Much has been said about the disparity between the cost of public education and the return on investment, but everything about government inevitably ends that way, and the more Democrats you have in charge, the greater the imbalance between rising costs and declining output.

It matters little what the budget exists to do; it will inevitably do less at greater expense, and politics ensures it goes to the right people at the wrong price. Take Vermont—a convenient punching bag for this and many a tale of woe. In recent years, it jumped off an ideological cliff, reducing itself to little more than a Liberal playground for failed policy. For our part, we get to watch this not-so-slow-motion decline—an exchange of individual rights and property for incompetent rule and perfidy.

Democrats are the joke that’s not even funny. A party that claims it can handle a complete transition in energy but is incapable of managing the infrastructure we already have. One of the many increases in costs Vermonters will face as they stumble into their Democrat legislature’s 2024 budget is rising DMV fees.

As part of last year’s budget, DMV fees are slated to increase about 19% across the board starting on January 1. That will include everything from registering a vehicle to getting a new license.

“There’s kind of an impression the DMV is the one pushing these fees — we administer them. They pass the laws, we administer them,” said Vt. DMV Deputy Commissioner Michael Smith.

Under the budget approved by lawmakers, it will cost $15 more to register a car, $10 more to register a motorcycle, $6 more for a small trailer, and $11 more for a driver’s license.

The increased fees are expected to bring in about $20 million to the state’s Transportation Fund to help offset lost revenue as cars have become more fuel efficient in recent years.

Who knew you had another 20 million lying around for the state to suck up. Revenue Vermont needs because of a deliberate policy decision to force people into cars that don’t pay gas taxes. Yes, they say “more efficient cars,” but that’s what they wanted, so has anyone thought it forward? To explain what I mean, consider tobacco taxes. If you dared to cut them, Democrats lost their collective hive mind, but their own goal was to end smoking. If you end smoking, there are no tobacco taxes.

If the revenue is critical, but the goal is to zero it out, what’s the plan? A progressive Government does not give back. It never gets smaller. Growing the state first is priority one. The lost revenue must be replaced, and taxpayers are well.

The transportation fund is no different. Much like tobacco, the goal is to get you to abandon personal transportation, but roads and bridges aren’t going away, nor is road striping, salting, and plowing, or any of the line items in a budget, which must increase. What’s the plan? From where do the millions beyond the next 20 million come, and for what?

To answer these questions, look back to public education. Citizens will pay more and get less, and their only hope of getting away from this progressive spiral of doom is to stop electing them to public office. I’d say look to New Hampshire for guidance. We’ve cut taxes and regulations, even eliminated some, but I’m not sure how much longer we’ve got until we are dragged down the same hole.

Every election is the most important one in our lives, and that includes the local/town elections. But the decades-long disaster that is public education hasn’t inspired a revolt at the ballot box, so what does it take to get people to care enough to change their own lives for the better? It begins by kicking Democrats out of office and never ends after that.

Or would you rather figure out where the next 20 million will come from to feed that ravenous beast because that’s what’s in store whether you’ve got it to give or not!

The post Another $20 Million Vermonters Didn’t Know They Had Will Leave Their Pockets Beginning Jan 1 appeared first on Granite Grok.

The Orange Bowl was not a traditional college bowl game in 2023. It was a game between two programs that had something to prove. The 13-0 Florida State Seminoles were snubbed from the playoffs for the National Championship of college football. They were the undefeated champions of the ACC, which many feel is a conference below the level of the SEC and Big 10.

After tonight’s game, these people have a lot of data to prove their theory.

The Georgia Bull Dogs had not lost a game in two years until the Alabama Crimson Tide took them down in the SEC Championship. That one loss kept them out of the playoff tourney and relegated them to play FSU on New Year’s weekend. There would be no three-peat in 2023 for the Dawgs, who had not lost a game in over two years but were denied a shot at the championship when they lost to the Tide.

