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.

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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.

This article is challenging to title as it is both sensitive and maddening. All of us have watched grandparents, parents, and even ourselves age to the point where simple tasks are no longer automatic. We have seen muscle memory fail, and even memories fade.

In some cases, we have had to step in and make hard decisions that limit a loved one’s liberty for the safety of themselves and others. That choice may be taking car keys or, sadly, placing them in a facility to cater to their specific needs. The aging process can be cruel if we are fortunate to live long enough to get to that point, but the truth is, it is life, and sometimes, we need to face it and make the best choices for all. The circle of life can be both beautiful and cruel, and understanding it is not always possible. Having God and loving people in your circle will help guide us through this life path.

The life expectancy in America has hit a speed bump for reasons that would be a topic for another article. Still, our nation’s leaders are aging to levels never before seen in our history. Many still appear at the top of their game in their eighties, and others we know are shadows of themselves pushing on into their nineties when they should have stepped aside. Whether these people are on your side of the aisle or the other, you would like to think they have their circle of loved ones to help them see it is time to leave public life and enjoy time for themselves with their families.

Some of us see a need for term limits for many reasons, including preempting the hard decision to leave. Still, the other option is observing our leaders and using our votes carefully to ensure we have sound, wise leaders to guide our great land. We have seen in recent elections we cannot rely on the electorate to make the right choices, and Pennsylvania in 2020 is a good example. Not only did the voters elect a Senator who had experienced a life-threatening stroke and was clearly not in control of his faculties, but they also re-elected a candidate who had passed away a month before the election. Maybe we give the electorate too much credit to think they can make good decisions.

We are watching and wondering who is allowing Joe Biden, Diane Feinstein, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and even a relatively young John Fetterman to stay in office today but also announce intentions to run for another term in 2024. Whatever their motivations, they must be counseled to rethink their decisions. Those choices are not suitable for them and certainly not for the American people. Power changes people and attracts people who bring their own motivations into one’s circle. The political game in America has become a source of wealth for politicians and their families and staff, and wealth corrupts some people to look beyond the purpose of their positions and to allow greed and more power to become their motivations. I fear this is where we are in 21st-century America. Our forefathers warned us not to let the government get too large for its good, and we are seeing their fears come to fruition. Our government is no longer for the people but despite and at the expense of the people. We, the people, cannot be only a slogan but a cause to force us to retake control of our government, and that starts by using our votes to replace lifelong politicians and their machines. If we make good decisions, which is a very big if, we may save this incredible republic for future generations. If not, we become a part of the problem rather than the solution. We, too, have a good deal of power if we use it wisely.

The post There Is Courageous And Their Is Foolish appeared first on Granite Grok.

What controls will be next to replace mandatory masks, the jab, social distancing, and selectively closing down small businesses in the latest Covid scare?

Are we to believe the virus didn’t spread in the nation’s largest retail chains while thousands of small businesses like mom-and-pop stores were closed – where crowds would be smaller? Does this make sense?

Just because the president issued an Executive Order, are we to believe that churches were non-essential and liquor and marijuana establishments were essential? I bet many of the folks who were frightened and walked in lockstep with these edicts also are among those involved in the “war against life in the womb,” who blow their horns about their “freedom of choice” to kill the baby.

Hypocrisy unlimited! The government tells those they wish to rule you can drink alcohol and smoke dope. You jump in line even though the Supreme Law of the Land tells you: “Government shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion and the free exercise thereof,” but all of a sudden, in case of an emergency, we are to jump in line like sheep follow the shepherd’s voice.

Our American Constitution is like an oasis in a desert of totalitarian regimes around the world. The purpose of our government is to limit government, not the people. But our God-given rights are only on paper: “We, the people, must enforce them. Because God is the author of liberty and all human rights, our Constitution demands limitations shall be put on Congress, not the people in the Bill of Rights. But what good is a law if citizens cower before the state?

