. Then they say, hey, sorry about that. Would you like to come back to work? Here’s Terry Poland’s response.

 

“I was livid. Like, how dare you force me out of a career that I’ve dedicated my whole life to, taken away my livelihood, my ability to earn a good income, and now you think I’m gonna come grovel back to you?” Poland said. “I don’t hardly think so. And that’s the attitude of most everybody that I’ve been in contact with since yesterday.”

 

She misspelled f**k off, you skeeving bastards, but you get the idea.

 

HT | Maine Wire

The post Hospital That Fired Nurses For Refusing Vaxx Wants to Know If They’d Like to Come Back (Please)? appeared first on Granite Grok.

NH Journal (NH-NeverTrump Journal) is to the Establishment-NHGOP what MSNBC is to the Biden-Regime … a propaganda organ. If you peruse NH-NeverTrump Journal’s twitter-feed … as I do regularly, in order to see what narrative the Establishment-NHGOP wants pushed … you may have noticed a change in the target. Instead of incessantly attacking Trump, as he had been doing since the Biden-Regime stole the 2020 election, Mikey Graham has instead redirected his fire at Ramaswamy.

This is also the latest tactic of the, at best, useless Super-PAC Never Back Down. From The Hill:

A leaked debate memo drafted by the heads of the pro-Ron DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down details how they think the Florida governor should attack businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, calling for DeSantis to “take a sledgehammer” to his GOP rival.

Today, for example, Mikey Graham is highlighting claims that Ramaswamy is, at best, soft on anti-semitism:

 

 

The post Is NH-NeverTrump Journal Actually Part Of The DeSantis Campaign? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The current Grand Solar Minimum is expected to last until about 2035, by which time the overall average temperature of the earth will likely have declined a few degrees. But wait, you say, Wasn’t it hot? In some spots, sure, but in others, it was cold, and the long-term averages will be lower (get into the weeds).

Related: NASA Says the Solar Minimum is Here. Climate Cult Says Meh, No Big Deal (But It Probably Is)

The Northern Hemisphere, in particular, will be a mix and mash of odd weather, common during a solar minimum, as we reported a few years back when it all started.

 

Solar minima are not wholesale drops in temperature as I understand it. The decrease in solar energy has a long term cooling effect but it’s not like turning off the heat. The seasons can get a bit odd. You will still have “weather,” meaning warm or hot spells, cool spells, especially in New England where the geography has taught us to wait a few minutes to see if the weather will change. And it does.

 

When I wrote that, it resulted from reading about the topic, but this past week, someone sent me some specifics on the science behind it. Higher levels of solar energy stabilize the jet stream. When that energy declines during solar minimums, the jet stream gets all wonky (or wavy), allowing warm air to move north and cold air to move south in weird and exotic ways. The result is areas in proximity with dramatically different weather.

 

The most immediately noticeable impact is the reduction of energy entering the jet streams, which changes the jet’s usual strong and straight ZONAL flow to a weak and wavy MERIDIONAL one.

Depending on which side of the stream you’re on, this means you’re either in for a spell of anomalously cold or warm weather and/or a period of unusually dry or wet conditions:

 

 

” …the perceived climatic changes can be fully explained by cyclical ‘buckling’ of the jet streams (Zonal to Meridional), itself caused by a bout of historically low solar activity.”

 

Here’s an actual real-world, current-day example of this in action (courtesy of the same link.)

 

Here it is, the omega blocking in all its glory, responsible for the annotated extreme weather events in Europe this week. pic.twitter.com/0TUmZMQzoT

— Mika Rantanen (@mikarantane) September 4, 2023

Related: NASA on the Solar Minimum – Next Cycle 30-50% Weaker than the Last

All of this is why, if you’d missed our previous prognostication, we think the left hit the accelerator on their Green Dream economic destruction plan. The science suggests that if they wait (which means they know the actual science), it will get too cool too often to keep the wool pulled over enough people’s eyes. It is now or never.

Selling the expected side effects of a solar minimum as extreme or chaotic just panders to their priorities at the expense of science and trillions of dollars in wealth redirected away from where it could do some good.