Maybe it’s not fair, but it’s inevitable when you let partisan people decide the fate of these future NFL athletes. Yes, these Dawgs had much to prove and their egos to mollify as the FSU mascot raced onto the field and planted a flaming spear into the fifty-yard line. That was the last moment to cheer for Seminole fans, as their heroes in Garnet and Gold were no match for their counterparts from Georgia. This game was ugly, and even friends and family switched the channel before the two-minute warning,

There was a big difference between the make-up of the two teams that met today for bragging rights and pride. Because of injuries, the Noles were down to their third-string QB, but as many as twelve key players opted not to play for an undefeated record. These players chose to protect their bodies for the upcoming NFL Draft. Rather than putting on the uniform and playing for the pride of the school that had allowed them to showcase their talents, they sat it out, and thus, their team was embarrassed in the final game of 2023.

In contrast, Carson Beck, the Quarterback for the Georgia Bull Dogs, not only played in the Orange Bowl but has opted not to go for the cash of the NFL but to return to Athens, Georgia, for his Senior year to win another National Championship for his school and, hopefully, a Heisman Trophy for himself. That difference in commitment and pride has brought back-to-back championships to Georgia, and that is why Florida may never rise to that level again.

The 2023 Orange Bowl had no impact on college football’s National Championship but was a microcosm of life. Those who put themselves above their teammates may have a big payday but may never know the feeling of winning a championship. Those who put their team above themselves will always be champions. The Orange Bowl was only a game, but I bet the players will have very different memories to last a lifetime.

The post What Does 63-3 Really Mean appeared first on Granite Grok.

Joe Biden has something in common with Donald Trump. They’ve both been president, and neither has seen any need to debate anyone in the 2024 contest for similar and different reasons. Both are far enough ahead in the polls that debates are more risk than reward.

There is simply no reason to step into any ring of that circus.

And while Trump could probably walk onto a debate stage without fear of falling and with very little prep. Biden can’t say that. I’d be surprised if Grandpa Joe can still manage to sniff hair, and I doubt he does any debates in 2024, and not just because we’ve predicted the DNC’ll replace him after he wins the party nomination at their convention. He always lacked intellectual agility, but his decline has reached a point where even wearing an earpiece for prompts (which he lacks the hair to hide (like Hillary) would only confuse him. It would be ugly, so Joe won’t be debating anyone… ever.

Democrats should be okay with that—no debates, I mean. We already know most of them don’t want Biden but, like good party animals, will compromise the speed with which we receive election results by writing him. No paper ballot hand counting is allowed, but if the New Hampshire Bien write-in campaign is even moderately successful, poll workers will be forced to count those write-ins to tabulate results manually. The machines won’t know.

That is a reasonable delay in Democracy. It is a worthwhile distraction so local Dems can show their fealty to Dear Leader and a party that has been fixing its presidential primary for years. But that’s what good little Marxists do. It will be required after the resolution – might as well get good at it now.

If, however, you’d like to pretend you want to live in that Democracy you keep flapping your skinny little lips about, there’s a debate in New Hampshire on January 8th. Even in a pretend Democracy, you are allowed to pretend to have competing opinions about managing the planned decline and fall of that Democracy. And, no Biden, which should increase the draw. It’ll be safe to bring your daughters.

The lonely political vigil of long-shot Democratic presidential candidates Marianne Williamson and Minnesota congressman Dean Phillips will be transformed on to the debate stage early next month in New Hampshire – without Joe Biden, who is neither on the state ballot nor agreeable to any debate interaction with competitors.

The debate between self-help author Williamson and Phillips is set to be held at the New England College on 8 January, and moderated by Josh McElveen, former political director of radio station WMUR, two weeks before the state holds its primary.

Update: The debate will be hosted by New England College, a liberal arts nonprofit school, on Jan. 8 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Manchester, N.H. It will be moderated by the founder of the communications firm McElveen Strategies and former WMUR Political Director Josh McElveen, and it will air on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 at 7 p.m. EST.

The Left’s Party machine doesn’t want either of them, so this is more an exercise in policy approach, but it is something Democrats in New Hampshire have been denied, so I’d expect the junkies to be there.

They’ve also been denied the media spotlight New Hampshir’s primary provides. The access to insiders, the donor class, and political operatives who would have come from all across the world to cover Democrats vying for the attention of Granite State voters.

The handful of no-names have been here. There’s a bunch of them. There are more than 20 filings in both parties for the Presidential primary contest. Local Dems may have had the opportunity to press the flesh with one or more of them. Or not.

Joe Biden is conspicuously absent from the list, but Vermin Supreme is there. So are Williamson, Phillips, and others from a dozen states and DC. So, you might see why any Democrat debate in the 2024 New Hampshire primary season might be attractive.

