By Stefan Gleason, Money Metals News Service Assessing a state sales tax on the purchase of gold and silver is becoming an outmoded, indeed outrageous, practice – but a small number of U.S. states still engage in it. Several of... Tom Bowler

It used to be a weekend event in Chicago where we counted the dead and wounded from gun shootings. Now it can be any day of the week, and it might be Philadelphia, Atlanta, or a small town like Naples, Maine.

No city or town in America is immune to gun violence from some deranged individual with their agenda. The only thing guaranteed is the Right will call for stricter use of the laws already on the books, and Liberal District Attorneys will call a press conference to plead for more gun laws. Both are feeble demands, but the call for gun control to end these random, senseless shootings is worse than feeble.

The claims are lazy. Gun controls have minimal impact on these ridiculous losses of life, for when the dust settles, and the facts come out, most of the weapons used in these shootings were obtained illegally. The strictest gun laws in the country will not keep a person hell-bent on injuring and killing people from accomplishing their objective.

Look at the details of the shooting incident in Philadelphia during the holiday weekend. First, people were appalled that the event happened during the 4th of July celebration. Holidays or days of the week mean nothing to these killers. When they snap, they snap, period. The randomness of the shooting is most alarming to me. In the neighborhood security video, we see the man in the video raise the AR-15 and begin shooting round after round into a parked vehicle.

When he finished shooting, five innocent people were killed and two injured. The shooter was soon arrested without incident. Officers arrested Carriker during a chase on foot, and he had an AR-style rifle, a 9 mm handgun, a scanner that tracks emergency response radio traffic, and was wearing a bulletproof vest and ski mask, authorities said.

Authorities are also investigating a since-deleted social media page believed to belong to the accused gunman, 40-year-old Kimbrady Carriker, that includes a series of posts about guns, the Second Amendment, and the “loss of freedoms,” according to a law enforcement source. Initial reports from neighbors of Carriker indicate a growing rage, and many felt he was prone to performing the violent act he acted out on Monday night. This lack of action, not gun control, is the problem. People saw the person’s personality change but did nothing about it. His posts on social media showed he was a ticking time bomb; on Monday, the fuse was lit, and the carnage was left in his wake.

Carriker had no previous record, but many of the shooters recently have had multiple incidents where they were not incarcerated but let back into society to repeat their crimes. These DAs can continue to call for new laws, but until they enforce those on the books, they should skip the press conference and do their jobs.

 

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Attorney and farmer John Klar has released a book with Vermont’s Chelsea Green Publishing titled Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival.

Farmer, writer, and food rights activist Joel Salatin writes in the Foreword to Small Farm Republic:

“[Klar] dares Republicans to get off their chemical industrial anti-health soil-degrading train and embrace a bottom-up entrepreneurial solution: small farms serving local food needs. This book is prescient and timely. “Food liberty is necessary for any liberty at all.” Amen, John Klar. Conservatives who embrace liberty and freedom can get on the right side of national health and food/farm integrity by embracing this prophetic treatise. ”

Chelsea Green Publishing writes:

“John Klar offers an alternative that puts small farmers, regenerative agriculture, and personal liberty at the center of an environmental revival.”

Klar calls for a nonpartisan focus on chemical pollution over greenhouse gasses; small farms over globalist plans to dominate food production; and improved American food quality and security over increased dependence on foreign food. Many of the policy proposals advanced in his book were part of Klar’s political platform in prior elections.

Small Farm Republic is available at Amazon, where it ranks as #1 in Agriculture & Food Policy, and at Chelsea Green Publishing (chelseagreen.com). Klar’s substack newsletter and podcast is johnklar.substack.com.

 

Editors Note: John Klar will be one of the regular contributors to our new venture in Vermont.

The post Brookfield Author John Klar Releases New Farming Book appeared first on Granite Grok.

The modern techniques used by the U.S. Democrat Party to install its politicians have been gradually developed since the 2000 election, which saw Al Gore lose to George Bush II on technicalities in Florida.