And yes, I suspect they understand the cost to economies, livelihoods, and lives. With fossil fuels verboten and affordable warmth at a premium, because wind and solar will always fail to deliver, people could (and will) freeze to death. That’s just alright with them. They must not have been the right sort of folks who could heat with oil or gas and virtue signal by purchasing carbon offsets. What is not alright is that there is still time to stop them. We can reverse the decline and ramp up oil and gas production in the US, and we must. There’s no way to build enough nuclear and hydro to meet the demands of their fossil-fuel-less future, not that the left would ever allow it.

But we need reliable, affordable energy for at least the next two decades while the sun takes a break; evidence of that need is all around us. What the left calls chaotic is normal, and your lifestyle has nothing to do with it.

 

 

The post The Crazy Weather isn’t Man-Made It’s the Grand Solar Minimum 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 ***

 

 

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

 

Steve’s passed some feedback to me – as is his right – that this new formatting is not quite as popular as before.  So I’ve tried to move more memes up to “front load” it.  Please let me know if this works for you.  I try to not “just” have memes but also other information / commentary that is useful – but I understand that the memes are the primary attraction.

 

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

 

“You’re just a black face!” | Larry Elder OBLITERATES Rude Woman!

 

 

Dems hate it when their vote-slaves cast off their chains.

 

 

I just rediscovered my JEXIT T-shirt.  I thought my anti-political wife had File-13ed it.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m certainly no historian, but as I understand it, such megalomaniacs telegraph their intentions.  Churchill knew who, and more importantly what, Hitler was because he’d read the book and had the moral courage to take Hitler at his word.  Schwab and others have openly talked about their plans, including depopulation.  But nobody wants to believe them.

 

 

 

 

 

39% still approve of Biden?  What’s he got to do to lose them?  Take millions in bribes from foreign countries, be a pedo, go senile, bring us to the bring or WWIII???  Oh, wait…

 

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

 

PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA

 

 

Criminal offenses.  CRIMINAL offenses.

From Telegram (image below):

Yesterday the UK State passed one of the most liberty crushing pieces of legislation in history under the Energy Bill.  This is completely unreported by MSM and edgy UK “media” Talk TV etc.  Under the Bill – the State will be able to FORCE people to get smart meters by end 2025 and will put smart meters into all major electric appliances (see grab), which can then be controlled externally.  The have also opened the door to creating a offense with up to 1 year in prison for not complying with their energy performance certification regime.

 

 

Coming soon globally, I am sure.  A year in prison for not complying with the green diktats.  They’re making it illegal to rent the place unless it’s upgraded, at your expense.  Or illegal to sell unless it’s upgraded, at your expense.  And don’t doubt that soon they’ll make it illegal for you to occupy your own home… unless it’s upgraded, at your expense.  More on this:

 

Net Zero Police Allowed ‘FORCE ENTRY’ Into Homes

 

 

Anyone remember this ad?  Not so satirical now.

 

Audi Green Police A3 TDI Ad (Super Bowl XLIV 2010)

 

 

In rewatching this, and the scene where the guy at the sink has the police helicopter on him because he trashed something compostable, think of the panopticon world that is.  So do not doubt me on this, but the more they tighten the screws, the more virtuous they will believe themselves to be.  Paging CS Lewis’ prescient warning:

 

 

Granted that those at the tippy-top understand the real plan, for the most part the “useful idiots” just think they’re doing good:

Slip-Sliding Towards Hell with a Good Conscience – Granite Grok

Or just following orders:

 

 

More on this topic:

 

 

 

Socialists getting them indoctrinated young.  I recall seeing that thought before… whether the international or national variation.

 

 

G-d bless ’em.  Every one.

 

 

Say, what’s “cricket” in Russian?

 

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

 

Israeli journalist Efrat Fenigson has an interview coming up with MEP Christine Anderson (AfD).  Here’s a preview:

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Teaser.mp4

 

I think this is going to be a great and substantive exchange.  Like the one I wrote about here:

An Open Letter to Neil Oliver and Glenn Beck – Granite Grok

And it’s up:

You’re The Voice – Episode 7: MEP Christine Anderson (rumble.com)

I’m listening now.  Fascinating.  And one thing that I never thought of with a cashless society – the inability of banks to be exposed to bank runs.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

From Telegram:

In the UK, posters appeared advertising childlessness for the sake of “saving the environment” “Green” activists propose not to give birth to children, calling them “climate killers”. The propaganda of eco-friendly childlessness has acquired unprecedented proportions – posters are pasted on the streets with calls to “stop giving birth”. “Conscious childlessness is environmentally friendly,” promote green inadequacies turned on ecology.