It is a meaningless debate, but so is the Democratic presidential primary, so why quibble?

The post Presidential Primary: If You Want to See Dems Debate There’s One Coming Up in New Hampshire [Update] appeared first on Granite Grok.

President Biden’s sliding poll numbers have set off alarm signals among Democrats, who are beginning to see that he might lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Those polls have also gotten the attention of pundits who have confidently said for three years now that Trump could never again win a national election.

The polling results published over the past few months suggest otherwise: Trump is currently the favorite to win next year’s election.

The most recent RealClearPolitics Average has Trump leading Biden by 2.6 percentage points, a switch of about four points since late summer when Biden led 45%-43%, and in a long-running decline of seven points for Biden since he won the 2020 election with 51% percent of the popular vote.

More ominously for Biden, a recent Bloomberg poll showed Trump well ahead (by an average of five points) in the seven swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It appears the most significant factor in recent months is a surge in support for Trump (from 43% to just above 47%), while Biden has essentially remained stuck in neutral.

Joe Biden is an unpopular president, almost as unpopular as any president in the post-war era. According to the RCP Average, just 40% of voters approve of his handling of the job. His ratings have been falling for more than two years since the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Not coincidentally, voters also take a dim view of where the country is heading, with 68% percent saying it is headed in the wrong direction and just 25% in the right direction.

The president’s ratings have gotten steadily worse over the course of this year. More than 60% of voters say Biden “has moved too far to the left” on policies important to them. Voters are also pessimistic about the economy: 47% say things are getting worse, while just 22% say they are getting better, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. These are alarming numbers for an incumbent seeking reelection.

Biden is also underwater on nearly every major issue. According to an early December Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is favored over Biden on the three issues voters say are most important to them: the economy (52%-35%), inflation (51%-30%), and securing the border (54%-24%). Voters also favor Trump over Biden on crime, the Russia/Ukraine war, and even the war between Israel and Hamas. These latter two ratings, on Ukraine and Israel, undoubtedly surprised Biden and his supporters, who assumed that voters would endorse his policies in regard to these conflicts. By contrast, voters favor Biden on just two issues: abortion (44%-33%) and Social Security/Medicare (44%-38%).

Voters in these surveys also question Biden’s fitness to hold office, especially as they look ahead to the prospect of another four-year term. According to a new Harris/Harvard poll, 62% of voters doubt that he is fit to carry out the duties of the presidency, and another 48% think his presidency is getting worse year by year and month by month. Whatever their views on the issues, voters appear to think that Biden is increasingly incapable of addressing them.

Biden is losing support among Hispanics voters, a key constituent group of the Democratic Party. Hispanics have been trending away from Democrats and toward Trump over recent election cycles. Hillary Clinton carried Hispanic voters by 37 points in 2016, but Biden carried them by just 21 points in the 2020 election and lags well behind that margin this year. According to recent polls conducted by Economist/YouGov, Biden led Trump among Hispanic voters by 18 points in August, by eight points in September, by four in October, and by just two points (41%-39%) in December. These voters express strong disapproval of Biden’s performance in office, and even disapprove (51%-33 %) of his policies on immigration. Since Hispanics represent about 15% of all U.S. voters, their move away from Biden and toward Trump accounts in part for Biden’s recent slide in the polls.

Another key constituency turning away from the incumbent president is independent voters. Biden carried independents by nine points in 2020. They were a crucial part of his coalition in the swing states he carried narrowly last time, and an important ingredient in his popular vote majority since independents represent one-third of all voters. As with Hispanic voters, he lags far behind that margin in this year’s surveys. A recent Economist/YouGov poll taken in December gave Trump a six-point margin over Biden (38%-32%), with many of those voters still undecided. Still, this represents a 20-point slide for Biden among independents since the 2020 election.

Biden also faces an “enthusiasm gap” among some previously loyal groups who turned out to support him in 2020 due to their dislike for Donald Trump but are disappointed thus far with his performance in office. This is true, in particular, with young voters and, surprisingly, with African American voters as well.

