If you’re a Middle-Class American who feels like life is getting harder. You are correct. Middle-class Americans are worse off today than they were 20 years ago. That is the finding of a new study.  What does this mean for the future of this country?

We want to thank Marc Abear for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
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The new study comes from researchers at USC and Columbia.  Together, they released a study showing average Americans near retirement are worse off today than 20 years ago.  They started with this question: How are people doing in this country in terms of their economic and physical well-being?  Of particular interest were people who were “middle class” and getting close to retirement.

So here’s their methodology. They used a data set from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Survey.  This survey has over 20,000 Americans who are age 50 and older.  They also used a microsimulation called the Future Elderly Model.    The things included were: physical health, private income, housing, disability, and an estimated future life expectancy.

The researchers compared the data from today with comparable Americans from 20 years ago.  What they found is not surprising to those who live it.  Lower class and lower middle class Americans are largely worse off today than 20 years ago. They are living shorter lives, more sickly and filled with disability.  The ailments include hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. Today if you are an average 60 year old American woman in the lower-middle class you will likely live to 84, but 40% of your remaining years will be lived with a disability.  The percentage of life you live disabled has risen since 1994.

Researchers also found lower middle class Americans have flatlined in terms of financial health too.   This is true in terms of income and housing.   The gap between the wealthy and working class is getting wider with respect to home ownership.  The gap has tripled in size as compared to 1994.

The researchers suggest we ought to increase the social safety net for these Americans.  Do you think we can afford to pick up the slack with more Medicaid, housing vouchers and food stamps?  Those are the findings and data coming to us from USC and Columbia Universities.  The key takeaway is: For the average American, things are not good.

About two weeks ago, there was a young man named Oliver Anthony from Farmville, VA that had a song go viral.  It’s called Rich Men North of Richmond  a song about the rich men and politicians in Washington DC.  As of Friday 8/25/23, Rich Men North of Richmond is the most played song in all of America… for good reason.

Oliver gives life to the pain and struggles of the average American of his generation and those of his parents and grandparents; the people included in this study out of USC and Columbia University.  His songs are about being a factory worker, his struggle with addiction and obesity.  He’s giving America a primal scream that things aren’t good, things aren’t right.

He makes you feel what this university data can only say.  Predictably, the media turned it into a fight about Left vs Right.  They call this young man racist and bigoted.  What they’re saying is a crock of excrement.  Listen to the song for yourself and you’ll hear that.

Oliver said in response to his sudden fame,  “I appreciate the compliments, but … I’m not a good musician. I hardly know my way around the guitar. My singing’s OK. That’s not what made this song a success.  It’s about you, and the struggles in your life. That’s what’s made this what it is.”

You can say things with facts and data.  But the struggling of the average American you can now feel.  Bill Clinton and Republicans in Congress  absolutely gutted factory towns  across the country when they allowed China into the World Trade Organization 20 years ago.  Researchers at MIT and others have proven that.

NAFTA, now called USMCA, is doing much the same.  Chinese companies are now planting themselves in Mexico to skirt tariffs and take advantage of us and our workers.

America’s social fabric is fraying. Data show that we’re less connected to each other now than we were 20 or 50 years ago  There’s research on that stemming from the book Bowling Alone.

Our children are increasingly being raised in single families.  This includes 49% of black children, 28% of Hispanic kids, and 21% of white children. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/children.html  Compare that to data from 1960, when only 7% of kids lived with just one parent.

These facts and data show things are not ok in this country.  We need to center our conversations on that topic.  It is time to focus on what is true , not just what we feel.  Maybe feelings have a place in the conversation.  Maybe we need to scream that things aren’t ok through our music, through our tears, to our politicians.

So what do we do about this? What do we do with a country that is not well?  When the working people in small towns and big cities are in trouble, in pain, are getting poorer and more desperate will we throw them an anchor like Bidenomics or a life preserver like a return to what made America once prosperous?

The post Load 16 Tons and What Do You Get? appeared first on Granite Grok.