Contrary to our Founder’s wisdom, like all other dictatorships, the UN Declaration of Human Rights grants rights on paper through the first 28 Articles, while Article 29 Section 3 takes them away with a guarantee of total government: “These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

On May 2nd, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer issued a Climate Emergency Resolution that urged the president to exercise unconstitutional executive powers to officially add emergency powers to his existing powers to prepare for a climate crisis which the president has declared “code red,” and the World UnHealthy Organization, UN bureaucracy has predicted would cause an additional 30 million deaths. Ask yourself, will health through government control add to the problem?

We have the Freedom of Choice to demand that Congress control the president’s dreams of a New World Order. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to jump in line? Or are you going to jump in line with the “revolution of truth” with The John Birch Society? Arm yourself with weapons of truth. See the exposure of fraud behind climate change at jbs.org. You have “Freedom of Choice.” Use it to stop the power of “choice” that has a history of “choosing death.” Only this time, it is the “death of liberty.”

 

The post Beware the Coming Climate Change State of Emergency appeared first on Granite Grok.

We asked readers to help us name our upcoming event in October, and we got quite a few responses and more than a few that were similar or the same. These then went to the panel of folks helping organize the events so that each could pick the ones they liked best. The plan was to have that name by the time this post was published.

That didn’t happen.

The name and the event will be announced tomorrow on these pages and at the Right of Center (ROC) meeting to help encourage attendance and support and, primarily, to get folks to share it with their folks and save the date. October 28th, 1-4 p.m., at the Londonderry Fish and Game Club.

The voting is very close, and we are still waiting on some votes. One vote could change the winner or result in a tie, so I want to wait until everyone on our board of Grok event ‘directors’ has submitted their favorite.

If I get the votes this evening, I will announce the winning event name first thing tomorrow morning before the ROC.

If we vote for a name with multiple submissions, I will do a drawing with the submitter’s names. If you were the first to submit it, you will get a number of entries equal to the number of times it was suggested, including your own. The next person will then get one less number of entries, down to the last person who submitted it, who would get one entry.

Maybe you are Primrose Everdeen, who knows?

We’ll mix them up in a hat (I have several), and my wife or one of my kids will pick a name. I will then email that person to ask if they want their name public or wish to remain anonymous. We will honor either request and update the post announcing the event name.

Becasue a tie is possible, the organizers will each vote again on those two event names, and we will announce that when we have a winner.

I know. It seemed simple enough when we set out to do it – the naming, I think the event organizing will be easier – but as it turns out, we received a lot of suggestions, but we should have it decided and announced by tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who emailed and the two handfuls of folks who submitted suggestions in the comments. We appreciate you all getting involved with us and look forward to seeing you at the event. Updates will be provided as we firm up all the moving parts.

The post And the Name of the Oct 28th Grok Event Is … Still Being Voted On (Doh!) appeared first on Granite Grok.

Kevin McCarthy’s GOP House has been a dismal failure. Not a single impeachment. A Speaker Pelosi would have impeached, at a minimum, Garland, Wray, Mayorkas and Biden by this point. What explains the GOP’s failure to deliver for the voters who gave them the House? Perhaps the Deep State controls a critical mass of GOP Reps. Jesse Kelly believes that explains Ken Buck’s fawning treatment of the FBI. Also listen to Ken Buck on MSNBC … he’s running interference for the Biden-Regime, repeating the same vapid “talking points” of the Left – for example, that there is no connection between foreign countries and foreign oligarchs showering millions on Hunter and the “Big Guy.”

I believe Representative Ken Buck is compromised. https://t.co/sWN2IzTV9m

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) September 7, 2023

We don't have the votes for impeachment, plain and simple. @HouseGOP must instead stay focused on addressing issues that harm everyday Americans, i.e., a porous southern border, rampant, inner-city crime, and skyrocketing inflation. pic.twitter.com/V0FnhEcZoJ

— Rep. Ken Buck (@RepKenBuck) September 11, 2023

The post Rep Ken Buck … A Deep-State Asset? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Traveling was once a luxury for the rich, but today even working-class people enjoy vacations. In America, people have gotten so wealthy that planning summer vacations is a priority for many families. Living standards have improved so tremendously that elite amenities are now commonplace.

