Your Congress created a provision in federal law (2022) for a ministry of truth and then funded it without knowing or caring what that would look like. Now we know. Introducing the Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC).

 

From its perch atop the intelligence community, the FMIC has been designated the U.S. government’s primary authority for analyzing and integrating intelligence on foreign influence, according to a brief entry on ODNI’s website. The FMIC’s acting director, Jeffrey K. Wichman, is a former CIA executive who previously served as chief of analysis for the agency’s Counterintelligence Mission Center.

“Exposing deception in defense of liberty” is the center’s motto, ODNI’s website says. It enjoys access to “all intelligence possessed or created pertaining to FMI [foreign malign information], including election security.”

 

Exposing deception in defense of the approved narratives would be more accurate, but after the collusion with pre-Musk Twitter was exposed, they needed a new safe house. Nestled in the “National Security” bosom. Suckling on partisan progressive narratives as they engage in anti-free-speech domestic counterintelligence.

Not against things like the Steele Dossier, a domestic intelligence scheme blamed on foreigners but fabricated by the Clinton Campaign. Or the Hunter Laptop scheme (Biden campaign), which “intelligence officials” swore was more Russian disinformation. They won’t stand up against that stuff in the name of liberty, but if you post peer-reviewed research questioning vaccine safety or efficacy, you might find yourself on their radar.

Ministry of Truth.

Thanks, Congress. Nice work.

 

The post The US Intelligence Community Has a New Fully Funded Disinformation Office appeared first on Granite Grok.

Frank “Footloose” Staples was wrongfully arrested on charges of “disorderly conduct” for sitting quietly at an executive council meeting in 2021. Last week his nearly two-month trial wrapped up, with Frank found not guilty of the initial “disorderly”, but guilty of the subsequent charge he received after he announced to the audience that he was being arrested in the back of the room. He intends to appeal.

In five days of court spread out over weeks, the state police’s prosecutors alleged Frank was disrupting the meeting and that’s why he was targeted. Frank’s multiple witnesses said he was never disruptive and that the state police were clearly looking to make arrests, as the chairs were zip tied together, multiple paddy wagons were on hand, and dozens of uniformed officers were present.

Ultimately the robed man decided the state had not met its burden of proof on the initial charge, but claimed, confusingly, that the police had probable cause to make the arrest. How can the police have probable cause to make an arrest for which the person is then found not guilty? They can’t. The judge is obviously covering for the police and trying to justify the second “disorderly” count that Frank received when he was taken behind the curtain and arrested, which is when he yelled that he was being arrested and to “shut it down!”.

The trial was very entertaining with Frank blowing up and yelling at the judge and the prosecutors many times. If you’ve seen him in court videos before, you know what to expect. I hope you enjoy this 13-hour trial video:

From single massive mainframe computers (e.g., IBM 360/370, Multics) to networks of “minicomputers” (e.g., Digital Equipment, Wang Labs, Honeywell) to hordes of standalone Personal Computers, and now tablets, smartphones, and “the Cloud,” compute power has gone from expensive and centralized to cheaper and distributed.  No one that I know of has said that this has been a bad thing. Sure, the “compute marketplaces” underwent tremendous upheaval both on an economic scale, death for many companies, and careers impacted (mine certainly was), but compute power went from the “High Priesthoods” to “common man” (or child) availability.

Power distributed is better – not a monoculture but a diverse landscape that caters to all kinds of niches, needs, and applications.

But there are those that, having SEEN all this over the last 70 years, refuse to see the analogy for economics in general from centralized control by Monarchies to the rise of capitalism to the masses.  “Spontaneous Order” is the ordering of the economy not by a very few but by millions upon millions of people simply making economic decisions for their singular self-interest.  For themselves and not at the behest of  “those at the top” that think they know everything needed to make those decisions for others. That’s a mainframe-centric 1950s thinking in the age of smartphones that have more power than back then, but it still exists. So what got me started on this rant, where the Socialists/Communists Totalitarians in the Biden Administration are taking more and more economic control over us?

Markets enable people to coordinate their activities so that individuals can make use of the knowledge of others without having that knowledge themselves. -Randy Holcombe

Unlike the power-hungry bureaucrats (who yearn for such control mainly because they have realized that the Executive Branch has become so expansive they only have to reach down and pick up that Power), Normal people don’t coordinate. They don’t gather in homes, in bars, or at clubs and decide how they will instruct how things will run. Instead, the coordination of a Free Market comes down to one datum: Price Point. While economic totalitarians hate the idea that people can and should choose for themselves, it is the vehicle by which many decisions can be made, the chief of which is “Can I afford it?”. “DO I want to ‘stretch’ to afford it?”, what is the ‘quality’ of that item at that price?” and “Will it perform (product specifications, quality-wise) as I need it to?”.

And each of us can play that role for ourselves as we also are immersed in our “scarcity” atmosphere – what is the tradeoff that I will pay if I purchase this over purchasing this other thing (as few of us can almost totally disregard that issue like Elon Musk can)?

Prof. Don Boudreaux speaks more to this on the famous example of “I, Pencil” – we can’t know enough individually to make all those things that make our standard of living what it is today BECAUSE of Capitalism, its underlying philosophy – and its “distributed knowledge that no top-down committee(s) could ever know:

This truth, alas, is ignored, or insufficiently appreciated, by nearly everyone outside of a tiny band of economists and classical liberals. Yet one glance at everyday reality in modernity makes this truth impossible to deny.

Consider, for example, the device on which you’re now reading my words. Even if you’re a renowned computer scientist or a genius software engineer, you have no idea how to make any of the vast majority of the components of your device. You don’t know how to make the glass that is the screen, the plastic or metal that forms the casing, the tiny lens of the tiny camera that’s in that device, the electricity-generating and transmitting processes without which that device would be useless. Yet each of these myriad different things exist. Each exists because a few individuals have the specific knowledge necessary to produce it, without any of these individuals – or you – having anything close to the knowledge necessary to produce the entire device.

The millions of different individuals each with his or her own specific knowledge must have their productive efforts coordinated with each other if the final results are to be useful – are to have value. This coordination is achieved by each person being guided by market signals – that is, by prices of outputs, prices of inputs, asset values, and profits and losses.

Simply, Price Points.  Everything needed to design, market, sell, and support “a widget” can be summed up in a single data point.

Advocates of industrial policy wish either to censor or to ignore the knowledge conveyed in markets. But the only ‘knowledge’ that they have to replace that which they censor or ignore comes from their hunches and personal preferences. Industrial-policy advocates simply assume that, if they can imagine some economic outcome, then the government can directly allocate resources to achieve that outcome and do so in ways that improve the well-being of ordinary people. The particular imagined outcomes, depending on what they are, might be achievable. What is not achievable, save by pure and highly unlikely chance, is the attainment of these outcomes in ways that are not excessively costly – that is, in ways that improve the well-being of ordinary people.

I bring up the apocryphal story of the Soviet Russian store that only had left shoes without the right shoe pair.  Oops – the story of incomplete knowledge in a command and control economy.

Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi:

The least advantaged in market societies are better off than the least advantaged in nonmarket societies and may be better off than the most well-off in some nonmarket societies. This material fact, we argue, is of moral significance

Oh, that Thomas Sowell quote? Yes, capitalism is concerned with serving others with goods and services that people ACTUALLY WANT.

(H/T: Cafe Hayek)

The post Crowdsourcing vs “Intellectuals” and Totalitarians appeared first on Granite Grok.