 

 

Remember this video I posted a while back?

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/ending-your-blood-line.mp4

 

There used to be a “Zero Population Growth” society – and in full disclosure I was a member for a year or so waaaaaaay back.  Now there’s a full-on Voluntary Human Extinction movement.  And it’s all presented as this great and wonderful thing.

I wish I could have more kids.  But there’s the wife’s age plus triple-Jabbed status.  And, of course, there’s the fact that I’m no “spring chicken” either.

 

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

 

Specifically on Covid / medical – because it’s that important to highlight:

 

Sad excess deaths

 

 

Also see this article showing that there is a statistical strong correlation between the Jabs and Covid cases:

Comment on Subramanian and Kumar, “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination” (pdmj.org)

 

—

How do we Reach the Brainwashed? – OffGuardian (off-guardian.org)

This discusses using art to get around cognitive barriers.

 

 

This is generic; placed here about the Scamdemic but applies to so many things.  And most people don’t want to because to see – really see – would call into question their status as morally, intellectually, and educationally superior.

 

 

—

 

Take stand now, or kneel forever.

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stand-up-now-or-it-will-be-never.mp4

 

 

I still think the idea of a maskless flashmob is a good one, if masks are required in stores.  Organize 10-20 people and all just breeze in at once and start shopping.  Fill up carts as fast as possible, because if they do call the police, all those products will have to be reshelved.  And while that’s hard on the floor workers, that’s a heck of a lot of wasted labor.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

On masks:

Study finds wearing masks for 30 minutes exposes to toxic chemicals (msn.com)

—

IgG4 Antibodies Induced by Repeated Vaccination May Generate Immune Tolerance to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein – PubMed (nih.gov)

What did I write about in Depopulation Speculations?  IgG4 antibodies.

—

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I need some of these to hand out.

 

 

 

 

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

 

Jordan Peterson Instantly OWNS Woke Professor On Gender Pronouns

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Pick of the post:

 

SHOCKING TRUMP Destroyed The Interviewer

 

 

Can you imagine any other candidate doing this?  Any. Other. Candidate?

And note the utter astonishment and – IMHO – completely sincere belief of the interviewer that The Potato is scandal free?  You can read it in her face.  She’s baffled that Trump would think there’s a scandal with the Bidens… but no wonder, they’re all on the same playbook:

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Enemedia-says-no-evidence.mp4

 

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

 

Collected links with commentary, loosely organized:

 

Compare Fenix Ammo And Liberty Safe Responses To Authoritarianism – Chicks On The Right (chicksonright.com)

An important question: Does Liberty Safes – irrespective of this particular thing – have ONE master code?

—

Biden Admin Agrees To Swap $6B In Frozen Funds To Iran For 5 American Prisoners – Chicks On The Right (chicksonright.com)

And done on 9-11 too.  On Iran:

Iran Can Produce 10 Nuclear Bombs in 4 Months, Watchdog Says (freebeacon.com)

I know some people have forgotten, but Iran’s practiced launching missiles from ships and blowing them up at 90-100 miles… and calling those launches successes.  Also remember that in Shia Islam their version of the Messiah, the Twelfth Imam, cannot return until there’s been a global conflagration.  Thus, to a believing Shiite, WWIII is a feature not a bug.

 

EMP: A Terrorist’s Dream

 

 

—

Thread by @Doc_0 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Remember, they really do think YOUR children are THEIR children, just housed & fed by you.

—

Biden Admin FINALLY Shows All Their Cards: They’re Coming For Your Guns – Prepared Gun Owners

They want them all.  Don’t ever believe assurances otherwise.

 

 

—

Invidious Comparisons Dept. – Liberty’s Torch (libertystorch.info)

The push towards digital currency proceeds apace.