Nearly 90 percent of American homes rely on air-conditioning, and 92 percent of households have access to at least one vehicle.

Relative to the globe, most Americans are high-income people. People who are considered poor in America would be rich in developing countries. Compared to other rich countries in Europe, America is also doing remarkably well. A 2019 study published by the think tank Just Facts shows that after accounting for all income, philanthropy, and noncash welfare benefits, the bottom 20 percent of Americans have a higher level of material consumption than all citizens in most rich countries. From 1990 to 2015, consumption per capita in America increased by 65 percent, whereas Europe registered a paltry growth of 35 percent.

Some worry that consumption inequality is on the rise, but such fears have been allayed by research observing that the rise in overall consumption inequality has been rather small. Rising income inequality is a frequent complaint of the Left; however, the consumption of poor Americans exceeds their incomes by over 5 percent. Despite their social class, Americans live so lavishly that analysts are imploring them to shop like Europeans, and poor Americans are not different.

Poverty is relative to the development of a country, so poor Americans are seen as such because the country is so affluent. Further, poor Americans have seen major increases in income when compared to their counterparts. In fact, income inequality in America has been stabilizing due to the surge in wage growth for the lowest-paying jobs. Poor Americans are getting richer faster as the rich become more prosperous.

Moreover, notwithstanding the uproar about plummeting income growth and a declining middle class, incomes have been growing steadily in America since the 1970s. Americans of all classes now have greater access to wealth-creating opportunities and superior social amenities. The real median incomes of Americans are higher than they were in 1980, and millions of Americans have encountered social mobility. Indeed, the American middle class is shrinking, but this is because people are getting richer.

Additionally, empirical evidence contradicts the argument that America is systemically racist, observing that black adults made the greatest progress up the income ladder from 1971 to 2021. Black Americans have been recording significant gains in employment and income, especially in the Midwest. Between 2010 and 2019, the median black household income increased in all Midwest states. Trends are also looking favorable for Hispanic Americans, whose total economic output is estimated to be over $2 trillion.

On the other hand, East Asians surpass white Americans in income and professional success. The Asian American and Pacific Islander community accounts for 7 percent of the American population but represents 10 percent of the country’s affluent population. Americans are doing well by global metrics, and many assert that its economic prospects are favorable. Therefore, it’s possible that American pessimism is being driven by social comparisons. People care more about relative status than absolute status; hence, Americans might feel that they are regressing if they drive an old car and their friends are traveling in a Benz.

But such inadequacies can only be remedied through self-improvement. Complaining is fashionable in America, but doing so only leads to stress and anger. Americans are better off than most people on the globe and should seize opportunities available to them instead of complaining about the struggles of life.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher, business analyst, and contributor to Merion West, The Federalist, American Thinker, Intellectual Takeout, mises.org, and Imaginative Conservative. Visit his YouTube channel, with numerous interviews with a variety of scholars, here. He may be contacted at lo_matthews@yahoo.com or on Twitter (@matthewslipton).

 

 

Lipton Matthews | 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.

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It’s bad enough that public schools have dumbed down the academic component in our public schools to the point where many children will miss out on careers in medicine, engineering, mathematics, and the sciences. Common Core and the Next Generation Science Standards are simply not up to par.

But there is something going on in public education that is just as concerning.

Public schools are becoming less about academics and more about social services. We see this with the push for “community schools.”  Community schools will offer students mental and medical services beyond what we’ve been accustomed to in the past.

Enrollment is declining in public schools, but budgets are increasing. Just look at the increase in school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers. In Manchester, they’ve even started the process of medicalizing their district by having Amoskeag Health present in the schools.

Amoskeag Health received a $1 million grant from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services to establish a school-based health center in New Hampshire, the first of its kind.

Parents no longer have to pick their children up from school when they are sick. The school will step into their role instead.

Supporters of the pilot program say it could help treat many illnesses like asthma, upper respiratory infections, strep throat, stomach aches, headaches, and COVID-19 by eliminating some of the barriers parents or caregivers may encounter trying to for a sick child.