This is from someone calling himself Rev. Tony Pierce, an activist for reparations in California:

You know that the numbers should be equivocal to what an acre was back then. We were given 40, OK? We were given 40 acres. You know what that number is. You keep trying to talk about now, yet you research back to slavery and you say nothing about slavery, nothing. So, the equivocal number from the 1860s for 40 acres to today is $200 million for each and every African-American.

The post Quote of the Day appeared first on Granite Grok.

“There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army.”
-Thomas Jefferson, 1789

What does it say about the state of our freedoms that there are now more pencil-pushing, bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines?

Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the IRS, Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.

Add in the Biden Administration’s plans to swell the ranks of the IRS by 87,000 new employees (some of whom will be authorized to use deadly force) and grow the nation’s police forces by 100,000 more cops, and you’ve got a nation in the throes of martial law.

We’re being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun.

Make that hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of federal agents armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorized to make arrests, and trained in military tactics has nearly tripled over the past several decades.

As Adam Andrzejewski writes for Forbes, “the federal government has become one never-ending gun show.”

While Americans have to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to own a gun, federal agencies have been placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets and military gear.

For example, the IRS has stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition in recent years, including 621 shotguns, 539 long-barrel rifles and 15 submachine guns.

The Veterans Administration purchased 11 million rounds of ammunition (equivalent to 2,800 rounds for each of their officers), along with camouflage uniforms, riot helmets and shields, specialized image enhancement devices and tactical lighting.

The Department of Health and Human Services acquired 4 million rounds of ammunition, in addition to 1,300 guns, including five submachine guns and 189 automatic firearms for its Office of Inspector General.

According to an in-depth report on “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” the Social Security Administration secured 800,000 rounds of ammunition for their special agents, as well as armor and guns.

The Environmental Protection Agency owns 600 guns. The Smithsonian now employs 620-armed “special agents.”

Even agencies such as Amtrak and NASA have their own SWAT teams.

Ask yourselves: why are government agencies being turned into military outposts?

What’s with the buildup of SWAT teams within non-security-related federal agencies? Even the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Education Department have their own SWAT teams. Most of those officers are under the command of either the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Justice.

Why does the Department of Agriculture need .40 caliber semiautomatic submachine guns and hollow point bullets? For that matter, why do its agents need ballistic vests and body armor?

For that matter, why do IRS agents need AR-15 rifles?

Why do local police need armored personnel carriers with gun ports, compact submachine guns with 30-round magazines, precision battlefield sniper rifles, and military-grade assault-style rifles and carbines?

Why is the federal government distributing obscene amounts of military equipment, weapons and ammunition to police departments around the country?

Why is the military partnering with local police to conduct training drills around the country? And what exactly are they training for? The public has been disallowed from obtaining any information about the purpose of these realistic urban training drills, other than that they might be loud and to not be alarmed.

We should be alarmed.

As James Madison warned, “We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

Unfortunately, we’re long past the first experiment on our freedoms, and merely taking alarm over this build-up of military might will no longer suffice.

Nothing about this de facto army of bureaucratic, administrative, non-military, paper-pushing, non-traditional law enforcement agencies is necessary for national security.

Moreover, while these weaponized, militarized, civilian forces which are armed with military-style guns, ammunition and equipment; trained in military tactics; and authorized to make arrests and use deadly force—may look and act like the military, they are not the military.

Rather, they are foot soldiers of the police state’s standing army, and they are growing in number at an alarming rate.

This standing army—a.k.a. a national police force—vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution and rule by force is exactly what America’s founders feared, and its danger cannot be overstated or ignored.

This is exactly what martial law looks like—when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force, only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it: Battlefield tactics. Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Intimidation tactics. Brute force. Laws conveniently discarded when it suits the government’s purpose.

The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades, which has gone hand in hand with the militarization of America’s bureaucratic agencies, has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.

Now we find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of administrative, police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military with little to no regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

This quasi-state of martial law has been helped along by government policies and court rulings that have made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed citizens, for law enforcement agencies to seize cash and other valuable private property under the guise of asset forfeiture, for military weapons and tactics to be deployed on American soil, for government agencies to carry out round-the-clock surveillance, for legislatures to render otherwise lawful activities as extremist if they appear to be anti-government, for profit-driven private prisons to lock up greater numbers of Americans, for homes to be raided and searched under the pretext of national security, for American citizens to be labeled terrorists and stripped of their rights merely on the say-so of a government bureaucrat, and for pre-crime tactics to be adopted nationwide that strip Americans of the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and creates a suspect society in which we are all guilty until proven otherwise.

Don’t delude yourself into believing that this thinly-veiled exercise in martial law is anything other than an attempt to bulldoze what remains of the Constitution and reinforce the iron-fisted rule of the police state.

This is no longer about partisan politics or civil unrest or even authoritarian impulses.

This is a turning point.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

If we are to have any hope of salvaging what’s left of our battered freedoms, we’d do well to start by disarming the IRS and the rest of the federal and state bureaucratic agencies, de-militarizing domestic police forces, and dismantling the police state’s standing army.

 

 

 

John Whitehead | The Tenth Amendment Center

The post Disarm the IRS, De-Militarize the Bureaucracy, and Dismantle the Standing Army appeared first on Granite Grok.

Parents and taxpayers are fighting with local school districts to remove sexually explicit, age-inappropriate material from public schools. Why? Because some kids might get the idea that it is okay to force a 6-year-old girl to perform a sex act under a school desk while someone records it.

The progressive push to sexualize young kids with no concept of sexuality is weird enough. They are literally putting ideas into their heads they’d never otherwise have considered.

When you realize the same people are trying to normalize pedophilia, it makes more sense. And it is a hill they are prepared to die on, complete with sexually explicit books (some with cartoon pictures).

And they could care less about the downsides.

 

Heather Gonzales, an older cousin of the 6-year-old girl, told KCBD that the girl’s family noticed a sudden change in her behavior amid indications of distress and complaints of a stomach ache.

The girl reportedly revealed that a boy had exposed himself to her in the school lunch line and that she had also been pulled under a desk and pressured to perform a sex act while another student recorded with a district-issued iPad.

 

The boy or boys are alleged to have assaulted the girl to make her perform the sex act.

 

“My daughter comes home with bruises and rashes if she doesn’t participate in these little boys’ sick games,” another parent at the protest said. “They will punch her, give her Indian burns, they’ll call her names and cuss at her.”

 

But wait, there’s more!

 

Parents who spoke to the Herald during the Monday protest outside the school district’s administrative office claimed the incident with the 6-year-old is not an isolated one.

“There have been multiple moms coming out about stuff that has been happening all year and nothing is being done about it,” one parent said. “It’s hit its peak and that’s why we’re here today, to get answers.”

 

Let’s pretend there is no LGBT influence or grooming at this institution. WTF is going on in these public schools that first or second-graders are not just doing this but getting away with it during class?

 

When the teacher collected the students’ iPads the next day, she noticed one of them had been locked with a password and took the device to the campus administrator. “Inappropriate content was discovered” on the iPad after a tech from the technology department unlocked it, according to the district.

The teacher involved has since been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, the district said.

 

Parents continue to protest and demand answers, but might it be too late? At least one 6-six-year-old girl has been physically and sexually assaulted in an incident involving multiple assailants – in her public school during class. That place where they say the students belong to the schools and teachers, not the parents.

Excellent “parenting” skills you got there.

 

HT | Fox News

The post Porn in Schools Update: Six-Year-Old Girl Forced Under a Desk to Perform a Sex Act (While Another Student Records It) appeared first on Granite Grok.