 

 

From the same site:

Sovereign Immunity – Liberty’s Torch (libertystorch.info)

Why Now? – Liberty’s Torch (libertystorch.info)

—

But…But…Greenwood Will Be At The Opening Ceremonies For The Camps! – Western Rifle Shooters Association

A fighter.

—

Judy Wood on the Twin Towers turning to dust – Jerm Warfare

I am still skeptical.  But a lot less skeptical than I was ten years ago.

 

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

 

Palate cleansers:

 

 

Powerball is up to

—

—

 

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

 

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

When I was at the university, I once objected to a classmate’s lazy use of “public goods.” He had used it to favor his policy position as a shorthand synonym of what’s good for society—only a thinly veiled euphemism for what I want to happen.

“Public goods are things that are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable,” I said, almost sputtering off a nearby economics textbook. “The ones you’re talking about are neither.”

He rolled his eyes in boredom. “Yes, yes, but that’s not what people mean when they say, ‘public goods.’”

Strangely, I think he’s right. These days, the economist’s clear and rather demanding criteria of so-called public goods are largely swept aside in favor of something like “What I think would be good for the public.” And that little linguistic slip opens up a world of economic policymaking from which we still haven’t recovered.

Everything these days are public goods. In a New York Review of Books piece by Helen Epstein, we learn that money printing isn’t just important for government spending but “for improvements in health care, education, transportation, the power grid, and other public goods that might foster development.”

To proponents of government services, everything that carries even a whiff of external benefits to someone, somewhere, is therefore transformed into a “public good”—which must be provided by government. We might have excused such convictions, chalking them up to ignorance, if it weren’t for economists at the pinnacle of the profession embracing those views; Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus is a case in point.

We have to dig about three hundred pages into Nordhaus’s book The Spirit of Green before we get an admission that government failures can be worse than the failures that ostensibly run amok in private markets. Otherwise, they’re just technocratic solutions: rainbows and unicorns, public goods this, public goods that. Everything is an uncorrected externality—from the keyboards we write on to gas stations, hospitals, landlords, and the English language.

If all you wield are government solutions, everything looks like a private-sector nail in desperate need of a hammering. In his book, Nordhaus argues over the merits of internalizing external effects from pollution and then extends the logic to sin taxes on gambling, smoking, drinking, and firearms use. Like pollution, they impact other people too, and so a benign social planner must intervene. Having already convinced his audience of the need for governmental correction for an invisible gas with invisible future damages, the rest follows as a matter of course.

What’s clear is that despite holding the most prestigious award in the economics profession and being the author of a long-standing economics textbook, Professor Nordhaus doesn’t understand even the basic economics of property and rivalrousness. For public good’s two criteria, it’s the competing use of rivalrousness that has societal (and thereby economical) implications.

Property and ownership, not in their legal concepts but in their economic functions, come about only under conditions of scarcity. Scarcity means that goods and services have secondary use—opportunity costs. With unlimited abundance, property, and ownership (perhaps apart from your own self) play no role: There is enough to satisfy everyone’s wants at any given time. In everyday life, we don’t price oxygen in the air because there’s enough for everyone all the time, and Earth’s natural processes make more of it. It’s a nonscarce resource; therefore, its price is zero, and it makes no sense to try to establish ownership over this or that air molecule. (While the use of a breath of air is rivalrous in that nobody else can use the lungful of air I have just inhaled, the ever-present amount around is enough so that the good “air” becomes nonrivalrous.)

Another misunderstanding of nonrivalrousness is the anti-intellectual charge of cultural appropriation. Cultural traits, ranging from fashion to music, art, language, innovations, or traditions, are unowned and intangible things. Yet the unenlightened wokesters of the world have decided that all traits belong (in perpetuity?) to whichever group historically wielded them.

What they overlook is the basic economic concept of rivalrousness. My use of English—a language that isn’t my mother tongue and that I have thereby thoroughly “appropriated”—does in no way prevent another person from using English or changing English in any which way they prefer (think teenager neologisms). My applying a decades-old recipe for tonight’s dinner in no way strips someone else of the pleasure of using that same recipe. My use of some far-away tribe’s dance, song, or belief system in no way prevents them from dancing, singing, or believing that same thing.