Some suspect that voters under age 30 who are abandoning the president are disillusioned by his support for Israel in its war with Hamas, his failure to cancel student loans, and an insufficiently aggressive posture in regard to climate change. Biden won those voters in 2020 by a margin of 60% to 36%, but due mostly to their dislike for Donald Trump. Much of that antipathy remains. Recent polls continue to give Biden a lead over Trump among these voters: A Yahoo poll in December gave Biden a 55%-27% lead over Trump, while a more recent Emerson College poll reported a smaller margin: 45%-40%. At the same time, just 35% of those voters approve of his performance in office, according to a poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, a measure of their lack of enthusiasm for his reelection campaign.

To the extent young voters disagree with Biden, they do so for progressive reasons – and are unlikely to vote for Trump. But they could stay home, which would be a blow to the Democrats. According to the same poll, fewer than 50% of young voters say they will “definitely” turn out to vote next year, compared to 57% at this point in the 2020 election cycle. In addition, roughly 10% of these voters say they would vote for Robert Kennedy in a multi-candidate race, which further narrows Biden’s lead over Trump in this group.

Biden seems to be in unlikely trouble among black voters. They are by far the most loyal of all Democratic Party voting groups: Biden carried these voters overwhelmingly in 2020 (92%-8%), which also helped him in the swing states. Trump may never win a significant share of this vote, but a doubling of his 2020 total now seems within the realm of possibility. A recent Economist/YouGov poll has Trump with support from 12% of these voters, with many still on the fence.

Perhaps more ominously for Democrats, a growing share of blacks say they will not vote in a contest between Biden and Trump. In a series of Economist/YouGov polls, the percentage of black adults saying they would not vote at all increased from 7% in August to 11% in December. This, despite Biden going a considerable distance to appeal to those voters by appointing African Americans to prominent positions in his administration and taking their side in controversies over civil rights, crime, and government spending. Biden’s challenge among the black community, then, as with young voters, is in regard to enthusiasm and turnout, and not so much with the direct match-up with Trump.

Biden’s strategy for the 2024 campaign becomes clearer in view of his sagging poll numbers. Instead of running on his record, which will be difficult to do in view of his overall ratings, he will emphasize Trump’s defects and the dangers a Trump presidency will pose to the constitutional order.

“We may have problems,” his allies are already saying, “but the other guy is far worse.” The various legal prosecutions underway will be woven into this strategy as a means of appealing to independents and those “on the fence.”

A conviction of Trump in a court of law would aid immensely in this strategy. In addition, Democrats will redouble their efforts to mobilize minority voters and young voters, while sharpening their appeal to Hispanics. Democrats will also ride the abortion issue, which worked for them in 2022, and is one of the few issues that cuts in their favor. Democrats understand that a victory for Trump in the presidential race will also mean that Republicans will take control of the Senate while expanding their margins in the House of Representatives – and thereby enable Trump to carry out his threatening agenda.

Trump, on the other hand, if he can side-step the legal challenges, has his own cards to play in the campaign. For one thing, voters know him, and there is nothing new that Democrats can say about him that they have not already said, ad nauseam, for several years.

Voters can also compare the Trump and Biden presidencies – and Biden does not come off well in that comparison. According to a Wall Street Journal poll taken last month, 50% of voters say Trump’s policies helped them, while just 23% said the same about Biden’s policies; indeed, 53% of voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them in some way. This allows Trump to ask the question Ronald Reagan posed to voters in 1980 during his campaign against Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Many voters will say “no.”

More importantly, Trump does not have to win the popular vote in order to win the election in the Electoral College. The election will be decided in a series of separate races in seven or eight swing states where Trump may have an advantage. If he wins even half of them he is likely to win the election. The national popular vote, measured by these polls, will be somewhat beside the point in determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Democrats will register large margins of 7 or 8 million votes in the populous states of California, New York, and Illinois, as they did in 2016 and 2020, while Republicans will carry their own large states (Texas and Florida) by less than one million votes – giving Democrats a substantial edge in the popular vote that will not translate directly into electoral votes. Any vote beyond 50% in a state is of no use in the Electoral College – and Democrats tend to “waste” more votes than Republicans.

Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016 by two percentage points, but still won a safe majority in the Electoral College by carrying nearly every swing state. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by more than four points (51.3%-46.8%), but carried the critical swing states by narrow margins, in the cases of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, by less than one percentage point. A swing of less than 1% from Biden to Trump in those three states would have given Trump a tie in the Electoral College, so that the election would have been decided in the House of Representatives. In addition, reapportionment following the last census will allocate three additional electoral votes to the states Trump won in 2020 – two more to Texas and one to Florida – and three fewer to the states Biden won. This will make Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes slightly easier to navigate. (Pollsters would do well next year to survey the swing states and mostly ignore the national vote.)

It appears, then, that Biden must win the popular vote by at least three points, and perhaps by as many as four, in view of what happened last time in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, to be assured of winning a majority in the Electoral College. Current polls have Biden running two points behind Trump in the popular vote, but at the same time show that he is behind by at least five points in the swing states. These polls, along with results of past elections, suggest that there is a gap of at least three points (and maybe four) between the national popular vote and the outcomes in those swing states.

Some have said that Trump has a ceiling of 46% or 47% of the popular vote, and has no chance of reaching 50%, which they say he will need to win the election. This is not so: Trump can win the election with 47% percent of the popular vote if he can keep Biden below 50%, perhaps with the assistance of third-party or independent candidates. If Trump stays close to Biden in the popular vote, which current polls suggest he can do, then he is likely to win the game in the Electoral College.

Trump is fully aware of this (many are not), and will campaign accordingly. He is also aware that Biden will not be able to campaign from his home as he did in 2020, lest voters conclude that he is not up to the job; but the attempt to run a vigorous campaign may further expose that weakness. Nor can he allow his vice president to lead the campaign because she is more unpopular and prone to gaffes than he is.

Trump’s rise in the polls sets the stage for an unusual campaign ahead. Democrats may conclude, in view of Biden’s weakness across the board, that a traditional campaign focusing on issues and turnout may not succeed this time around – and that their hopes will rest upon winning the legal campaign against Trump.

This may explain recent moves by the special prosecutor to expedite the case against Trump in order to win a verdict prior to the election. The reversal of fortunes between Biden and Trump also accounts for the revival of charges that Trump, if elected, will prove to be a “dictator,” and so should be disqualified from the ballot. Those cases, and perhaps the election itself, will be decided this year by the Supreme Court.

For these reasons, and others likely to develop, this is bound to be an ugly and unsettling campaign – and one in which the traditional rules of national politics will be cast to the winds.

James Piereson | RealClear Wire

The post What’s Behind Biden’s Sliding Poll Numbers? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The People’s Republic of Vermont has a climate itch it can’t stop scratching. An irritation that persists to the point of bleeding if it were on your person. And it is. You, kind people of Vermont, will pay in ways they can’t or won’t explain.

Despite your objections, your ruling class has plans to get you all off oil and gas and running heat pumps. Separately, the peasants will be expected to trade in vehicles they need and want for Electric imposters. Pod vehicles that look like the real thing but don’t act it. This requires an exponential rise in power generation and the infrastructure to carry this increased load from the mystical place it is created (Captain Planet’s lair, perhaps) to the homes, businesses, and EVs meant to use it.

Over at Watts Up With That (WUWT), they’ve got a post about increased demand if everyone in the UK were forced into using Heat Pumps. They have the same sorts of idiots running their government as Vermont (where lunatics in its legislature rammed through the clean heat standard). It is a messy bit of business whose only redeeming characteristic is that no one tasked with implementation has a clue quite how to get started. We can hope it was all about resume pumping, but the dingbats seem serious about their fraudulent emissions reduction plan, just like the idgits in the UK.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ll find a way, but while they try to fit square pegs in round holes, look at this from WUWT.

If we assume then that the heat pumps are in use for 14 hours a day, that gives average hourly electricity demand of 2.1 KWh. This assumes that the heat pump runs at a constant power rating. In practice, the system would have to work harder in the early evening as temperatures drop.

There are about 24 million homes with gas and oil boilers, so a peak demand of 2.1 KW amounts to 50 GW for the country as a whole. To that we can add demand from offices, shops etc, which currently use gas and oil.

Along with demand from EVs, the UK would need well over 100 GW of capacity to meet peak demand.

Has anyone done similar math for the Green Mountain State? How many homes, number of offices, hourly demand, and total demand? Believe it or not, no, but that is a legislative priority – they say. But how serious are they about admitting anything past “ratepayers will pay more.”

How about a little game of truth or dare where the truth is the dare?