I commend Rep. Kelley Potenza on her statement regarding Ann Edwards’ judicial nomination. It’s time to rip the bandaid off New Hampshire’s Court Corruption and reveal the extremely ugly truth about what is going on.

Racketeering is a felony. Witness tampering is a felony. Obstruction of Justice and influencing justice are crimes as well. They are not victimless crimes.

Follow this link for just a small portion of what has been uncovered. I have copied in Robert Hansen, a reporter for Davis Vanguard in California, who has recently reported on a similar enterprise in Santa Clara County Court which also involves collusion between judges, attorneys, victims’ rights non-profits, police, media, prosecutors, and political activists.

 

 

 

 

Editor: View all the individual testimonies here:

• Nomination Testimony Part I
• Nomination Testimony Part II

The post Rep. Kelley Potenza’s Statement Regarding Anne Edwards’ Judicial Nomination appeared first on Granite Grok.

Kamala Harris has failed every task assigned to her as Vice President. Border policy, voting rights, abortion, and even water policy have all been placed in her in-basket, and she has yet to respond. Harris was an unpopular AG in California. Her Senate career was a “whatever is popular” approach, often contradicting her AG decisions. Her Presidential run was a failure. She was polarizing in debates, sparring with Gabbard and even calling Biden a racist and sex offender. Harsh words for her future running mate. She dropped out of the race before the first primary vote was cast. With her record, you know the only reason she is VP is color and gender. Her performance has been consistent in the second chair-consistently inadequate.

There have been two problems with her approach to any of her assignments – incompetence and laziness. When she has shown a weakness in grasping the task, she has done little to get up to speed. Instead, she disappears and, at times, complains about her role.

“What can be, unburdened by what has been” is a line she has used in over eight speaking engagements, and still, nobody, including Harris, understands what she is talking about. This is the story of Kamala’s speaking record. She delivers a word salad every opportunity she has to speak and show the world that she is on her game. Her incoherent ramblings only serve to embarrass the VP and supply fodder for late-night shows.

That brings us to the latest assignment for Kamala Harris as the AI czar and will oversee an effort to ensure the technology is developed responsibly. This job will require a knowledge of what AI is, its capabilities, and how it impacts society and security. Sorry, but this is doomed from the start. She is in over her head and best disappear immediately.

AI is not a new technology; many of us have experienced its impact, even if unaware. One of the most common AI functions is a grammar/writing application like Grammarly. As you type, the app is sitting in the background, not only catching spelling and punctuation errors but suggesting better sentence and paragraph structure. It is like having an assistant sitting next to you-an AI assistant. Each day, we hear of new capabilities, and the speed at which AI is progressing has caught the attention of some of the smartest among us. Even Elon Musk has suggested that research and development of AI take a six-month hiatus. The experts fear that AI is taking on a life of its own and man will lose control of the tool. They know there is a potential dark side to the technology that can harm the public at the hands of someone nefarious.

Of course, a technology break would never happen, and there is no way you could get the world to agree to a cease-fire. AI is a speeding train, and there is no stopping it and, quite possibly, no controlling it. So what can our hapless Vice President do to regulate it? Nothing. This assignment appears to be the government putting itself in the way of the free market. The only thing the government should do is protect us from a foreign adversary using AI against America or Americans. She is not the person for this job. Even if there were a miracle and she understood AI, there is no way she could intervene in an adversarial interaction. She is an insignificant speed bump when the country may need a strong firewall. 

The post Let’s Put Kamala In Charge Of AI…Brilliant appeared first on Granite Grok.

California, The Golden State, symbolized the spirit and curiosity of America for decades. California was the American dream. California now exemplifies much of what is wrong with America, and how it is declining could be a harbinger of America’s future.

In new data published by the Census Bureau this week, California’s population shrunk by approximately 113,649 people from July 2021 to July 2022. There was a net gain across the state in “Natural Change,” the number of births (420,000) and deaths (318,000) during that time frame. That only tells part of the story. California’s population shrank by 508,903 people during the first two years of the pandemic, second behind only New York. A half-million people leaving California, which has a population of more than 39 million, isn’t exactly a large-scale departure — but it does have some policymakers concerned about the state’s future. 

The final piece of this equation is difficult to quantify. Businesses and tax-paying residents are leaving and replaced by illegal immigrants pouring over the Border from Mexico. These new residents are placing a burden on housing, social services, and education. The other intangible is the impact on crime as these immigrants flow into California’s many sanctuary cities. Those that stay are looking at paying more of their “fair” share in a state that already has one of the highest tax burdens in the country. This exchange of residents is not a good deal for the people of California.

California is on the precipice of initiating a reparations program to exacerbate the tax situation further. The statewide reparations committee has concluded its work, and its recommendations will create a new class of millionaires in California. They recommend a cash payout of up to $1.2 million for every Black Californian resident. This plan would cost an estimated $800 Billion.

The panel’s recommendation breaks payments down by types of historical discrimination. For instance, Black residents affected by redlining by banks would receive $3,366 for each year they lived in California from the early 1930s to the late 1970s, amounting to up to $148,099. Similarly, Black residents could receive roughly $2,352 in compensation for over-policing and mass incarceration for each year they lived in California between 1970 and 2020. Those payments could amount to $115,260.

In total, from these and other payments included in the plan, a Black Californian who is 71 years old and has lived in California his entire life could receive up to $1.2 million, according to an analysis from the New York Times.

The timing could not be worse timing for California. Sacramento has decided to default on a Federal COVID loan of $18.5 Billion in debt, leaving state businesses holding the bag. Little did California businesses know that they were cosigners on the state’s nearly $20 billion loan from the federal government used to cover California’s unemployment fund shortfall during the COVID pandemic. Newsom and the State Legislature have thrown the people under the tax bus rather than owning up to their responsibilities—an example of bad policies by a state government intent on ruining the future of California.

I have written about reparations in the past, and my negative feelings have not changed. There is no link between the people of today and what happened over 150 years ago. Every feeling human being will condemn slavery, but that does not mean we all have to dip into our pockets to assuage Blacks for what happened to their ancestors six or seven generations ago. I also have to chuckle when someone says this will be a huge step toward solving our crime problems. That statement intimates the crime issue is caused by Blacks, and writing them a check will change their mindset. I am not a psychologist, but I have enough common sense to know it is a lie. Unfortunately, if reparations happen in California, the Left will push to adopt it as a national initiative. That will be a national mistake.

The post California’s Million Dollar Conundrum appeared first on Granite Grok.

Today America is under attack from within. Among the battles being fought is equity versus meritocracy. This battle is ravaging American institutions. Wherever we look, from the arts to higher education, corporate America, and the sciences, the battle is exacting a high cost.

We want to thank Marc Abear for this Op-Ed. Please submit yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.

Hopefully, the battle burns itself out before it destroys America.

The juxtaposition of the issues of race and merit is ignored. We are treading a path back to racism. This is morally wrong, ethically challenged, and economically damaging to our future. It will take some serious backbone on the part of the nation’s political leadership to change the outcome. But we must try.

There is great value in telling the truth. We all know something is wrong. Most of us struggle to articulate exactly what. Let’s try to organize the truth so there is a framework for galvanizing our political leadership in the effort.

Our institutional leadership is turning against meritocracy. Their argument is we have a problem; Blacks are falling behind. They have chosen the answer, reverse racism. The truth is “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The destruction of meritocracy today does not remedy the past ills of slavery. Neither does it make anything but privilege for the ignorant. Divide the world by identity all you want, but that breaking down of society into smaller and smaller parts makes America weaker and poorer.