Cultural expressions are unowned, unownable, and, more importantly, unlimited. They are nonrivalrous in the public-goods sense in that anyone can don a Mexican hat, grow dreads, pray to a foreign God, play the traditional instruments of some faraway tribe, or, closer to my own heart, practice yoga.

It repeatedly happens that—entirely hypothetical, of course—a young, woke, anticapitalistic woman complains about some feature in modern-day yoga as practiced in the West. We all know the character (and if not, the recent outburst by Anita Chaudhuri in the British newspaper The Guardian can serve as a decent approximation).

Sweaty from a class with dozens of other like-minded and culturally sensitive students, this hypothetical woman’s commitment to not culturally appropriate something that other humans have once made is undermined no less than three times by her own very actions. First, she’s speaking English, a language that culturally appropriated words from everything from Old Norse to Frisian, Norman, and Germanic languages (not to mention its exportation across the world in the last century or more). Second, she just came out of a physical, aerobics-like sequence of fast-paced flows that many people in the West treat as a physical workout; that is emphatically not what yoga was like for most of its five-thousand-year history. Third, she’s a woman (women feature only scantly in the historic records of yoga), and her practicing of this ancient art would have been looked down upon by most of the very cultures she seeks to uphold.

Performative contradictions are powerful, but the lesson goes wider: a practice—like yoga or food recipes or fashion or songs—made in whichever time, place, or people belongs to nobody. They are nonrivalrous goods. They can change and incorporate different things from anything else in humanity’s vast array of emergent, cultural, and artistic traditions. Mozart’s symphonies may not only be performed by white Europeans in the splendid halls of Vienna; cars and car culture are not only wielded by those demographics that contributed to its invention. Nobody owns cultures. Nobody rules cultures. And nobody can shut you out from wielding them. Therefore, you can mix them and change them anyway you like.

One would think that the sort of person attuned to celebrating diversity, praising tolerance for one another’s differences, and embracing melting pots should understand that. Alas not.

Joakim Book is a writer and professional editor. He holds degrees in economics and financial history from the University of Glasgow and University of Oxford, and was a Mises summer fellow in 2017. His main research interests are monetary economics and the history of central banks. 

Joakim Book | Mises Wire

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 Cultural Appropriation: The Nontheft of Something No One Owns appeared first on Granite Grok.

New Wave Feminism tried to stand on the shoulders of its older sisters but only just barely. It has been a while since it was about bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan. These days, it is more focused on “weaponizing their own unhappiness and turning it into an activist movement.”

 

It is for this reason that modern feminism is often accused of being an ideological cult for narcissists.  Everything about it seems to be designed to elevate and appeal to the worst kinds of people.  Not only that, but the belief system is now so pervasive in western countries, especially among the college educated, that 60% of women say they identify and agree with the “common definition” of feminism, even though the common definition does not match the behavior and motives of most feminists.

More like that from Zerohedge here (on men leaving the US in search of women who share their values), but that’s just my opening Salvo to a finer point. Western feminism has evolved from equal rights to accusations of benevolent sexism (attacking men for being gentlemen) to outright rage and resentment,

 

A friend who took the course with me felt the same way. “If all else fails,” she would groan as we walked out of class together, “blame it on patriarchy.” She was a convinced atheist and I was a churchgoing Christian, but we agreed that the theories we were learning did not address our most pressing questions and concerns.

 

To …

 

If it excludes trans women, it is not feminism!!!

— Women’s March (@womensmarch) September 10, 2023

 

…celebrating men who deny women opportunity or success. Women’s Liberation has evolved into man-hating women applauding the patriarchy for infiltrating and undermining women.

Related: Where Men Take Things from Women, and If You Don’t Applaud, You Are a Bigot.

Low Hanging…Fruit.

Will  Thomas (doing business as ‘Lia’), the C-team men’s swimmer who is still attracted to women, put on a one-piece, planted a flag in the feminine gene pool, and proceeded to take success, accolades, and opportunities from actual women – with the blessing and support of the woke patriarchy and feminists (excluding the TERFs).

Celebrating his womanhood has turned Dylan Mulvaney into a millionaire – money and opportunity stolen from penis-less women celebrating legitimate womanhood. And again, the elite’s golf clap and whisper to each other about how wonderful it is that men are rising to the top as “women” while raging against anyone who defends real women from men who have infiltrated their ranks and deprived them of things Feminists have been squawking about for decades.