They still do NOT understand WHY a majority of Republican VOTERS continue to support Donald Trump. This ad explains it. I’d add this: these voters understand that Nikki Haley, Chris Christie etc., etc., etc., have much, much, much more in common with the Biden regime than with Republican voters.

That nothing is really going to change by replacing the Biden regime with Haley et al. … that it is all talk designed to fool Republican voters yet again… that once Haley et al. get power, it would be “business as usual” just like Kevin McCarthy did.

 

Wow. Watch this. pic.twitter.com/cp5UOKW8xo

— Ned Ryun (@nedryun) October 15, 2023

The post What NeverTrump Will Apparently NEVER Understand appeared first on Granite Grok.

This Bride and the Groomsmen show what they’d do to ANY challenge to “speak now or forever hold your peace” with their “pieces”.

 

Frequent commenter at GraniteGrok, Matt, sent this to me. I have no idea where it came from but DANG!, I thought it was really funny. Best of all is the expression on the bride’s face as her husband-to-be had no clue that she wasn’t fooling around in getting hitched…she was QUITE pleased with herself.

Gives “Enforcing the Peace” a whole new attitude, doesn’t it?

The post Palate Cleanser – Montana: This Bride Is Making SURE That She’s Getting Married! appeared first on Granite Grok.

RFK, Jr. has quit the Democrat party to run as an independent, and already, we’re seeing pundits on both sides of the political aisle grousing about how this will potentially impact the 2024 presidential election.

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Whether or not his third-party candidacy will pull more votes from Democrats or Republicans, thus changing the calculus of the Electoral College.

One thing that the media hates about RFK, Jr. is that he holds some questionable beliefs, most notably surrounding vaccines in general (and the COVID-19 vaccine specifically), as well as the topics of autism, his father’s assassination, and that the 2004 presidential campaign is “stolen.”

Do a quick Google search, and top returns are, unsurprisingly, headed by the most far-left liberal rags attempting to downplay his legitimacy by casting him as a crackpot conspiracy theorist who’s unqualified to hold the office of the president.

As though an obviously cognitively-impaired, stumbling, bumbling, rambling buffoon in the current White House administration is a better alternative?

My point is this: our country allows everyone the right to not only hold a personal belief but to express that belief publicly. And unfortunately, in 2023, even stating simple facts can be frowned upon by liberals pushing an agenda. Yet free speech, no matter how unpopular, is integral to our founding as a nation and to a modern society based on liberty.

How telling it is, then, that one of my former favorite haunts online—TreeHugger.com—around 17 Sept 2023, went full draconian tyrant mode by eliminating the DISQUS commenting applet, thereby preventing any responses to their nauseatingly boring HGTV-lite articles that have become de rigueur since management axed Sami Grover, Lloyd Alter, and other editors from their payroll. The occasional non-milquetoast article, which could elicit comments of praise, inquiry, or ridicule, has proved to be too difficult a job for the website’s new taskmasters to police, and so they decided it would be easier to manage controversy simply by turning off all comments.

Against this backdrop, TreeHugger.com has been publishing what can only be described as boring-as-hell articles about gardening aesthetics, home decor, and other mind-numbingly dull topics. The benefit of Lloyd Alter and Sami Grover, among others, was that they did try their level best to bring cutting-edge news about advances in (shudder!) climate resiliency, energy efficiency, construction, and technology. It was entertaining, if nothing else, being able to ask legitimate questions about the costs associated with such technological advances, if for no other reason than to spar against ideologues who can’t see that the emperor has no clothes.

Such discourse, however, no longer exists. Free speech was too great a threat to TreeHugger.com’s bourgeoisie overlords because—heaven help them—someone might be offended by what Joe Q. Public might write in the comment section, especially if it didn’t remain lockstep with the progressive narrative heading up the editorial board. Who knows, they might be RFK Jr. operatives undermining the progressive narrative, and we can’t have that, can we?