The united whole is more than the sum of its parts. That is what the American dream has shown us. When we aspire together, we will work together and we can achieve whatever we can dream.

America can be controlled by diversity or meritocracy. We cannot have both. Meritocratic standards have a disparate impact on Blacks. Blacks as a group do poorly on standardized tests. That’s not because the tests do not measure correctly. Rather, the tests are objective and colorblind. It’s a statement; Blacks’ academic skills are generally lower. This is not a value judgment, it is a statement of fact.

That is a separate issue from diversity. The issue of academic underperformance by Blacks can and should be dealt with. Destroying meritocracy is not the way to do that. Destroying meritocracy makes everyone poorer without helping those most in need of the assistance.

The point is; if Blacks were not the lowest performing group, we would not be tearing down meritocracy. Some people succeed at each of the various areas of life more than others. That is because of effort and/or innate talent. Racism and racial disparity are increasingly driving the troublesome areas of decision making in our society.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act penalized intentional discrimination. It ended the use of race based standards in hiring and employment. In the 1970s the game changed and the next step became the disparate impact doctrine.

The disparate impact doctrine began as a court case. The important tenant of it is the showing of a difference became the establishment of racial intent. This is and always has been a non sequitur. Yet, it has settled in and become a corrosive cultural construct.

Perhaps the clearest example is civil service exams. At the time Blacks were doing poorly on these exams. That fact kept them from getting civil service positions, police, firefighters, etc. But the tests were not racist. They measured the skill level of the test taker in job specific areas. The tests were both relevant and merit based.

Disparate impact threw out the tests because those passing them did not represent racial groups proportionally. From there disparate impact spread into regulation and statute. That is how reverse racism metastasized.

After 30 years of institutionalized reverse racism the Supreme Court erred again. With Grutter v. Bollinger they further extended the reverse racism doctrine. The case said affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable.

It included a caveat “but not in perpetuity” which today is dropped from the application of the ruling. It has become the way we approach decision making. It has become codification of racism…which was never the intent. Perverse, don’t you think?

Today to take down any individual, organization or institution all that has to happen is to label it “White”. That is racist. There’s no other way to say it. It is racist. We are returning to a racist society. Blacks are leading the charge.

It used to be the burden of proof was on the government to prove discrimination. Today, it is enough to simply show a difference in results. And individuals, the academy, corporate America and government are abandoning objective truth in decision making.

We are adopting a reverse racist position. The burden of proof has been shifted. The accused must now prove a negative… It is a nearly impossible case to make. It should be unconstitutional. It is unfair and un-American. Just think about it. There is a way out of this.

The post Equity Kills Excellence appeared first on Granite Grok.

Vermont majority legislatures have been picking away at your right to self-defense for years. Successive years, actually. The 2023 assault on your rights includes a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases, expanded Red Flag seizures, and new gun storage rules.

The dress on this old whore is not a new one. Legislators claim these changes are necessary to reduce suicides and community violence (in a state that invites both?). Before we get much further, can anyone show me an example where such infringements made a Democrat-run political entity less violent?

 

Supporters say it’s time to take action against gun violence and the rate of suicide in Vermont, which is higher than the national rate.

 

As if the rise in left-leaning policies from drugs and trafficking to sanctuary for illegals, to human trafficking (in Burlington), to COVID lockdowns could not possibly be vectors for an increase in violence or suicide.

We can add progressive anti-police rhetoric and policies and the Democrat legislature’s civilian disarmament culture.

Related: Democrat Rule Will Do That: Vermont Has Its Highest Homicide Rate in Three Decades

Back in 2018, Vermont raised the age to purchase a firearm and began dancing with protective orders. In early 2022 we reported on a bill in Vermont that banned firearms from hospitals. Why did they do that? COVID policy separated families and stressed public health workers and citizens unnecessarily. Parents and grandparents across the US died alone while loved ones were refused any contact. The death by hospital kickback protocol claimed a fair share of lives.

The same legislation included a 30-day waiting period to address the made-up Charleston Loophole. The Bill Gov. Scott eventually signed reduced the waiting period to seven days with the Hospital ban intact.

Nibbling, nibbling.

At the end of 2022, a movement began to repeal Vermont’s Sportsman Bill of Rights. If successful, cities like Burlington would be freed to pass their own local anti-gun ordinances without approval from the state. The result would be a patchwork of local mismatched rules Dems would use as leverage to make them statewide.

Nibbling, nibbling.

 

The [new] legislation also creates a crime of negligent firearms storage and expands the state’s extreme risk protection orders so that a state’s attorney, the Attorney General’s Office or a family or household member may ask a court to prohibit a person from purchasing, possessing or receiving a dangerous weapon.

 

So-Called Republican Gov. Phil Scott has concerns that it is unconstitutional, but that doesn’t concern Democrats. If he vetoed it they could override because they are more than happy to waste taxpayer money in protracted court cases on the chance that they can get future generations used to a state in which only the government is allowed to have guns. And it’s working.

Vermont went from no waiting period to thirty days, to seven, to three, all while their crime and homicide rates went up. Gov. Scott could veto it, but the Dems have veto-proof majorities.

So, how long before the once great state of Vermont needs its own version of Hey Jackass – which tracks violent crime in gun-grabbin’ Chicago?

 

The post Slippery Meet Slope: Vermont Dems Pass Yet Another Gun-Grabbin’ Bill appeared first on Granite Grok.

Court Settlements in Nashua are done in bad faith and are unreasonable. They are a ploy to ring up legal bills and produce no records. A settlement is not an admission of guilt, so settling results in no real improvement in the process. (In Nashua, winning in Court has resulted in no real improvement, either.)

My first mediation, designed to settle, started with an abatement appeal. The mediation, ordered by the State Tribunal, is based on State Tax Codes and Statutes. The City failed to comply, offered no review of the valuations, provided no documentation, and provided no expert to justify the value. My attorney stated it was the worst mediation he had ever been involved in. Of course, we left the door open to continue negotiating with the city; the City never responded.

In the second year of the appeal process, I represented myself by filing a second separate appeal. The city refused to come to the table for the ordered mediation. Attorney Bolton claimed the two appeals were inextricably linked and that I could not represent myself, stating an attorney must be present. The tribunal disagreed and ruled that each appeal is treated as a separate case. The City refused to mediate.

During my Right-to-Know lawsuit for assessing records months prior to the Trial, the City offered a settlement permitting me to inspect the property record cards I sought. The offer was poorly written and required clarification. What did the City want in return for inspecting the records? The City did not respond.

In a pro se case, the City disclosed to the Court that a settlement with requested records was offered. The City’s offer was delivered five minutes before the Trial began. I refused the settlement. This was an ambush with nothing in writing, and I was looking for answers as to why Nashua’s records are so scrambled. I won the case, and the City has now appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court. The City had no intention of providing the records.

In another Right-to-Know case, a court hearing was scheduled that my attorney was certain we would win. My attorney encouraged me to let him write a stipulation to settle this outside of Court. Of course, the Court was pleased with this solution. I spent $22,000 working with the Attorney on this case and never received the records. Attorney Bolton refused to provide clear answers to the request and employed his typical “ring up the legal bill and stall” strategy.

In a recent hearing on a Right-to-Know lawsuit involving the Nashua Performing Arts Center, an attorney representing the Corporations formed by the City to accept money from a Federal New Markets Tax Credit program to pay for the construction disclosed in Court that he had tried to settle the case, acknowledged that the bylaws for the company were not written in compliance with the Right-to-Know law and offered to rewrite the bylaws. He claimed that my failure to settle was unreasonable.