School board member Leslie Want was particularly impressed the program will help identify cases of COVID-19 and strep.

Many are rushing to provide these medical and mental health services in the schools, but what are the impacts on your child’s education? If any? How can something that sounds good hurt your children?

When your child is sick, you take them to the doctor’s office for care, and you are present. The chances of a mistake happening while you are sitting there is less likely to occur. When parents are not present, there is a higher chance that a serious mistake can happen.

This year, two young children in New Hampshire received a vaccine while attending school. Their parents were explicit in their direction to NOT vaccinate their children–but two mistakes happened.

Shockingly, many years ago in Pennsylvania, 6th-grade girls were given a surprise gynecological exam at school. Parents were never informed, nor did they consent to their daughters being violated this way, while they were attending school.

….parents of a sixth-grader are suing the East Stroudsburg Area School District for what they claim as subjecting their daughter to a compulsory strip and body cavity search. It turns out that their daughter and 58 other J.T. Lambert Intermediate School girls were summoned to the infirmary. The school nurse instructed them to strip down to their underwear for a gynecological examination. Some parents said their daughters asked not to have their genitals examined but were told they had to. Some of the girls started to cry, and at least one was denied the right to call home.J.T. Lambert School was greeted with a storm of parental protest. Dr. Ramlah Vahanvaty, who performed the exams, explained, “What it involved is an external examination of the labia to see if there were any warts or vaginal lesions.” She said, “Even a parent doesn’t have the right to say what’s appropriate for a physician to do when they’re doing an exam.”

Parents have had to sue their schools to protect their right to care for their children. School policies like JBAB, which is still in some New Hampshire Schools, instruct school staff to lie to parents. How does a parent trust that school officials will not violate their trust when school policies instruct their staff to lie to parents?

As school districts shift to social services, we see examples like this: Kettle Moraine School District’s policy instructs educators to socially transition children to the other gender without parental consent.

School officials can now bill for these services through Medicaid. But the Biden Administration recently proposed changing the rule on Medicaid reimbursements from public schools by eliminating parental consent. They called the rule to obtain parental consent for Medicaid billing “an unnecessary, time-consuming and emotionally fraught process for districts and parents. 

This is just another way to cut parents out of some of the most important decisions they make for their children.

Parents can certainly refuse some of these services, but if they do not, they may find out the hard way that what they wanted for their child was not honored.

We also know that personally identifiable mental health information on students in New Hampshire is being shared by school counselors. We know that analysts at Keene State BHII have had access to this sensitive data, and students and parents were never notified, nor did they consent.

Most parents do not know that the student privacy law (FERPA) was gutted during the Obama administration. The protections that were put in place were stripped, and now there are exceptions that allow some individuals and organizations to access your child’s personal information. Think about it: when your child signs on to their Chromebook, all kinds of personal data is being collected by software companies, and you never consented. That’s because Obama changed the FERPA privacy law. There is now a LARGE gaping loophole that allows all kinds of personal information to be shared without parental knowledge or consent. But it’s one thing when they are accessing information your child’s math scores–it’s another when it’s sensitive mental or medical health information.

Did you know that a child who visits a school counselor can be denied a career in the military? If your child has their heart set on a military career, a visit to the school counselor can deny them that opportunity.

They sought help when their Army dad deployed. Now, they’re barred from joining the military:

By seeking counseling for their two teenage daughters as their family coped with multiple moves and multiple deployments to Afghanistan, an Army major and his wife unwittingly prevented both girls from following their father, their grandfather and their great-grandfather into military service.
Rudy and Mia De La Rosa thought they were providing emotional support for daughters Juliet and Samantha.

Sometimes, mental health treatment is necessary, so a career in the military may not be a good fit. But what happens if your child decides to visit the school counselor for something trivial? In order for that district to receive a reimbursement for services provided, they will now bill Medicaid. Medicaid requires the district to assign a code to your child–and there is no code for normal. How will that impact your child if they decide to seek a career in the military?

Did you know that with the change to the FERPA law, the U.S. Department of Education can now share personal information on your child with the U.S. Department of Labor? Why is the Federal Government amassing personal data on students?