Many on the U.S. political left cried fraud, and there likely was some involved.

Many US Republicans have been complicit or accepting of DNC-led fraud because they remember 2000 and are willing to play political ball and give a victory here. Unfortunately for them, the US Democrat Party has metastasized into a group of totalitarians, fascists, communists, and radical socialists hell-bent on the total destruction of the USA so that they can rebuild it in their own image as a new country.

Step One of the Playbook is to smear all political opponents in the most rude and base ways possible so that US citizens do not bother to read or hear anything that the opposing politicians say. The object is to get U.S. citizens to simply ignore all candidates and vote Democrat. RFK, for example, is smeared as an anti-vax, anti-science conspiracy theorist. What does that even mean? Most U.S. Democrat Party followers would not be able to really tell you.

Trump is smeared as a far-right, homophobic, racist, fascist, Nazi, white supremacist. Despite none of these claims actually being true, they have been drumbeat for so many years that most people do not bother to even question them. The ridiculousness of the smears makes it difficult to actually produce an intelligent and logical response– they are that dumbfounding. Have you noticed that according to leftist news media sources, there are no center-right candidates in the US political field? These leftist legacy media folks have lost all credibility in the eyes of any intelligent, honest citizen.

The Second Step of the DNC’s Election Fraud Playbook involved polling and disinformation. The Democrat Party, through its institutionalized media outlets like The Atlantic, Politico, and a slew of polling institutions, puts out numbers that it has allegedly drawn from legitimate polls, which show its politicians as favored or within reach of winning. In reality, most DNC politicians have no chance of winning their elections. Almost all of them require some sort of ballot fraud.

Step Three of the DNC’s Election Fraud Playbook (EFP) involves Secretaries of State and Governors. These individuals are either Democrat Party politicians themselves or under threat of death to follow the Democrat agenda (like the Georgia governor, whose staffer was killed in 2020 to send a message to him to cooperate or else). These people in state office wield their power to force election-related policies that will set up later ballot fraud. They hire and train election workers. They work in conjunction with Big Tech NGOs, like Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech & Civic Life (CTCL) and other organizations, to subliminally show poll workers how to throw the election. Of course, Alphabet and Meta, the parent companies of Google and Facebook, do their fair share in manipulating peoples’ information streams on their smartphones so that they understand their role in the election fraud strategy.

Step Four of the EFP is election day itself. On this day, many techniques are used to prevent Republicans from voting. Different states use different methods, and these methods constantly develop in order to circumvent Republican and Independent efforts to maintain election integrity. Maricopa County in Arizona, for example, sabotaged ballot readers in Republican majority precincts, which resulted in long lines and ballots up for adjudication (see next step). In California, for the Gavin Newsom recall election against Larry Elder, many residents reported that their vote had already been cast somewhere else when they hadn’t yet voted. This is another popular technique– the ghost vote. Democrat-led voting precincts take all measures possible to remove Republicans and Independents from counting rooms and voting centers, citing voter intimidation or some other nonsense.

Step Five is the ballot adjudication. This works especially well for mail-in ballots, which have drastically increased in usage after COVID. Most Republican-led legislatures are too distracted or too complicit to effectively walk back COVID measures, and most states are maintaining high volumes of mail-in ballots. These must all be opened by hand and can be easily set aside for adjudication. When a ballot is damaged or marked incorrectly (according to the poll worker or the counting machine), it must be adjudicated.

In 2020, adjudication rates skyrocketed. This process is usually conducted in a secret location that the public and media cannot oversee. In Pennsylvania, the adjudication process takes up to seven to ten days after the election, which gives the PA Democrat Party, one of the most corrupt in the country, plenty of time to manufacture however many votes it needs and prevent any opposition. This is also a time when additional ballots can be printed and appeared.