In Nashua, settlements appear to be public matters, not confidential matters. Court rules dictate as Attorneys are out to look like negotiators working for the greater good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nashua is a game of dirty tricks. Mayor Donchess has no interest in fairness, transparency, or equity. History speaks. All Nashua Right-to-Know cases belong before the Court.

A Lack of Transparency is a symptom of Dishonesty.

The post “No” to Settlements in Nashua RTK Cases appeared first on Granite Grok.

This week’s (May 3) show topics included: Hunter Biden being forced to show up in court in person and reveal his financials. 1500 troops sent to the border—to do something real or to help facilitate more migrants? The government punishing home buyers for having good credit; Bernie Sanders wanting to confiscate anything more than 999 million dollars from the wealthy...

The post The Conservatarian Exchange Podcast #152 appeared first on The Liberty Block.

Recently after purchasing bananas at the DW Highway Shaw’s in Merrimack, NH, I noticed a Disney label attached to the Dole sticker. The sticker sparked a curiosity to do some research. Business enterprises offering good prices, quality, and service cannot overcome the harm that joining “woke corporate America” will do.

We want to thank Russ Payne for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.

Giving the credibility of your marketing expertise to a woke, degenerative anti-family cause joins the name of “Shaw’s” to a perverted mindset that targets the minds and hearts of innocent children for profit.

Good public relations will not be gained by Shaw’s joining hands with the same satanic roots of moral decline that dominate our nation’s capitol that only owe their immunity from law to the illegal power they possess. There is not a large enough blanket of deception, even with Mickey Mouse’s picture on it, to contain the morally degenerate nature that Disney has become. This is a sample of the moral pollution aimed at the minds of your children:

“Little Demon” is a recent Disney cartoon show that openly MOCKS Jesus Christ while EXALTING two main characters: Satan and the Antichrist. Absolutely sick. But it gets worse.

The Antichrist is a 13-year-old middle schooler, Chrissy (a profane wordplay on Christ). This is designed to draw young viewers. Chrissy is the child of a sexual union between Satan and Chrissy’s mother.

When Satan wants to claim her, all kinds of dark but supposedly “humorous” plot twists occur to pull in impressionable young viewers.

These include demons loudly demanding to have sex with corpses (chanting four letter words) and desiring to eat the brains of babies.” Does Shaw’s advocate such a cruel attack on our children’s minds?

Even with Mickey Mouse on your side, a large majority of your customers will not appreciate the potential harm to their children. Americans still believe the key pillar of Western Civilization is the God-ordained family and place the protection of their children as first priority. Please consider this quote from The American Family Associations, STAND magazine, how the “woke culture” is losing in the Corporate world: “Corporations such as Disney, Yahoo and Google announced company-wide layoffs in late 2022 and early 2023.” Check out afa.net.

 

The post Little Demon appeared first on Granite Grok.

Well, I almost lost all the weight I had gained last week. Helpful but I’m still “less there” than what I was two weeks ago. All I can say is that it’s now a new week so time to improve.

Tom is telling me that while he’s moderated his intake, he’s also weight lifting on a regular basis.  Good on him (and I’m going to try to keep on his good side) but by building up his musculature, he’s losing inches but trading in for heavier muscles.

asdf

And the tale of the tape:

 

The post The Skip & Tom Weight Challenge – Week 9 appeared first on Granite Grok.

They’re flying so thick and fast it is amazing.  Take heart – there will be a Meme Overflow and almost certainly a Friday Meme Overflow-Overflow.  Last week’s Overflow-Overflow.

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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She’s so Woke

 

 

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PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA

 

‘Horrible Idea’: First Vaccine for Birth Control Now in Clinical Trials • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

Turning the immune system against the reproductive organs.  Related:

 

 

So… becoming infertile is not sterilization?  Who knew?

 

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Time for another My Tree in Israel recipe.

 

 

Incredible – albeit not cheap – olive oil.  I also got one grape vine through them and have already had one bottle of wine.  Good stuff.

In full disclosure, one of the founders is a friend of mine, but I receive no compensation for these posts.  It’s just helping a friend’s business…

 

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Pick of the post:

Reminds me of this (italics replaced by underlining, bolding added):

If Palpatine and Jar Jar won, the Leftards should welcome honest audits and recounts, the better to take another victory lap, while rubbing the Right’s noses in the Left’s inevitable march to the throne room of power. People who’ve actually scored a touchdown don’t bitch about re-watching the video that proves it. It’s that simple. You can run the tape back and forth, and if the feet are inbounds, and the ball is in control, it’s a touchdown time after time after time. So when one team’s coaches, and half the fans in the stadium, boo and catcall the replay, and start agitating loudly to ignore it and just call the touchdown without looking at that pesky video replay, you know they didn’t score, and you know they know they didn’t score, so all their histrionics and hissyfits beforehand and afterwards is just them being pissed that they lost, refusing to admit it, even to themselves, and terror at having their noses rubbed in you seeing it with your own lying eyes, on a 50′ tall jumbotron, in front of millions of eyewitnesses.

 

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Palate Cleansers:

 

—

—

 

The post MONDAY MEMES appeared first on Granite Grok.

New Hampshire is home to $932.5 billion in Pandora Papers hidden accounts: Trusts, LLCs, and Non-Profits. The amount is staggering. The state is also home to a very serious opioid crisis, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, family court corruption, and close to 1000 suits of child sex abuse at the Sununu Youth Detention Center as well as several criminal indictments against state employees for child abuse.

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

The state Attorney General’s office has kept a list of corrupt police officers who the state has protected despite being involved in horrific crimes. Freedom of Information Act requests are routinely stonewalled, ignored. The office of Public Integrity at the AG’s office is a joke — the last person in charge, Geoffrey Ward, deleted files of corrupt police officers before graduating to become a federal prosecutor.

The issues all go back decades but the same names and agencies come up again and again. It’s a comically small club of players — many who have received rewards for their services to children but who may have actually been complicit in aiding, abetting and covering up horrific abuse of those children.

Is it possible that the king pin in this corruption is actually a former Monsignor who has managed to orchestrate a global insurance racket?

One address in particular might hold the answers to New Hampshire’s Pandora Papers, Money Laundering, Child Trafficking, Medicaid Fraud, Insurance Fraud. It holds offices tied to the Department of Health and Human Services, The Catholic Church, the Department of Defense, even the CIA.

10 Ferry Street, Concord New Hampshire. Registered address for Virtus LLC, Maximus Inc, Children’s Trust Fund, Dataminr, Quest Diagnostics, Dyncorp among others.

What do we know about these companies?

1. Virtus LLC was founded in 1999 by since defrocked Monsignor Edward Arsenault who went to jail in 2014 after pleading guilty to defrauding the Diocese of Manchester, a dead priest’s estate and a Catholic Hospital (Catholic Medical Center where he was in charge of increasing profits for the hospital). Virtus LLC is the education wing “Protecting God’s Children” under the Catholic Risk Retention Management group which was founded in Burlington Vermont in August 1987. Curiously, it was set up shortly before NH DCYF worker Sylvia Gale’s fabricated rumors about Father Gordon MacRae which she shared with a known corrupt police officer James F McLaughlin.

 

According to Sylvia Gale’s letter, the information was passed to her by an unnamed employee of New Hampshire Catholic Social Services who claimed that she had been told this information by her employer, Monsignor John Quinn, on condition that she would be fired if she ever divulged it.

 

Sylvia Gale died in 2020. NH DCYF has since been exposed for decades of cover-ups of horrific child sex abuse at the Youth Detention Center, which have resulted in multiple arrests for historic sex abuse at the YDC. The State has suddenly found “millions” of documents that had mysteriously gone missing all these decades.