A commenter on the WUWT post noted that almost nowhere in the UK are the buried cables capable of carrying that sort of load, especially the end-of-the-workday variety when EVERYONE turns on (or turns up) the heat pump and plugs in the EV. It would all need to be dug up and replaced. It’s expensive and a colossal bother.

I’d guess most of that infrastructure in Vermont is above ground, but it would need to be replaced or rerun. All of it. Soon. But then not. Vermont’s sooty foot is already on the decarbonization path despite no one knowing where it leads or at what cost to not just ratepayers but the entire economy. Why rush things? Burlington’s carbon tax on buildings hasn’t been enacted yet (it starts Jan 1), but at least one councilor wants the rate hiked. That should buy them some time (/snark!).

On this side of the Connecticut River, the New Hampshire Legislature has introduced HB1644, which proactively asks the NH Department of Energy “to initiate a proceeding and conduct an investigation of the benefits and key considerations regarding support for clean or non-carbon emitting power generation, and report to the legislature in one year.” Benefits and risks. Reliability, security, and winter energy spikes. Cost-effectiveness, how it might impact economic growth – a list of things you’d want to explore in detail before making any more permanent grand gestures.

It also requests that the NH DoE define clean energy and investigate steps “taken by other states, including clean energy standards.” Presumably, to learn lessons from their mistakes, for which Vermont will be helpful – their 2024 legislative priority includes trying to back into what HB1644 requests upfront. Potential problems you’d want to sidestep or a workaround for in advance but that Vermont ignored before it latched onto the California standards. None of which addresses the genuine issue of cost.

What will it cost Vermonters, not just in dollars but in ‘sense.’ The state government is punishing everyone to reduce emissions – even if you believe that’s the problem or that a government could fix it – that China will erase in a wink of the Middle Kingdom’s military-industrial complex eye. A sum of emissions Vermonters might take decades to save, coughed into the earth’s atmosphere in a few industrial heartbeats by that Marxist regime to which Vermont’s Heat-Standard Climateers are (more than likely) most enamored.

Vermonters need to confront their legislature and demand a response. Why are they killing Vermont with these crippling initiatives when China, India, and Africa could do 100 times better – meaningful good if your goals are to be believed –  in a fraction of the time, at no cost to us?

Or if we framed it another way. How does my paying more for a paper straw keep China from dropping tons of plastic into the ocean every day?

Shouldn’t they be pressuring the Feds to pressure China by any means necessary short of war instead of pressuring a few farmers and small business owners to give up so much for so little?

The post Night Cap: Where Will Vermont Find the Money for This? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Senator Rand Paul mentions Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical State in his book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. Dr. Kheriaty’s online biography includes the following information:

Dr. Kheriaty is a plaintiff in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden challenging government censorship on social media. . .. Dr. Kheriaty also serves in teaching and advisory roles at the Brownstone Institute, the Zephyr Institute, the Paul Ramsey Institute, and the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

For many years, he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI [University of California—Irvine] School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years. He was fired from the University of California after challenging the University’s covid vaccine mandate in federal court.

Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue is titled “Nuremberg, 1947.” It is the right place to begin in understanding the COVID-19 control program. Following the more famous 1946 trial of the top Nazis, the trial of Nazi doctors led to prison sentences for nine and death sentences for seven defendants. As part of the opinion of the tribunal, the Nuremberg Code was published, which contained ten items that established the criteria for conducting ethical human experimentation.

Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue only explores the first item of the Code, but it is the foundation, addressing informed, noncoerced consent. Those interested in reading an analysis of all ten items of the Code are directed to Dr. Nicholas Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program. Dr. Bednarski concludes that all ten items of the Nuremberg Code have been violated.

The New Abnormal’s prologue identifies the connection between the work of the Nazi doctors and the eugenics movement, which is disturbing for Americans initiated in the United States. The New Abnormal reveals, “Eugenics programs received funding from major foundations, including those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Kellogg. Intellectuals at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton endorsed the movement’s aims and participated enthusiastically.”

Pursuit of eugenics was not restricted to the private sector but extended to state governments and the federal government:

In the 1920s an impoverished young woman from Virginia, Carrie Buck, was diagnosed with “congenital feeblemindedness” and slated for forced sterilization. She challenged the state of Virginia’s law in federal court, and her case, Buck v. Bell, went to the Supreme Court in 1927. The court upheld the state’s eugenic sterilization law, resulting in Carrie’s forced tubal ligation.