Privacy rights attorneys focused on student privacy have already voiced their concerns for all of this data that is now easily accessible to 3rd parties.

 

 

Sometimes school officials think they know better than all parents. Here is one of many examples: (emphasis added)

The teenage girl had taken a pregnancy test at the school’s health center, according to a local news report, and administrators subsequently arranged for her to get an abortion at a county-run clinic. The girl was given a pass during school hours, put in a taxi and sent off to a local facility that’s overseen by the King County Health Department in Seattle. It is not known what classes she missed or if she will be allowed to make up the work.

The girl’s mother says the only consent form she signed allowed her daughter to be treated at the school’s health center for ailments such as earaches and sports physicals but not for terminating a pregnancy. She assures that nowhere in the paperwork does it mention “abortion or facilitating abortion.”

Clinic officials told the girl that if she concealed the pregnancy from her family, the abortion would be free of charge and there would be no financial responsibility. The school (Ballard High) is the Seattle District which is the largest in Washington State with more than 45,000 students in 88 schools.

There are numerous problems that can arise from school-based medical clinics. We are already witnessing violations of privacy rights and medical services forced or available to children without parental knowledge or consent.

Activists are out there banging the drums to make sure that all children hear their message, regardless of your views.  By shifting public schools into mental and medical clinics, expect more political factions to get involved. Expect more fighting about who has the right to make decisions for your children when it comes to their mental and medical health. Expect more personal data on your child to be confiscated. But how will that impact your child’s future?

That’s what you should be concerned about.

 

The post WARNING: Public Schools Are Now A Way To Deny Your Child Military And Career Opportunities appeared first on Granite Grok.

Axios AM published a piece this week dressing up the crisis of men leaving the workforce in record numbers as a win for women’s equality. “Workplace gender gap hits new low,” the newsletter stated.

“Women are closing in on men in the workplace, Axios Markets’ Emily Peck writes.”

A report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution showed that the highest increase of workforce participants after 2020 came from mothers with at least one child under five. Peck promotes this as a positive thing for women’s equality. It represents to her “a ‘level shift’ for working mothers — with potential lifetime consequences in terms of higher earnings and improved career trajectories.”

It’s not that the economy is booming, and our country has worked out a parental leave program that supports and boosts families so more mothers can enter the workforce, doubling the family’s ability to financially survive President Joe Biden’s spending spree. Women are being forced to take a more active earning role in the family because men are opting out of the labor market, and progressives are actively cheering their downfall.

Mothers with young children should be home teaching and nurturing their families. Daycare should be a last resort. Encouraging mothers to leave their children in the care of strangers who do not love them is damaging to the mother and child.

Yes, it is true that the “workplace gender gap” narrowed in percentage. Still, it is hard not to notice that the cheerful green line representing the percentage of men in the workplace is not increasing as the strong purple line for women does. The number of men in the labor market has decreased to almost pandemic-level lows. This is terrible news if you care even the slightest bit about men and their societal role.

Seven million men in the prime of life are opting out of the labor market, according to a Sept. 5 report released by Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio titled, “The State of the Working (And Non-Working) Man.” Men aren’t being asked to take leadership roles because those are reserved for the diversity hires. DEI demands we look for women first and then go down the equity ladder to determine which particular interest group represents the biggest victim points.

The lack of available upward mobility is soul-crushing, leading men to decide that being vilified at work all day for little pay and even less respect just isn’t worth it.

Here starts the doom cycle.

Men — demonized and depressed — drop out of the labor market. Society does nothing to bring them back in. Instead, we write loads of articles about why this is a good thing for women and ignore the male plight. Men turn to porn, video games, and weed to cope with the overwhelming depression from their lack of purpose. Women don’t want to marry unemployed men smoking weed and watching porn all day in their mother’s basement, making men not just unemployed, but also unloved.