Well, to state the obvious, anyone who knows anything about how the internet works could have foretold what would happen to TreeHugger.com’s readership as the last excuse for even visiting the website at all evaporated in their misguided attempt to improve the “readership experience.” And now that a new month is here, we have proof of the rats leaving the sinking ship in droves.

This past weekend, I wanted to check the website’s analytics as they reflect web traffic, but as I don’t have a subscription or ownership of the website, I had to skip Google Analytics and rely instead on an alternative, SimilarWeb. You can find the website traffic breakdown here.

What stands out for me from the information provided is this: traffic overall is down nearly 11%, and the average site length visit is just 51 seconds. More than three-quarters of all readers (76%) don’t even read past the home page before leaving the website, too. Further sleuthing reveals over the last three months, their global ranking online has decreased from #30,820 to #32,992 (translation: lower is better; thus, their “blogsite” stock valuation has decreased.) The abandonment continues unabated, but I suspect none of that matters to Dotdash Meredith, the parent company of TreeHugger.com, who in turn is part of IAC, Inc. As long as young people continue to click through just enough to pay the bills and do so without questioning the narratives pushed, then all is well.

Except it’s not. As we’ve seen over recent months, Bud Light, Target, and Disney all have gone full progressive mode with the sexual grooming of children and suffered mightily for their hubris. Bud Light lost $40 billion in market value and suffered a 27% decline in market capitalization, allowing Modelo to take its #1 spot. Target warned investors their quarterly losses were down over $4 billion exclusively because of the pushback against Rainbow Gestapo-inspired childwear. Disney continues to bleed dollars with every new woke remake of popular animated movies, and the belief that Bob Iger’s return would boost sagging revenue has evaporated more quickly than a drop of sweat falling from the brow of a Phoenician in July.

The common thread throughout all of these examples is that the more woke they’ve become—the less free they “allow” us as consumers to express our objections to progressive communism—the more their bottom line suffers.

IAC Inc. reported around August 22nd that they expect earnings to decline 17.4% per year for the next three years. One has to wonder how much more cash they can bleed before realizing the alienation of their customer base is not the pathway to profitability or sustainability.

Personally, the question is a rhetorical one, in my opinion. There are much bigger fiscal fish to fry that our elected leaders continue to ignore addressing—the Russia-Ukraine war, inflation, and immigration control, to name but three—but TreeHugger.com’s demonstrable decline is a case study in failure that the woke, anti-free speech brigade earned all on their own.

 

 

 

The post “Our Country Allows Everyone the Right to Not Only Hold a Personal Belief but to Express That Belief Publicly” appeared first on Granite Grok.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the candidate for President of the United States, initially impressed me after hearing him speak last spring in Alton. I wrote a couple of favorable articles about him here on the ‘Grok and in the [Laconia Daily] Sun. Since then, the candidate has made some very questionable pronouncements concerning Israel.

On the Hannity program on Fox News the other night, Vivek truly and for certain outed himself as an anti-Semitic trying to make a very Leftist-like attempt to equate the bloody Hamas attack on Israel in some kind of justifiable quid-pro-quo view to we voters.

Make no mistake, Hamas is a barbaric terrorist organization dedicated not only to the destruction of Israel but to the killing of all Jews. For that matter, Hamas, like the rest of Islam (that is, all of Islam), wants all nonbelievers either converted to Islam or to be killed. That includes all Americans whom they view as their biggest impediment to their destruction of the Jewish State. They spend hundreds of millions here to buy politicians, favorable media, and support from the ignorant and anti-Semitic among us.

As for Vivek now, who bends over backward to sound very Trump-like, I urge readers to look no further than to the real thing, Donald Trump. President Trump was the best President in my lifetime. He promised to make America Great again and did so in spite of every form of opposition. The same Hamas terrorist excusers are some of the most hateful anti-Trump Leftists and RINOs. They, too, have outed themselves trying to excuse terror while condemning Israel.