Sylvia Gale’s claims led to the prosecution of Father Gordon MacRae and a trial in which his accusers were reportedly trained to cry by a therapist sitting at the back of a courtroom. Nevertheless, the trial provided the perfect excuse for a “Compliance Officer” (Edward Arsenault who had an accounting background) and what AG Phil McLaughlin termed “Creative Solutions” to go after priest sex abuse at the Diocese. As millions were pouring out in fast settlement agreements, Arsenault was assuring parishioners that insurance would cover it and the Diocese wouldn’t have to pay.

Edward Arsenault clocked up hundreds of thousands in expenses from 1999–2009 (allegedly for computers, cell phones, lunches, trips, expenses for his under age lover and meetings with journalists) and grew a multi-national insurance industry at the same time.

Meanwhile Sylvia Gale was accused of conflicts of interest regarding her activities with NH DCYF and “non-profits” with which she was involved. She appealed in 1999 and various members of NH DHHS approved her appeal. The same year NH DCYF received a letter from US DHHS Office of Inspector General complaining of accounting and lackadaisical oversight of contractors. Kathleen Kerr was legal counsel for NH DCYF at the time. Virtus LLC opened a few months after Sylvia Gale’s appeal.

gale_sylvia_1999-o-001
DHHS review of procedures for child support

Virtus LLC has dozens and dozens of companies tied to it all over the world. It appears to have grown from being just the education wing of Catholic Risk Retention Management to a massive multi-national insurance enterprise tied to Virtus Holdings. It is listed in the Pandora Papers.

VIRTUS Brochure

In January 2014, there was a share change in the Catholic Risk Retention Management documentation. A couple of weeks later, Edward Arsenault’s crimes were published. He shook hands with assistant AG Jane Young (now US Attorney for NH) on his way to prison, where he managed to somehow purchase a luxury condominium in Florida while incarcerated.

And when he was released, he had a new name: Edward Bolognini, which he claims is because he got married, but Chat GPT (which could well be inaccurate) states it was his mother’s maiden name. Chat GPT also states he stole $500,000 from the Diocese of Manchester, not $300,000, and that he was engaged in money laundering.

Why would the Assistant Attorney General shake his hand unless she was in on it too? And I believe she was. In fact, I believe that the financial rewards that Edward Arsenault created for members of the NH Bar, law firms, and judiciary essentially made many of them indebted to him. You only have to look at the number of companies and properties the local law firms in New Hampshire own or are tied to, to realize that something is not right, and it all stems from the time when Edward Arsenault was COO of the Diocese of Manchester.

This may explain how his restitution was paid off while he was away, why he was transferred to a jail instead of prison and why he was then released on home confinement. Financial fraud of that magnitude, whether $300k or $500K is significant. Shaking someone’s hand who had defrauded a place of worship, a dead priest’s estate, and a hospital is not something I could ever imagine anyone doing unless they were somehow complicit in the racket and had benefited from it. The handshake seemed more of a nod-nod-wink-wink than anything else.

2. Maximus Inc is also registered at 10 Ferry Street, Concord, New Hampshire. The company contracts with Catholic Charities in some states (Tennessee, for example). It is highly likely that Maximus and Virtus and Catholic Risk Retention Management are, in fact, all intertwined. Maximus got its first no-bid contract with New Hampshire in 2004 for Medicaid. There have been numerous cases of Medicaid fraud in New Hampshire since then.

On the board of Maximus is Kathleen Kerr who was legal counsel for New Hampshire’s DCYF when she received a letter from US DHHS OIG informing her of accounting laxity and shady deals for contracts with DCYF in 1999.

According to her bio on Maximus, Kathleen Kerr worked for NH DCYF for 12 years before joining the company. That same year in 1999, Sylvia Gale of NH DCYF appealed a conflict of interest ruling. She won the appeal — who agreed with her? Members of the DHHS — in other words, people who were working with Kathleen Kerr and presumably had something to gain from Maximus contracts and potentially Catholic Risk Retention Management insurance claims. Maximus Inc is also in the Pandora Papers with hundreds of companies all over the world. It keeps getting new contracts with New Hampshire that go up by the millions with no questions asked.

3. Children’s Trust Fund — The Diocese of Manchester refers families to the Children’s Trust Fund where Lauren Noether from the AG’s office during the time of the Diocese of Manchester claims and settlements) works. It would appear that Children’s Trust Fund is also intertwined with Virtus and Maximus. It was founded in 1986 and is a quasi Government run organization that collects data on children and families although somehow when it really matters and children under state care go missing that data just disappears.

In fact for all the money that is thrown at children’s services in New Hampshire since Sylvia Gale, Edward Arsenault and Kathleen Kerr’s 1990s involvment — as Anna Carrigan in Anna Carrigan v New Hampshire pointed out — precious little seems to reach the intended recipients who are bullied, raped, abused, starved, drugged — all under state care with records deleted or lost by DCYF, YDC and the AG’s office. Not only did the State dismiss Anna Carrigan’s suit but she faced retaliation for blowing the whistle.

4. Dataminr — is essentially a spy/data software that was promoted by Beacon Global Technologies and the CIA. What does it have to do with Maximus? Quite a lot. Maximus gets contracts with the state for Medicaid, Veterans services, and Title IV, among other things. It’s collecting social security numbers, private information on health, and many other intimate details. Dataminr is a companion to that, feeding that information to DoD and CIA, I believe, but neither Maximus nor Dataminr would want the general public to piece that together.

5. Quest Diagnostics — a medical lab. If you read the Maximus CAT reporting, you can see that children get referred to in treatment under Maximus. There is an incentive to remove children from their parents and put them under state care and then for state care to refer them to Maximus services which can then provide treatment including opioids etc etc. Literally turning them into drug-addicted lab rats while the state’s agencies use their suffering to put their hands out for more federal grants — the only thing that seems to matter to the NHCADSV (working with DCYF and AG’s Office) and Maximus in fact.

NH-CAT-FAQs-10.20.21

6. Dyncorp — Department of Defense. Dyncorp was known for child sex trafficking.

Rep. Cynthia Mckinney grilled Donald Rumsfeld about the Department of Defense and child trafficking in 2005 or so.

New Hampshire, Guardian Ad Litem Kathleen Sternenberg’s daughter, became chief of staff for Donaldg Rumsfeld, according to her wedding announcement.

Kathleen Sternenberg goes to Niagara Falls with family court judge Julie Introcaso who orders Kathleen Sternenberg to be paid using Apple Pay. Niagara Falls is a known center for trafficking children.

Kathleen Sternenberg is known for creating fake reasons to remove children from their parents in divorce proceedings. Former AG Michael Delaney stepped in as counsel for Judge Julie Introcaso and arranged for no jail time for her felony of whiting out judicial documents and failures to mention her conflicts of interest with Kathleen Sternenberg. Delaney’s wife, Caroline Delaney, is the leal counsel for CASA NH and legal counsel for the Department of Revenue. They have a stated financial interest in CASA NH which recognized Sylvia Gale for her services towards children. Delaney helped set up the Children’s Advocacy Centers. He also happened to be AG when the FRM Ponzi scheme got exposed. His office and the Banking Department were found at fault in the report.