Men deserve so much better than what we are offering them. A proper society cannot function with this happening to seven million men. Earning a living gives a man respect and honor. Women don’t want to date men who make less than them because it is a sign that he has no drive or potential to earn a comfortable living. (ROOKE: Blaming Feminism Is A Cope For Men Who Traded Masculinity For The Mirage Of Free Love)

Hoards of unemployed men are dangerous for our nation. The neighborhoods are safer when the men who live there have duty and integrity. But we aren’t giving that to them if the narrative we tell them is that it is better for society when MOTHERS with children under the age of five are more desirable employees than single men.

Married or not, men should be out working with the goal of being the best at their craft. When men have a strong focus, so does society’s morality. At this moment, our nation is the culmination of several generations of men focused on escapism rather than being masters of the universe. America used to offer men the promise that if they showed up, worked hard, and were loyal, our nation would repay them with the financial security to support a home and family. What we have now is not sustainable.

Mary Rooke is a reporter at the Daily Caller.

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There is an excellent read at Palladium by Harold Robertson about the competence crisis. Put simply, it’s a lot like the recent push to get kids into the local Uni instead of trade schools. There’s a dearth of qualified trade workers. Now, apply that to every occupation becasue of the culture shift.

 

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.  …

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

 

America has become obsessed with putting appearance above skill. From Meritocracy to Diversity, to quote the author. A journey he outlines beginning in the ’60s and through today from College faculty and admissions to Corporate board rooms. The picture he paints is not a still life. The cascade of failures that follow are very real. From his opening,

 

In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

 

Appeasing the social justice gods requires sacrifice and it comes not just in the rejection of qualified applicants but in the lives of regular Americans. And it is an altar upon which more than just bodies will pile. The decline in skill at every level leads to a loss of institutional knowledge and a reduction in the number of qualified or capable persons to teach their replacements.

It is the making a copy of a copy of a copy. Each iteration is less legible until you can’t tell what it was to begin with.

Think about the consequences for air travel (manufacturing, pilots, and air traffic controllers) to the military (from contractors to soldiers), to the very heart of every company.

 

Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America’s systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.

 

What are the long-term consequences of this cultural shift?

 

[C]atastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems. In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection. The more recent coronavirus pandemic was another teachable moment. What started just three years ago with a novel respiratory virus has caused a financial crisis, a bubble, soaring inflation, and now a banking crisis in rapid succession.

 

It cannot be lost on anyone with a modicum of common sense that absent an abrupt change in culture and priorities, America will collapse on its own in a few generations, if not sooner. And our enemies, if not complicit in the decline, are certainly watching and could take advantage before we implode on our own.

 

HT | Palladium

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Throughout his tenure as the leading “expert” on the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci had a bad tendency to engage in doublespeak when the topic of wearing face masks was thrust into the public spotlight.

For example, in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci appeared on CBS’ 60 Minutes, in which he said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

“While masks may block some droplets, they do not provide the level of protection people think they do,” he continued. “Wearing a mask may also have unintended consequences: People who wear masks tend to touch their face more often to adjust them, which can spread germs from their hands.”

A few days later, Fauci changed his tune, imploring Americans to wear face masks at all times, in all situations, including when they went outside. Later, he went even further, recommending that Americans wear multiple masks, calling it “commonsense” to do so.

However, we also know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that Fauci sent an email on Feb. 5, 2020 to a colleague stating, “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”

Fast forward to Labor Day weekend of 2023, which brings us to Fauci’s latest face mask faux paus. During an appearance on CNN, the disgraced former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stated unequivocally, “there is no doubt that masks work.”

Fortunately, the CNN host, Michael Smerconish, pushed back, citing a study that found wearing medical grade face masks “makes little or no difference.” Smerconish also quoted the study’s author, who told The New York Times, “There is just no evidence that they make any difference.”

This is where things got interesting.

Fauci responded that “there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage” to wearing face masks at the individual level. Then, in the same breath, he dropped this bombshell, “when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong.”

 

 

Wait, what? Based on Fauci’s ludicrous statement, face masks somehow work on the individual level at preventing transmission of the virus but also have little effect on the spread of the virus at a macro level?

How can that be? It defies logic, reason, and commonsense.