Wake up America! The enemy to Western Christian civilization is all of those who excuse barbarism, inhumanity, intolerance, and injustice. MAGA support and vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States.

P.S.  Support Israel’s right to exist, too.

 

Reminder: Endorsements by Grok authors are their own and not an endorsement by GraniteGrok.com 

The post Outing Oneself appeared first on Granite Grok.

The UPI headline reads, “New Zealand’s conservative National Party trounces Labor; Luxon will be new PM.” What does it mean? The years of abuse by the political Left in NZ have taken a toll, and just enough voters would like a change in direction.

For how long? Well, voters are a lot like bees, Pooh Bear. You can never tell. But New Zealand’s progressive Labor government was famous for not letting the so-called pandemic crisis go to waste. Their earlier gun-grabbing went so well that they paired their Western-style democracy up with a bit of despotism and took that for a spin on the dance floor.

I speak often about political yahoos scratching their totalitarian itch. New Zealand’s elites got zealous and broke it open, bleeding restrictions upon everyone. They even used Santa to get kids to mask up and line up for COVID jabs. Let’s see if you were naughty or once – papers, please. (Why does she sound like Sir Alec Guinness in “Hitler: The Last Ten Days”?)

It was ugly and unpleasant and evidence that the Left is not about helping the disadvantaged. It is about using them to strangle liberty. And just enough voters took notice.

 

Oct. 14 (UPI) — New Zealand’s conservative National Party soundly defeated the ruling Labor Party in elections held Saturday, paving the way for Christopher Luxon to replace Chris Hipkins as prime minister.

Hipkins conceded defeat after results came in showing the National Party scoring historic gains even across some of the most reliable of Labor districts in the country.

With 99% of the vote counted, the National Party had garnered 39% of the vote, while Labor managed only 27% after getting 50% in the previous election. The Green Party, meanwhile, nabbed 11% and the small-government, libertarian ACT Party collected 9%. The National Party will forge a  with the ACT Party, which between them total 61 seats, the barest possible margin to govern in New Zealand.

Lessons learned on the Left. Not a damn one.

“The result tonight is not one that any of us wanted. But I want you to be proud of what we achieved over the last six years, because despite governing through some of the biggest challenges our country has ever faced, we kept New Zealand moving forward,” Hipkins said in his concession speech.

If you are not familiar with Hipkins, he’s the jackass who promised the government would look for those (as in hunt down) who were not vaccinated (to jab them) and then, later – with what passes for a straight face – insisted there was no compulsory COVID vaccination.

And he’s proud of what they achieved. Which means he’d do it again.

 

HT | Legal Insurrection

The post New Zealanders Kick a Few Ruling Class COVID Tyrants to the Curb appeared first on Granite Grok.

Americans love their lawns. Some clean-looking lawns resemble golf courses in the area and may be mowed more frequently than required, a sort of suburban therapy. Cows, cars, and tennis courts are among the targets of climate change agitators.

Are lawns and lawnmowers next? Will shaving that gargantuan swath of grass cause the planet to warm?

NASA’s Spaced-Out View of Lawns NASA reported back in 2005 that there are “conservatively” three times more acreage of lawns in the nation than irrigated corn. The estimate determined that about 49,000 square miles of US land is mowed for aesthetics. A more recent report from Princeton in 2020 estimates that the area is now over 40 million acres (or more than 62,500 square miles).* As for climate impact, NASA’s website reports anthropomorphic lawnmowing activities are not harmful but beneficial:

“[Researcher Cristina] Milesi says that a well-watered and fertilized lawn is a carbon sink [a place that absorbs more carbon than it releases]. If people recycle the grass clippings, leaving them to decompose on the lawn, the U.S. lawn area could store up to 16.7 teragrams of carbon each year. That’s equivalent to about 37 billion pounds — the weight of about 147,000 blue whales. The fact that recycling the clippings on the lawn would be so productive is a little surprising, according to Milesi … After all, decomposing grass is a source of carbon, with bacterial activity releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The growth boost provided by the recycling of nitrogen from the decomposing grass clippings more than makes up for the carbon being released.”