10 Ferry Street was reported to the Boston FBI in 2016 by Audra Toop for suspected child trafficking.

However, instead of following Audra’s lead, she was then kidnapped and held hostage with no proper access to legal representation for over four years until she was eventually released with no proper explanation. Before that she had emailed various people at the NH DOJ’s office and called only to get a complete run around and reaching numbers on business cards for people not associated with the business card….for example she tried to reach head of the criminal division, Richard Head, but instead reached someone completely different. It made her start to wonder whether the NH DOJ was in fact a call center for three letter agencies running a racket with fake business titles for those involved. It’s far from professional for the head of the criminal division unit to provide numbers on a business card that lead to someone completely different and yet that is what happened. Moonlighting also appears to be common practice in Concord among public employees.

When Edward Arsenault was released from jail, he joined a new non-profit called “ReServe” and he set up new companies in Florida.

It begs the question as to whether Edward Arsenault ever was who he claimed he was: A Catholic Priest, or if he was, in fact, a con artist from the start — a fraudulent accountant who infiltrated the Catholic Church and realized there was an opportunity for a global insurance scam to be had that would make him and several members of the New Hampshire Bar and Judiciary rich. I believe the latter, and I believe this is why there is so much secrecy in New Hampshire judicial matters and why former AG Michael Delaney stepped in to negotiate a plea deal for a judge’s felony. Corruption of the NH Judiciary seems to be the rule, not the exception, with several judges being forced to resign over the years for fraud or unlawful influence.

I believe that there is a core issue behind corruption in the Family & Criminal Courts: The little discussed and carefully disguised financial incentive to coerce children, bully them, lie to them and remove them from their parents, to put them into state care or under state control and to turn them into drug addicts and lab rats. The state has failed appallingly in its handling of children, and there is zero accountability because of the profits for those involved in the “Kids for Cash” type racket.

You don’t have to look very far to realize that David Vicinanzo and Gordon MacDonald, who worked with Edward Arsenault to settle hundreds of claims for the diocese, were also getting rich off this. And in the other direction, you find Chuck Douglas III, who’d been NH Supreme Court Chief Justice and knew the club, also filing dozens of claims with little to no evidence. He spoke very kindly of Arsenault when he was arrested — he would. He got rich off the association. In the 1999 Washington Post Article “A Splitting Headache,” reference is made to the club-like atmosphere in New Hampshire’s courts. There’s also a reference to financial fraud.

It seems that between Edward Arsenault and members of the NH Bar, they bought the media as well: Boston Globe, NH Press Association, WMUR (whose reporter Amy Coveno is on the board of CASA NH) and the Concord Monitor (on whose board was Amanda Grady Sexton of NHCADSV which works hand in glove with NH DCYF, the AG’s office, David Vicinanzo, Gordon MacDonald, Shaheen & Gordon and NHPD).

AnnMarie Timmons, an erstwhile reporter for the Concord Monitor, demanded to meet Father Gordon MacRae, but he declined. She then, according to him, wrote a handwritten letter to him saying “If you won’t meet with me, I will write about the four men you raped and the record will reflect that you don’t deny it!”. She allegedly called the prison demanding that Father Gordon be put in restraints and forced to meet her but went silent after the Wall Street Journal articles regarding his case came out in 2005.

Soon after, she took mental health leave from the Concord Monitor, blaming her mental illness on her coverage of the clergy abuse claims. She went on to marry former assistant AG Will Delker who was the principal prosecutor in the Diocese/AG report working with Edward Arsenault to obtain (forge?) Bishop MCormack’s signature on a waiver of rights for all priests named in the claims. Delker is now an NH Superior Court Judge overseeing the Youth Detention Center cases. He was named in the article: “Judge: Laurie List Lawsuits Are Being Improperly Sealed.”

While Will Delker was overseeing the AG’s investigation of the Diocese, he was assisted in the AG’s office by Jim Rosenberg (who later joined Shaheen & Gordon) who appears to have gone looking for “victims” to trigger the tsunami of “creative solution” claims. Brian Harlow I understand was the first one. Brian is part of the NHCADSV.

Despite crucifying accused priests and stripping them of their rights in 2002, Jim Rosenberg defended a Concord Middle School teacher/principal: Matt McGonagle who in 2006 was sentenced to a term of 16 months for the serial rape of a 14-year-old student. Rosenberg defended the deal:

Attorney Jim Rosenberg of Concord, representing McGonagle, also asked the court to accept the plea agreement. He recalled at the time the offenses occurred, McGonagle was recently divorced and living alone. “It was a difficult time for him,” he said. Rosenberg said that McGonagle became “a surrogate member of the victim’s family household” and became friends with the girl inside and outside of school. “The appropriate boundaries were blurred,” he said. Rosenberg called the offenses “an isolated case,” which has not been followed by allegations of misconduct since.

Jim Rosenberg also represented Andrew Thomson in the trial of NH v Owen Labrie — Thomson was a state witness who was reportedly tampered with by Michael Delaney representing St Paul’s School and effectively Thomson’s mother, Lucy Hodder, on the school’s board of trustees. Thomson had sent the State Complainant Chessy Prout an invitation to a “lap dance” and “secret snuggle” in full knowledge that she was underage. Rosenberg claimed Thomson did nothing wrong. The prosecutor admitted to the judge that she knew a deal had been made for him — which she later retracted when the records became unsealed.

Jim Rosenberg was best man to Will Delker’s and AnnMarie Timmon’s wedding. In 2012-2014 another attorney who is with Shaheen & Gordona and also apparently part of the club, Cathy Green, simultaneously represented Father Gordon MacRae for his failed habeas corpus appeal and Edward Arsenault for his plea and pre-arranged sentence. She failed to let Father Gordon MacRae know of the conflict of interests.

Father Gordon MacRae has been denied justice for 28 years while Edward Arsenault and members of the New Hampshire Judiciary and Bar and their friends have gotten away with extortion rackets, cover-ups of child abuse and worse.

Mike Gill, a Mortgage Broker and anti-corruption activist who lost a defamation suit against three prominent New Hampshire businessmen (tied to Catholic Charities and whose “Primary Bank” is in Bedford, New Hampshire, where Edward Arsenault was a priest for years) for putting up billboards calling them drug traffickers, had an attorney: Alex Walker.

According to Mike Gill, Alex Walker had another client: The Diocese of Manchester. According to Mike Gill, Walker’s only job was to protect the financial secrecy of the Diocese’s dealings. Walker is now CEO of Catholic Medical Center which was fined $3.8 million by the US Government for kick-back schemes. Curiously, it was Edward Arsenault’s pal Chuck Douglas who stepped in to represent the whistleblower for his reward.

Mike Gill has been somewhat vindicated in his accusations since the Pandora Papers probe started in 2021 — one of the plaintiffs in the defamation suit against him– Andrew H Crews — abruptly stepped down from Autofair (named in the Pandora Papers and Paradise Papers) in December 2021. The company was sold out of state to an address in West Palm Beach, Florida. He and the company were sued in Massachusetts for failure to pay employees (even though he received several hundred thousand in PPP loan money). He was on the board of directors of Primary Bank New Hampshire and on the Board of Granite One Health and the Children’s Advocacy Centers. He was also President of the New Hampshire Lottery, for which Chuck Douglas’s current wife, Deborah Douglas, is Chair. His name seems to have disappeared altogether.

Coincidentally, Bedford is not only Edward Arsenault’s former stomping ground, home to the head office of Primary Bank and Autofair but it is also where there was a huge fentanyl bust about which former US Attorney Scott Murray fumbled when asked why the local police weren’t involved in the investigation. If you couple his answers to inquiring journalists with Ex NFL player Jeff Hatch’s admission that he was part of a drug smuggling operation but sworn to secrecy while he worked at the State’s “Granite Recovery Center,” the pieces of the puzzle seem to fit together in a very disturbing way.