Think about it. If face masks actually do thwart the spread of COVID-19 from person to person, as Fauci has claimed countless times, doesn’t that automatically translate to fewer overall cases of COVID-19, which would absolutely have an effect on the pandemic in totality?

Aside from the study mentioned by Smerconish about the lack of efficacy regarding face masks, numerous other studies have corroborated the fact that face masks are basically useless in preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Moreover, several health care professionals, including former Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams and Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have reiterated that face masks are not effective in stopping transmission of COVID-19.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, face mask mandates are making a comeback, as COVID-19 cases are on an upward trend again.

When asked by Smerconish about the return of mask mandates, Fauci answered coyly, “I would hope that if we get to the point that the volume of cases is such and organizations like the CDC recommends…that people wear masks, I would hope that people abide by that recommendation and take into account the risks to themselves and their families.”

Surely, Fauci knows that the American people are not inclined to go through another round of mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures. But, based on recent events, it sure seems like the so-called experts and imbecilic politicians are on the cusp of pushing for a renewed urgency to return to the panic and hysteria that sowed the seeds for these devastating policies in the first place.

I simply hope that the vast majority of Americans see through this charade. In the early days of the pandemic, most Americans, including yours truly, went along with the mass hysteria because COVID-19 was a novel virus that we simply did not know all that much about.

But, this time is very different. We now know much more about it, including the fact that it does not pose a threat to children. We also know that it poses little threat to healthy adults, school shutdowns did much more harm than good, unnecessary lockdowns inflicted havoc throughout our economy, and the isolation produced by these measures has wrought substantial emotional pain and spiritual suffering. And, despite Dr. Fauci’s attempts to rewrite history and his weird predilection that he “represents science,” we are fully aware that he is a demented liar who cannot be trusted.

 

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.

 

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The leading cause of wildfires is arson, which means they are man-made and even (technically) a result of man-made “warming,” but not in the way the Climate Cult would have you believe. An Arsonist can still drive his EV past the wind farm to set the woods aflame.

The evidence is abundant and growing, and we’ve got another incident to add to the pile.

 

State officials announced yesterday that the devastating wildfire that ravaged over 33,000 acres in Louisiana — the largest in the state’s history — was caused by arson.

Louisiana has been facing an unprecedented wildfire crisis, with a record-breaking number of 441 fires burning from August 1 to August 24, according to the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry (LDAF).

The Tiger Island Fire in Louisiana is the largest wildfire in the state’s history. It has burned over 33,000 acres, which is more than the state usually has in an entire year.

 

So, what’s the government going to do to address the arsonist case rate hockey stick? Take away your affordable, fossil-fueled lifestyle. I’d be surprised if the Pfeds were not in on it.

The more radical Leftists in every progressive movement (as in fecal) are happy to beat people up, kill them, derail trains, shout about racism and hate speech, or burn forests. Their ideology demands it.

When the thing they whine about the most fails to happen as fast or as often as they like, the solution is to fake rape, oppression, crime, or climate catastrophe.

 

• Are They Really “Wildfires” if You Arrested 79 Arsonists for Starting Them?
• Suspected Arsonist Caught Starting Fires in Italy and Sicily
• Australia’s Brush Fires – Arson is Playing a Huge Role
• Local Logger’s Equipment Destroyed by Arson – Was it Eco Terrorism?
• Australian Police: Arson is to Blame for Much of the Devastation Caused this Bushfire Season

 

We’ve numerous examples of them all, but this year, as the private funding for reporting on climate has skyrocketed, so has the number of “wildfires ” set by arsonists and activists (if they are not both). How convenient. And they are excited to advance their false agenda based on other lies while ignoring the real-world consequences.

 

Multiple towns in southwestern Louisiana were placed under mandatory evacuation orders due to the fire, and state officials have implemented a burn ban to control the situation.

 

People had to uproot and upend their lives, but I suppose they should get used to that. It is, after all, what the Climate Cult is all about.

 

 

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had a suggestion for advancing President Joe Biden’s awkward three-way deal between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. “Significant concessions,” he said, from Israel to Palestinian Authority (PA) strongman Mahmoud Abbas. Blinken, according to news source Axios, said Saudi Arabia would be needed to show the Arab/Muslim world that it got “significant deliverables from Israel for the Palestinians in return for a normalization agreement.”