This analysis seems to be a tad skewed. NASA measures the weight of carbon dioxide saved in blue whales, but its bizarre calculus ignores the environmental impact of the industrial inputs required to create lawns and grass clippings: gasoline, lawnmower and leaf blower manufacturing, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and the pollution created by transporting clippings. These are “externalized costs” overlooked by NASA in its one-lens, carbon-centric obsession.

Lawn Facts NASA Skipped Expanding lawn analysis beyond NASA’s narrow carbon-only assessment, the impact of an estimated 800 million gallons of gasoline burned in residential mowers (without pollution-control technologies such as catalytic converters) should be considered: How much energy and carcinogens are released thereby? It is reckoned that at least 17 million gallons of refined gasoline are spilled on the ground each year, filling lawnmower tanks – far more than the 11 million gallons of crude spilled by the Exxon Valdez disaster. Lawns are a sink for gasoline as well as carbon: not very nurturing to microbes. Americans spend billions of dollars on their eye-pleasing lawns, but unseen are the poisons dumped onto grass. Fertilizers cause phosphorous runoff, pollute wells and waterways, and feed algal blooms. Pesticides and herbicides laced with carcinogens kill bees, soil microbes, and other life. Did NASA calculate whether these toxins compromise carbon sinkage? Dead soil does not sequester carbon.

Americans buy some 6 million new lawnmowers annually, including popular “zero-turn” mowers that are anything but net zero. Battery-powered and electric mowers have gained in popularity, but their production comes with a cost. Did NASA consider that? About two million leaf blowers are purchased yearly, an estimated 150 million to be used in America. Leaf blowers are extremely inefficient. A four-stroke lawnmower’s emissions running for one hour are equivalent to an average car traveling 500 miles or running 11 car engines for the same duration.

‘Renewables’ Pollute

These same oversights bedevil climate warrior assessments of electric vehicles, solar panels, and industrial agriculture. The astronomical mining and fossil fuel impacts of EVs (including all the fancy gadgets like backup cameras) are simply omitted when only their supposed carbon-sparing benefits are extolled. Most Chinese-manufactured solar panels require coal burning and extensive mining in their creation. If such costs (along with disposal) were accurately and honestly weighed, these technologies would turn out to be far from “net zero.” All spew toxic chemicals into the air, soil, and water. They are not salvific as advertised but accelerate environmental degradation.

Industrial agriculture destroys soils with chemicals and treats cows horrifically. These abuses are used to target not the anthropomorphic activities of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feed Operations or factory farms) but their innocent cud-chewing victims. Rotationally grazed cows feed soils depleted and poisoned by tilling (or lawnmowing), creating the most powerful carbon sink possible while rebuilding eroded lands with manure. No human technology can rival this miraculous soil-nurturing: The resulting explosion of bacteria devours far more methane than cows emit. Healthy, regenerated soils sequester exponentially more carbon dioxide than forests, so “rewilding” is a comparative farce, often reducing net carbon sequestration to sell carbon credit indulgences to corporate schemers while eliminating vital farmlands.

Renewable energy manufacturing is a fraud that creates trillions of dollars in profits for corporations who steer captured government agencies like NASA. Grass blades are God’s renewable energy, using photosynthesis to capture energy and carbon. Grazing cows absorb this energy, stimulate growth (without gasoline spillage), produce manure that nurtures soils, and convert that energy into steaks for dinner. Yet it is cows that are cruelly scapegoated.

No Climate Change Integrity

Americans may want to do their own environmental calculus rather than be distracted by social justice shenanigans that deliberately obscure the true environmental costs of gadgets and toxic foods peddled as environmentally beneficial. The same culprits who sold Americans on the large, consolidated dairies and industrial farms that destroy the planet are now claiming that only chemical-saturated GMO soils can feed the world (while killing the soil).

Food-producing, soil-building bovines are routinely slandered by the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and PETA, which claim humanity cannot reduce climate change without cutting meat consumption.