The New Abnormal continues, “Hitler himself remarked, ‘I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would . . . be of no value, or injurious to the racial stock.’”

The New Abnormal’s prologue concludes, “While the Nuremberg Code did not enjoy the binding force of international law, its principles did inform the laws of most nations, including the United States. The principle of free and informed consent was further developed in the influential World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki in 1964.”

The New Abnormal focuses on the role of declared emergencies in establishing invasive government policies that destroy our personal freedoms:

[Government policy] . . . from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the declared state of emergency. But tellingly, the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, et cetera—was deliberately never defined.

Who has this power?

At the federal level, with the backing of the president, that person is now Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC, among other divisions. Becerra, a lawyer and former attorney general of California, has no medical training and zero public health experience.

How extensive are these powers? Dr. Kheriaty reveals that in a state of emergency the president gains access to an additional 136 statutory powers. He summarizes the implications of this concentration of power:

The full significance of what transpired in March 2020 may have escaped our attention. Without realizing it we lived through the design and implementation of not just a novel pandemic strategy but a new political paradigm—a system far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously attempted by Western nations. Under the biosecurity model, “the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [under lockdowns and social distancing became] the ultimate act of civic participation.” Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy nor the Communist states of the Soviet Union ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.

We have encountered new terminology that was not medical according to Dr. Kheriaty:

It is instructive to reflect on the chosen phrase, “social distancing,” which is not a medical term but a political one. A medical or scientific model would have deployed a phrase like physical or personal distancing, but not social distancing. The term suggests not a new model for health but for organizing society, one that limits human interactions by six feet of space and by masks that cover the face—our locus of interpersonal connection and communication.

According to Dr. Kheriaty, “To see where this biomedical security state will lead, many point to the Chinese social credit system—and this is a useful shorthand for the dystopian future this regime portends.”

He continues, “University biomedical security systems were also sustained by a near constant stream of propaganda generated by administrators, with catchphrases that would make even bureaucrats at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth cringe. For example, administrators constantly admonished students, faculty and staff to ‘hold one another accountable.’”

That is Orwellian, of course, but it is a good description of how people were encouraged to betray each other to the gestapo and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Neither of these infamous security organizations had access to the digital technology that is so pervasive today. How was this used to surveil citizens during the COVID-19 control program?

“In May of 2022, Vice broke the story that during the previous two years the ‘CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed COVID lockdown orders.’ . . . What descended on us was not just a novel virus but a novel method of social organization and control.”

Dr. Kheriaty identifies two influences on his thinking—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Although it would be imprudent to do so, one might dismiss Brave New World as fantasy. But Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago describes a seventy-four-year experiment in real social organization and control in the Soviet Union. Dr. Kheriaty makes a compelling case that we in the United States are on the road to a similar kind of tyranny.

Dr. Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State should be read if it is the only book on the COVID-19 control program one reads. But for a broader view, begin with Dr. Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program, and then read Senator Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. The COVID-19 control program is a many-tentacled monster. It is easy to surrender to information overload.

Dr. Bednarski’s series describes an internationally recognized set of ten criteria for human experimentation by which COVID-19 control measures might be measured. He concludes that all ten were violated in the COVID-19 control program. Senator Paul explores the source of the COVID-19 organism and the efforts made within government, in particular, to cover up the facts through propaganda. But if there is any belief that the COVID-19 control program was a one-time phenomenon, Dr. Kheriaty dispels that delusion. That is a perspective we need in order to fully understand the implications of the COVID-19 control program.

Phil Duffy is a regular contributor to WFYL’s We the People, the Constitution Matters, a lifelong student of history, and the author of the forthcoming A Tale of Four Cities, an investigation about who really wrote the first modern text on economics and why it matters today.

Phil Duffy | Mises Wire

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The Cuban dictatorship was built and sustained on planned executions, so this recent move by its National Assembly to legalize “dignified death” seems a bit belated. I guess, like Western Elites, they needed Political murder to feel like a kindness.

The Communist-run country’s National Assembly passed the measure as part of legislation updating the nation’s legal framework for its universal and free healthcare system.