In 2024, there is an additional step being prepared that comes even before Step One. This is a Step Zero. It involves all of the newly arrived illegal immigrants from the Biden junta’s first few years in office. All of these people have been trafficked from places all over the world through sophisticated networks of racist NGOs intent on packing the USA with Africans, Asians, and anyone they can find who isn’t Caucasian. The mission is to prepare for a planned Caucasian ethnic cleansing that is being perpetrated in academic institutions in California, New York, Arizona, and Chicago. The plan is to have illegal immigrants staff the election.

These newly minted U.S. citizens, many of whom have court dates over the next seven years, have been issued smartphones by the U.S. government with Apple and Google operating systems. They are the perfect pawns for the U.S. Democrat Party. Since they are not even U.S. citizens yet, they can be abused extralegally, and the U.S. standing laws don’t neatly apply to them as they would to longstanding citizens. These illegal immigrants already have loose morals and know that they are in the country potentially illegally. They mostly all have very fluid identities and a fluid sense of how the world works. They can be manipulated through their smartphones via signals intelligence warfare techniques very easily. They are all beholden to the Biden junta and the U.S. Democrat Party because those people enabled their access to the USA and helped them to set up their lives here. Additionally, many of them have conflicted identities and relationships with the countries where they came from, many of which are outspoken critics or outright geopolitical enemies of the USA.

The 2024 election may be the most fraudulent yet. The Biden junta will try to stay in power by any means necessary. They may attempt to assassinate RFK Jr, hoping that US citizens will sheepishly allow another Kennedy politician to be killed for the power and profit of the globalist-corporatists and the military-industrial complex. They will continue to attempt to jail Trump, and continued programming from legacy media channels is their rationale behind promoting basically any ridiculous charge they can concoct.

The charge doesn’t matter– what matters is that the U.S. Democrat Party can encourage a handful of loud, obnoxious activists to show up and make a scene so that it seems there is some consensus in support of the U.S. Democrat agenda (which is not one that supports real, true democracy, but seems to subvert it at every level).

 

 

The post The 2024 Election Fraud Playbook, brought to you by the U.S. Democrat Party appeared first on Granite Grok.

White nationalists hung a banner on a highway overpass. When asked to remove it for failing to have a permit, they did. The State, looking for something – I speculate on that more here – charged them with a civil rights violation that I concluded would fail miserably. It did.

Not only did the State fail to make a compelling civil rights case, but it also failed to secure a trespassing charge, as the defendant’s motion to dismiss was granted.

You can wade through the details of the full decision here. There are some interesting points about trespassing, the overbreadth doctrine, how the State chose to charge the defendants, and how the judge wrangled the related law and statute.

At the end of the day, this might be the most crucial part of the decision (IMO).

 

The State’s construction does not stop at messages motivated by race. Presumably, the State could bring a civil action against a person whose presence on public property is motivated by any other protected characteristic. For example, the State could, under this theory, bring a civil action against a person who walks on public sidewalks, knocking on doors to spread the message of their religion. The State could likewise regulate a person who drives a car on a public highway to a job working with people with disabilities. The State could prohibit abortion protests on the Statehouse lawn. “Such a law that confers on police a virtually unrestrained power to arrest and charge persons with a violation of the resolution is unconstitutional because the opportunity for abuse, especially where a statute has received a virtually open-ended interpretation, is self-evident.” (citations removed).

 

How the State of New Hampshire tried to invoke a violation of the Civil Rights Act opened the door to wide-ranging abuses of power, which was a point from my remarks on this case in early June.

 

Disregarding how offensive we may find white nationalists, neo-nazis, anti-semites, BLM, Antifa, or anyone else willing to use racism, intimidation, or violence to advance an agenda in the absence of incitement (an expression directing immediate acts of violence – a challenging standard to meet), there’s no there there.

You can’t have a civil rights law that infringes on the First Amendment, nor can you pretend it capable of such a thing when the legislature never intended it.* What are you after, and why do you think you can get it? I’m opposed to anti-semitism and race-hating white purity movements but not at the expense of free speech.

Is this some veiled effort to get a shadow of a penumbra of a hate-speech ruling squeezed out of 354B:1, and if so, to what end?