The Biden administration insists on movement toward Palestinian statehood before “rewarding” Israel and Saudi Arabia with US support. But American insistence on adding extraneous Palestinian demands is more likely to delay progress on a deal than advance it.

The genius of the Abraham Accords is that it allows countries of the region to engage on the basis of their national interests, not beholden to the recalcitrant and terror-sponsoring PA. Palestinians were offered a seat at the table, which the PA declined to take, so the Trump administration and its regional allies simply moved forward. The Biden administration, however, returned the Palestinian statehood issue to center stage and now “deputizing” Saudi Arabia to bring Israeli concessions to Abbas. (RELATED: BRYAN LEIB: Biden Should Stay Out Of Israel’s Business)

That is unlikely to happen.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) is not a cheerleader for Palestinian statehood. The Wall Street Journal notes, “Saudi officials have dwindling patience for uncompromising and divided Palestinian leaders with limited popular support.” By the time the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020, Arab funds for the PA decreased by 81.6%. Saudi support declined by 77.2% according to the PA Ministry of Finance.

Furthermore, the Saudis had previously made their “deliverables” clear: a strong defense pact with the US and a civilian nuclear program. And the Kingdom has been in various forms of private and profitable communication and cooperation with Israel for some time. Affinity Partners, owned by Jared Kushner, backed by $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, is investing $150 million to acquire a stake in the automotive and credit operations of an Israeli company, the Shlomo Group.

MbS has flipped the script. He does appear to be working the Palestinian issue, but from the other end and in pursuit of Saudi interests.

Far from presenting Israel with demands, according to Palestinian sources, when Abbas visited Saudi Arabia, MbS told him that the Kingdom was willing to extend “considerable support,” as long as the PA maintains effective security throughout its territories.

That is a problem. Abbas is not just waging war against Israel, he is deep in the throes of a Palestinian civil war in which his Western-and-sometimes-Sunni-Arab-supported PA is fighting against Iranian armed and trained Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militias. It is a battle for the Abbas succession.

 

 

In 2007, Hamas threw the PA out of Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement was geographically split. In 2012, Israel found the first Iranian Fajr-5 rockets in Gaza.  Hamas was operating in Jerusalem before 2020 and well before the Hamas rocket war of 2021. Now, owing in part to PA corruption and brutality toward its own people, Hamas and PIJ have worked their way into West Bank cities. Weapons have also been smuggled into the West Bank through Jordan – an increasingly shaky Western ally under pressure from Iran. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah has been smuggling arms to Israeli Arab gangs from Lebanon as well.

Abbas has no answers. He is 88 years old, ill, and has lost control. He can only hope that Israel will protect his rule on the principle that the PA is better than Iran – Scylla over Charybdis. Israel agrees. The Israeli incursions in the West Bank, including in Jenin and the IDF destruction of the Lion’s Den militia in Nablus were fought for the security of the Israeli people, and that includes not allowing Iran a foothold in Judea and Samaria. (SHOSHANA BRYEN: Can The US Turn These Historic Rivals Into Partners?)

This is what has the attention of MbS.

Israel is not the enemy of Saudi Arabia; the mullah regime in Tehran threatens the Kingdom as it hopes to a) destroy Sunni governments in the region and b) end up in possession of the holy places in Mecca and Medina – now under Saudi control and protection – and, eventually, Jerusalem.

The demand that Abbas control security in the West Bank is a demand that he oust Iran. This accounts as well for the suggestion that MbS has designs on a formal role in the Jerusalem Waqf that controls the Muslim holy sites under Israel’s security control.

Is there a workable deal here? If it relies on Abbas to regain security control of the West Bank territories, probably not. But if it is an opening for Israel and Saudi Arabia to combine political and economic forces (military forces would be a step way too far) in preventing an Iranian takeover of the territories and Jordan – well … leaving the US aside, which would be a good idea, there could be something to talk about.

 

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.

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