At the other extreme, and I’m not saying there’s no Venn diagram overlap, there are ‘feminists’ who claim milking a cow is sexual assault.

 

A paper currently being promoted by a New York university calls on society to consider the rampant “sexual exploitation” of dairy cows by the milk industry in order to “fully fight gendered oppression.” Specifically, the author compares cattle insemination to “rape” and the milking of cows to “sexual abuse.”

 

The end of Western civilization can’t be far behind that sort of thinking (that was 2019), but now a group that was formed as a result of something Trump said but Biden did – the former (lockerroom talk by a Republican) and the latter (rape by Joe Biden). The Women’s March never had much to say about the latter. Still, they’ve got time to tweet support for men who have not only deprived women of victory or income but continue to integrate into safe spaces where actual sexual assault has become customary (women’s prisons, for example).

Saying the inmates are running the asylum would be ironic and an understatement. And while the prison girls would like to march in protest, that would mean stepping on the hairy toes of the sisterhood of the traveling penis, and even female inmates may want to stay away from that sort of trouble—a new next “NEXT” generation of feminism controlled by men.

Femasculism.

 

HT | Twitchy

The post It’s Not Feminism, Its Femasculism appeared first on Granite Grok.

On a split screen, I was amazed to see Kevin McCarthy’s announcement covered simultaneously on FOXNews, MSNBC, and CNN, but the post comments could not be further apart. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) on MSNBC, called the Speaker’s actions and the MAGA Republicans an arm of the Trump campaign.

Schultz is rich, saying that the Republicans have no evidence showing wrongdoing but that the Democrats had plenty of credible evidence to Impeach President Donald Trump. We know in retrospect that they did not and relied on manufactured evidence.

Congresswoman Schultz has a short memory or is lying about the Trump Impeachment Inquiry. Nancy Pelosi set the precedent in 2019 by doing the exact thing that McCarthy is now. They both bypassed a House vote and used the power of their office to call for the Inquiry. An Inquiry is the first step in the process and usually leads to a vote to impeach the sitting President. An official Impeachment Inquiry has more power for investigating than House committee investigations. The Republicans have been frustrated by the lack of cooperation with the Biden Administration and the Justice Department to be forthcoming with requested documents and evidence. The Inquiry’s power will pressure Biden and Garland to cooperate or face contempt of Congress charges.

If a vote were taken today on Impeachment, it would probably fail. Too many Republican members of Congress are running for reelection in districts won by Joe Biden in 2020. They fear an Impeachment of Biden would hurt their reelection bids, turning the seat over to the Democrats. With Democrats controlling the Senate, there is little chance of a successful Impeachment trial and vote.

A well-run Impeachment Inquiry showing how corrupt the Biden Family is, how much they have profited from their shakedown of foreign companies and countries, and the possible compromise of the President of the United States may be enough to turn no votes to yes. An Inquiry will also have to be covered by a biased media that has been protecting Joe Biden by suppressing the news and keeping half the country hoodwinked.

The timing of the Inquiry could not be worse for the President. Special Counsel Weiss has committed to indicting Hunter Biden by the end of September, which will further soil the Biden name in the mainstream media. This attention should be too much for any hopes of Biden winning a second term, putting the spotlight onto Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, or Gretchen Whitmer. None of those three excite the Democrat base, and the bench on the Left is very weak.

Democrat members of Congress and the President will all minimize the Republican case against Joe Biden, but the evidence has been piling up. The fact that Hunter Biden’s lawyers have been accused of pressuring the IRS whistleblowers to change or retract their testimony. The House Republicans have directed Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate these charges, which will be the first step in the current level of cooperation.

This process is not payback for the Democrat treatment of Donald Trump. Joe Biden has been using the power of his office for years to grow a fortune for the Biden Family. He has been using America as a piggy bank for the extended Biden family, and it is time to pay the piper. Watching Joe Biden fall like one of the many statues pulled down or defaced by hostile Democrats will be sad for the country but oh so sweet for Republicans.

 

The post McCarthy Announces Biden Impeachment Dog and Pony Show appeared first on Granite Grok.