 

I think this was a fishing expedition searching for court precedent that would allow the State to use civil rights law to pick and choose opportunities to chill the right to free speech. “[a] virtually unrestrained power to arrest and charge persons with a violation of the resolution is unconstitutional because the opportunity for abuse, especially where a statute has received a virtually open-ended interpretation…”

It is fair to ask why.

 

 

The post NH AG’s Civil Rights Case Against White Nationalist Group NSC-131 – Dismissed appeared first on Granite Grok.

You might have heard that in Croydon, our superintendent admitted, on two separate occasions, in public, that even for $1 million per student per year, he wouldn’t be able to teach the two dozen kids in the Croydon Village School (CVS) to read.

What you probably haven’t heard (unless you were at my talk at PorcFest this year) is that at a recent school board meeting, the principal of CVS admitted that ‘we don’t really know how to teach kids to read.’

What you definitely should hear is the podcast Sold a Story, which explains how one publisher, and a few academics, made a pile of dough (enough that one of the academics drives a Maserati), pushing a theory of reading that is contradicted by basic facts, known for decades, about how brains process the written word.

(It’s also contradicted by common sense, although teachers enamored with the approach don’t seem to recognize that. As you listen to the description of the ‘reading recovery’ method, ask yourself how you might, when reading a book on biology, be able to guess a word you’ve never seen before — like ribosome or mitochondrion, or chirality — from context, without being able to sound it out. Or how you might, when reading a book on history, be able to guess the name of a city or country, or historical figure that you’ve never heard of. And so on.  The very idea boggles the mind.)

There is a reasonable chance that this approach is being used in your local schools, as it is in Croydon. (At least one in four schools across the country uses it.) You might want to check with your school board.

As I listened, I couldn’t help thinking about all the parents in Croydon who were terrified at the prospect that privately-run micro-schools might ‘make a profit off the children.’

Oh, the irony.

 

The post Trust the Experts appeared first on Granite Grok.

On Monday, James O’Keefe announced a court win for a case started while he was still running Project Veritas. Veritas challenged Oregon’s Laws regarding recording people in public, and the 9th Circuit Court agreed with O’Keefe and Veritas.

 

Today, on the eve of our Country’s birthday, I received incredible news on the result of a lawsuit that I filed almost 3 years ago: Oregon State recording laws have been overturned! That’s right – I was able to change a state law that disallowed my investigative journalists to covertly record their subjects while doing our reporting.

 

The opinion notes that,

 

“We conclude that Oregon’s law is a content-based restriction that violates the First Amendment right to free speech and is therefore invalid on its face.”

“Oregon does not have a compelling interest in protecting individuals’ conversational privacy from other individuals’ protected speech in places open to the public, even if that protected speech consists of creating audio or visual recordings of other people.

 

New Hampshire law reads like stereo instructions to me, but the gist of it is that you need consent from both parties to record unless it is an obvious public place or recording equipment is visible and there to record others. That means you can’t claim you were recorded without consent if you are caught on a microphone at an event where recording is obviously taking place.

There is a boatload of exemptions for state and law enforcement to surveil you without permission, and there’s no requirement anywhere in public where you have no expectation of privacy. But the dual consent law exists and likely impacts the ability of journalists to get details that might be held back in the presence of a visible recording device.

This may be good or bad, depending on your opinion. It is my practice to speak as if I am always being recorded. This solves two problems. First, no open-mic gaffes because your speech sis yours and it is deliberate, and second, there is no opportunity for inconsistency in your principles.

If I’m being me in all cases instead of pretending to be something I’m not, then there is no oops moment, not that this matters in the context of New Hampshire Law. The statute is indifferent to truth or falsehood; it is the act of recording that is regulated. And in Oregon, they are going to have to revisit it, thanks to James O’Keefe.

 

The post O’Keefe Gets Oregon’s Recording Laws Overturned – Reminded me of NH, a Bit … appeared first on Granite Grok.