India reveres cows – slaughtering a cow is punishable by death in some districts. America worships its lawns (and ritualistic gas-spilling), much as it idolizes anthropomorphic non-renewable technologies above God’s provision of cows on grass. NASA is lost in outer space on climate analysis. Americans should keep their eyes on the ground: Climate change activists who mow their lawns with fossil fuels had best examine the cow-bashing logs in their own eyes.

 

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

The post NASA’s Climate Change Metrics Need Fixing appeared first on Granite Grok.

They’re flying so thick and fast it is amazing.

Take heart – there will be both a Wednesday and Friday Edition.  Last week’s Friday Edition.  Also please see my latest Israel-related installment, which is a rich post with memes, as well as links, info, and commentary.

Remember, ridicule and mockery are effective weapons:

1. Ridicule cannot easily be fought
2. Ridicule makes the enemy angry, and angry people make mistakes
3. For those in the “squishy middle” a Thought Splinter (and Part II and Part III and Part IV) can often be hidden inside humor.

 

Now, let the mockery and mayhem begin.

 

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

 

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And this is by design.

 

 

 

When people truly understand that there are different standards of the law by dint of who you are and with whom you associate, society is doomed.

 

 

 

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PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA

 

 

 

“First Saturday, then Sunday”.  First the Jews, then the Christians.  If you think that all Islamic terror and wars stop if, somehow, Islam wipes out Israel – you are mistaken.

Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians

Hamas Chief Emphasizes That Israel is Only the First Target (jihadwatch.org)

They’re coming here already:

659 known or suspected terrorists caught at the border in 2023, the most ever (jihadwatch.org)

With Democrats wanting at least a million more.

 

 

And like I said in my last Israel-focused post, they’re out in force in New York City; college and university campuses swarm with them and their sympathizers.  Antifa is their ally and they have already worked / trained together.

Take this example of Islamic treatment of Christians – no Jews involved:

Today in History: Muslims Worship Allah Atop 2,400 Decapitated Christian Heads (raymondibrahim.com)

You may not like Israel.  Or Jews.  But if you think that the feeding frenzy will stop there, you’re sadly mistaken.

 

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Pick of the post:

 

 

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Palate Cleansers:

 

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Come back Wednesday for another edition.  Same Meme Time.  Same Meme channel.

 

The post MONDAY MEMES appeared first on Granite Grok.

One of the Political Left’s cultural accomplishments, and they are so very proud of this, is how they’ve managed to cling to their self-proclaimed label as the party of women while tearing women down every chance they get.

An old story making a fresh run at the hypocrisy is Soren Stark-Chessa. Last year, he was 206th in the boys competition. This year, the shmale finished 5th in the girl’s competition. All he had to do was say he was one of them.

 

The latest case takes place at Maine Coast Waldorf High School. Last year, sophomore Soren Stark-Chessa ranked 172nd among male runners in the 5k division in the state.

Stark-Chessa “transitioned.” Now, he is ranked 4th in the female division.

Outrage exploded when he competed against females at the Maine XC Festival of Champions.

Stark-Chessa placed 5th.

 

The “girls still lucked out. Stark-Chessa is such a B-team male track athlete that there are a small number of female superstars who can still outrun him.

 

“The only reason that this boy did not win the meet on Saturday is because Greene has some of the strongest female athletes in the nation. The first two girls who finished the race on Saturday…the first-place winner ranks number 8th in the country and the second-place winner ranks number 15th in the country. If it wasn’t for these top-ranked girls who are faster than most girls in the whole United States, this boy would have won the entire girls’ cross-country meet,” Collins said.

 

Translation: To the boys in Maine who were better at it than Stark-Chessa in the male division but not good enough to make the top 100, you might be a state champion. You just need to race against girls.

 

 

HT | Legal Insurrection

The post Go From a 172nd Ranked Runner to 4th in the State With This One Crazy Trick! appeared first on Granite Grok.