“The right of people to a dignified death is recognized in end-of-life decisions, which may include the limitation of therapeutic effort, continuous or palliative care, and valid procedures that end life,” the final draft of the legislation stated.

Euthanasia and medically assisted suicide, opposed by most religions, sparks huge controversy around the world where just a handful of countries allow the practice and some equate it with murder.

Cuba is, of course, doing the deal in reverse. They’ve been killing off the political resistance (democide) for the entirety of their existence. Locking people up for years over the smallest slight. How convenient for them to have learned from Western progressives how to address the problem of overcrowded prisons. Sorry, I meant “patients.”

Almost anyone could suddenly take ill or request they be put to sleep like a dog, and since this is Cuba, you can’t complain unless you’d like to pay a visit to the ‘Vet’ for your last ‘vaccination.’

Closer to home, the depopulationist social engineers among us are coming at the problem from the other direction. Pretend it’s about people in pain and then expand the scope until the state can hide political executions behind assisted suicide.

And yes, there are useful idiots who honestly believe that the practice would never grow beyond expediting the voluntary deaths of terminal patients in pain. But it has, it does, and it will. This is not a pleasant reality to face, but it is better for the community and society if the government is not permitted to manage the terms and circumstances of chemical death beyond investigating murder. There will be some suffering, but you won’t have to deal with the State using euthanasia policy to end people’s lives because they are sad, poor, or there are just too many of them. Or they’ve done the government wrong.

It’ll happen if it hasn’t already. The best course of action is not to go there at all.

HT | GatewayPundit

The post Slippery Meet Slope: Cuba Embraces Assisted Suicide as If They Didn’t Already Have It appeared first on Granite Grok.

I read somewhere that the SPLC had fingered GraniteGrok as anti-government. I feel certain they are honored now more than ever, given that The Government has become the thing that drove the Founders to Declare their independence.

 We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

There is a lot of safety and happiness these days, and you can blame the government for that. The cabal of connected insiders bilking the people and the planet for their own benefit. A sort of Global confidence scam, though that wasn’t where I intended to go. The SPLC, a scam all its own, is another establishment tool, but it has been struggling to find relevancy.

Labeling the ‘Grok anti-government isn’t the gesture to get them there beyond this audience, so they’ve come up with a new thing. It’s called CAPTAIN.

That stands for Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives. …

What they are doing with CAPTAIN is reviving one of [SPLC founder Morris] Dees’ rare flops, an example of when the fundraising prodigy got too far out ahead of his target market. Two entire decades ago, Morris teamed up with some autogynephilic big brains like economist Donald-Deirdre McCloskey and semiconductor scientist Lynn Conway to try to cancel anyone who’d given a nice blurb to Northwestern U. psychology professor J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen.

Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.

I’m no expert, but I find it unlikely this will take off the way they hoped. It’s too long. It’s cumbersome and conceptually late to the party. Science is no longer the driving force behind the militant transgender agenda. It’s about fear and intimidation. The battle has moved from the streets to grade-school classrooms where groomers and activists are immersing other people’s kids in gender faith dogma.

Munchausen, by proxy in all its forms, is the captain. People, schools, teachers, and parents desperate for attention and acceptance in the go-viral or bust digital world are sacrificing children for clicks and views. They then mislabel it as compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance – none of which has a thing to do with science.

The science  is that it is unhealthy to leave kids alone and let them develop naturally. It is better to inundate them with sexualized literature that includes fringe heterosexual abuse as well as so-called LGBT themes that the average non-anit LGBTQ pro-science apologist should find offensive.

Drugs, cutting, rape, smoking, alcohol abuse, assault, adult child sex and suicide.

It is true that some members of the LGBTQ community are more inclined toward all of the vices, so perhaps that’s at least honest. Even in the most encouraging communities, nearly half will consider or attempt suicide. So, sure, that content might pass as actual LGBTQ “science” if we’re talking psychotherapy, which, if you ask a real scientist, will tell you that is not science at all. It’s pseudoscience. And look, it’s all coming together.

CAPTAIN is really about advancing LGBTQ pseudo-science narratives, which is what everyone else is doing.

Not new. Not likely to make a splash, but they at least got an anti-government blog post out of it on the ‘Grok.

The post Have You Met the SPLCs’ New CAPTAIN? appeared first on Granite Grok.