Dear Representatives: After reviewing the House Education Committee discussion on student mental health during a work session on June 28, 2023, I wanted to add some commentary.

First, let me start by saying that I consider the mental health of children to be extremely important. But I think we should all ask ourselves, when did offering mental health assessments and services become a part of public education?

Over the past few years, many of us could see that treating mental health has become more prominent in how public education is delivered in our communities. But we’ve also seen many problems too. When public education shifts to mental health services, what does that mean for students? Does this improve the mental health of those who need services? What about students who do not need these services? Does their quality of education improve or decline? Social and Emotional Learning is directed at all students, not just the children who need mental health treatment.

Many schools have added SEL classes, while we continually hear how time in the core academic subjects has been reduced.

I think we have to be honest with ourselves and admit that this extra challenge to public schools could result in a decline in academic outcomes. You can’t shift focus away from academics, include mental health classes and curriculum, and expect academic outcomes to improve. A student receiving expert mental health care outside the classroom may be a better solution.

For many children, these services are not needed. SEL is offered to all students, and it is embedded in the curriculum. In addition, teachers have reported SEL data collection on students.

If we are talking about children who need mental health services, why has this become a school-wide agenda for all of the students? Why are they not targeting children who need these services?

Children experiencing depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts need expert care. This cannot be provided by a school counselor, or social worker. They do not have the expert training and education that is required. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that these extremely serious mental health conditions can be fixed using an SEL program. Let’s not pretend that an employee without any advanced education, clinical training, or ability to prescribe medication, can handle these serious mental health problems.

We have school counselors in New Hampshire defying basic ethical guidelines, and sharing mental health data without consent from the students or their parents. We have LEA’s changing mental health permission slips to reflect “counseling” so parents will be fooled into signing them. (See attached file 22:00 – 54:00) We have districts with policies that require school staff to lie to parents about their own children. (JBAB) We have a federal student privacy law (FERPA) that was gutted several years ago so that this sensitive data can be shared without informed consent. And now we are going to hand them the responsibility of servicing their mental health?

This has set up a situation that defies ethical codes of conduct. Outside mental health professionals must follow their ethical guidelines if they are to maintain their license to treat patients. And yet we have school officials in New Hampshire ignoring all of this.

I cannot imagine you going forward with any of this in our public schools. School officials are ignoring ethical guidelines, and the privacy laws either go ignored or counselors defy them. We have school policies that are hostile to parents, and you want to now task school personnel with mental health treatment and services?

I’d suggest reading some of the ethical guidelines that have been developed for mental health professionals who treat children. They are extremely supportive of parental involvement, and fully support informed consent when sharing sensitive mental health data. This is not the current practice in our New Hampshire Schools, and we have the evidence to prove it.

You should not task a school district with assessing, and treating the mental health of children without strict ethical boundaries in place. You should not task a school district with treating the mental health of students using personnel who lack the education and clinical training that is needed. Would you ask the school nurse to diagnose and treat a student’s cancer? Of course not. That cancer would be diagnosed and treated by a cancer specialist outside the school system. The school would only be there to follow the doctor’s medical advice.

What is the role of a school counselor when offering direct services to students? What ability do they have to assess or treat a child’s mental health? This is a discussion that one would think would take place in a different committee like Health and Human Services. What are the laws in place that allow parents to hold counselors accountable for poor treatment?

In this example, a student attempted suicide at school after counselors there helped her transition from a girl to a boy. All of this was kept from the parents because the parents were Christian. The school even sent her in a police car to the hospital where she was kept with minimum contact from her parents.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuI5pRjrQPB/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

A few months ago I received a frantic message from a father whose son was given a mental health evaluation after he scraped his friend with a plastic knife in the lunchroom. I’ve received phone calls from parents whose children were counseled at school without their knowledge or consent; and yet ESSA requires parental consent when assessing or servicing a student for their mental health.

A licensed mental health provider in private practice would risk losing their license if they practiced in the manner we are seeing in our public schools.

This push to turn public schools into mental health clinics was done without any consideration for ethics or privacy protections. If I take my child to a private practice, I do not have to worry about information shared with colleagues in the school or sensitive data that can be shared without my knowledge or consent. The privacy of the patient is a priority.

It is shocking to hear these kinds of discussions in the House or Senate Education Committees. Instead of placing this new burden on public schools, these services can still be provided to children who need them through DHHS. Our public schools are struggling to teach children to read, write, add, and subtract. Now they are going to become experts in mental health treatment?

Did you know that children who are sent to the hospital after attempting suicide must sit with a medical professional while doing their homework on their Chromebook? That’s because some of the instant messages come from bullies telling the child to kill themself. Why don’t you ban Chromebooks? The administrators haven’t removed the digital devices in spite of the cyberbullying that continues.

How about all of the pornographic books that are now available to children through the school library App? That is child sexual abuse, and yet this is now allowed in schools by the administrators that are supposed to administer mental health treatment. You want to trust these people with mental health services for students?

The schools remained closed during COVID in spite of the many mental health professionals that were warning about the emotional toll it was taking on children. I worked with parents all over New Hampshire, literally begging administrators to open the schools. Parents explained the emotional toll this was having on their children. All of this went ignored even though private schools were open.

We’ve already started transforming public schools into mental health clinics, and now we see bad behavior treated as if it’s a mental health condition. This new approach has teachers leaving the profession because there are no consequences for bad behavior. This transformation to mental health services in schools is already having a negative impact on behavior. Representative Ladd touched on some of this during the work session. If leadership in the school is going to fail to administer consequences for behavior, what can you do as legislators? This is a problem that must be addressed at the local level, which is why parents in Keene have been attending meetings and speaking up.

SEL isn’t just a program used in our schools; it’s a mechanism for gathering mental health data on children. Many parents send their children to school to learn the academics, not to become guinea pigs when it comes to their mental health.

We have children sitting in hospitals waiting to get into the one mental health facility that treats children. These kids are desperate for mental health services, but we are going to shift much-needed resources to schools that are proving to be incapable of educating students in the core academic subjects. Not only are many failing at their main task, they are failing to offer these services in an ethical and lawful way.

The post This Extra Challenge to Public Schools Could Result in a Decline in Academic Outcomes appeared first on Granite Grok.

Scottsbluff, Nebraska, approved a 5.2 MW Solar farm meant to “help the city achieve its goal to reduce our carbon footprint and stabilize city costs for the next 25 years.” One hail storm has reduced the life expectancy to four years and revealed another weakness.

Solar is land-intensive, water-intensive, has a large front and rear-end carbon footprint, offshores serious environmental harms (mining and manufacture), isn’t easy to recycle (if at all), underperforms both in output and longevity, and … is subject to imminent failure after a midwest hail storm.

 

Solar panels destroyed by large hail north of Scottsbluff, Nebraska last night. #newx Photo Courtesy Matt Larsen #hail pic.twitter.com/2ND7BHmYlB

— Daryl Orr (@WxWyDaryl) June 27, 2023

 

Rumor has it a typical solar panel is made to withstand common weather events like hail, but not baseball-side hail. The result is millions of dollars wasted on an inefficient energy solution that isn’t green and – in this case – effectively useless.

The facility is insured, and everyone is on-site assessing the damage.

 

[Molly] Brown [executive vice president of corporate strategy for GenPro Energy Solutions] believes it’s important to note that the extreme weather system caused significant damage to clean and fossil energy assets alike. While storms are indiscriminate, Brown said this is the first major damage GenPro has sustained since its first solar farm was installed in Lexington, Nebraska in 2017.

“We do get a lot of hailstorms in the Great Plains region, but typically the roofs get more damage than the solar panels.,” Brown told Renewable Energy World.

 

Fair enough, but solar has a lot of downsides, and this isn’t going to help matters.

 

The post Solar Fail – New 5.2 MW Solar Farm Reduced to Ruin by One Hail Storm appeared first on Granite Grok.