Justice Broderick has been assigned to adjudicate the payouts to victims of the Youth Detention Center abuse. Broderick denied Father Gordon MacRae’s appeal in 1996, but when he got wind that the Wall Street Journal was going to do a story on Father Gordon MacRae, he reportedly got his son (in jail for hitting his father apparently) to ask his cellmate to see how much Gordon MacRae was going to say to the Wall Street journal about being framed and the people involved. Edward Arsenault had promised to give Gordon MacRae’s case files to David Vicinanzo (attorney at Nixon Peabody who repped the Diocese) for an appeal but that apparently never happened — or if it did, it wasn’t in David Vicinanzo’s financial or political interest to help a priest who’d been framed by a corrupt police officer and a child services worker.

David Vicinanzo is now one of the attorneys representing the victims of child abuse at the Youth Detention Center.

Children had been put there by officials who had a financial interest in removing kids from their families and in protecting corrupt public officials and state employees who abused them. David Vicinanzo knows this because he was part of the Diocese of Manchester racket with Edward Arsenault, which was all tied up with children’s services. He claims to seek reform regarding confidentiality laws, but will he go as far as to seek prosecution from the puppeteers, his friends, who allowed all of this to go on? Or will he continue to protect the cozy and incestuous merry-go-round of a club because doing the right thing would cause the swampy house of dirty cards to collapse?

Gordon MacDonald, Vicinanzo’s former colleague at Nixon Peabody, dismissed the child abuse at YDC blaming “victim negligence” when he was Attorney General while he also protected a list of corrupt police officers from becoming public. One of those officers was James F McLaughlin — the officer who took Sylvia Gale of DCYF’s rumor and ran with it. Gordon MacDonald referred plaintiffs of YDC abuse to the NHCADSV, who work with the DCYF but have not criticized them for the abuse at the YDC. Jane Young provided Nancy West of InDepth News with a lame answer as to why the AG’s office was referring victims of YDC abuse to the NHCADSV.

Gordon MacDonald is now the Supreme Court Chief Justice for New Hampshire. He was endorsed by Brian Harlow (on the board of directors for the NHCADSV):

Brian Harlow, of Concord, offered perhaps the most surprising words of support. A victim of clergy sex abuse, Harlow said at the hearing he met MacDonald when MacDonald represented the Diocese of Manchester. MacDonald, he said, helped him take “immeasurable steps toward healing.”

Is it possible that Edward Arsenault is, in fact, the head of the so-called “Cartel”? Is he an FBI informant with the same kind of protection awarded Jeffrey Epstein? He has his finger in every pie not only in New Hampshire but all the way to the Vatican — finances, insurance, Medicaid, education, childcare, and healthcare. Snippets from his resume indicate the far reach of his tentacles:

President and CEO — Saint Luke Institute — Silver Spring, MD — 2009 to Present — Silver Spring, MD http://www.sli.org 2009 — present St. Luke’s Centre — Manchester, England, UK http://www.stlukescentre.org.uk

• Opened regional office in Louisville, KY focusing on outpatient and psycho-educational services for the regional Catholic community.
• Established a regional presence in Johannesburg, South Africa at the request of the Roman Catholic bishops’ conference. The initial focus of this office has been needs assessment, issue orientation and psycho-educational programs.

• Retained financial experts for the development of operating and capital budgets. Upon implementation, this has resulted in increased gross revenues by 35% and decreased operating expenses by 20% in 2nd and 3rd year of tenure as President & CEO.

Chief Operating Officer/Chief Compliance Officer — Diocese of Manchester — Manchester, NH 2000 to 2009 — Served as Chief Operating Officer and Compliance Officer for the Bishop of Manchester.

Chairman of the Board Catholic Medical Center Manchester, NH — 1998 to 2009

Catholic Medical Center Healthcare System

• Collaborated with the President & CEO of Catholic Medical Center in retaining, training and supporting a community hospital board if directors. Responsible for the chairmanship of key board committees, including Executive Compensation, Nominating, Governance, Ethics and participation in the Executive and Finance Committees.

Chairman — Board of Directors — The National Catholic Risk Retention Group — Lisle, IL — 1999 to 2007

Served as Chairman of Board of Directors during a period of significant growth for a captive insurance company owned by and operated for the benefit of 67 Roman Catholic dioceses and religious institutes in the United States.

• Served as principal spokesperson for the governing board of directors of the risk retention group, including all shareholder relations, partnerships with other insurers and reinsurers as well as state and federal regulators

Edward Arsenault appears to have started up a new non-profit in Tampa, Florida for mental health. Ghislaine Maxwell — who was arrested in New Hampshire and represented by Shaheen & Gordon, who also represented the plaintiffs against Mike Gill — is in a low-security prison in Tampa as well. This may be a pure coincidence.

Lyn Forester de Rothschild, a close friend of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s (and the Clintons), stepped down from Rothschild Holdings shortly after Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest in New Hampshire, where Shaheen & Gordon represented her. Lyn Forester de Rothchild has now reappeared on the scene — at the Vatican. I would not be remotely surprised if Edward Arsenault were involved as well.

What’s really going on at 10 Ferry Street, Concord New Hampshire and why do New Hampshire officials and agencies avoid accountability? Follow the money.

When I contacted Anna Carrigan after reading her suit against the State, she replied with the following:

I am interested that you have identified key NH players that myself and others doing work in NH find troubling (but we are definitely in the minority on), and I am comfortable saying that AG MacDonald and Amanda Grady Sexton and NHCADSV are two specific people who I think are doing things to directly or indirectly hurt child protection victims in this state, abd that our crazy family and criminal court system is completely dysfunctional and supports that in happening, along with a local media that purposely helps keep the public blind to things happening behind the scenes. I am a government social worker whistle-blower, one of several, who faced retaliation by the State of NH for speaking up about the truth of NH’s child protection system and is suing them, so I’ve seen and know about a lot of stuff that goes on that I feel like most people would have a hard time even conceiving is true.

 

Submitted for Republication here by the Author, who is responsible for the content.

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Democrats everywhere have a list of things. Once elected, appointed, or hired into the bureaucracy, the job is to check the boxes even if they make no sense or contradict the stated policy goal. And none of them make any sense, and all of them contradict the advertised outcome.

The actual objective is always the opposite of the stated objective.

One example we’ve visited on these pages from time to time is so-called single-use plastics. The Left’s political theater is great fun, but their science is all backward, and this has come to a head in Canada, where the nation banned single-use plastics (bags, straws, etc.) at the end of 2022. Cities like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, are constantly looking for a way to do this locally, so we’ve covered the subject at length.

Up there in the Great White North, environmentalists who likely lobbied for the Canadian law are sounding an alarm we’ve rung for years. You can’t just replace single-use plastics with single-use paper. Why? A bigger carbon footprint: and single-use paper is worse for the environment. But there’s nowhere else to go.

 

• To make exponentially more pulp for paper and paperboard products, you’ll need to cut more timber.
• Fewer trees impact CO2 absorption and oxygen generation.
• “The Netherlands-based and UN-backed Institute for Water Education says it can take anywhere from two to 13 liters (3.4Gal) of water to make a standard piece of paper.”
• “When paper, or any organic material, ends up in our landfill and decomposes, methane is released, which is so much worse for the environment.”

 

Issues we’ve noted on these pages in the past include,

 

• Plastics and styrene have much lower front and back-end carbon footprints (if that matters to you).
• They are easier to recycle, and recycling them has a lower carbon footprint.
• Non-recycled waste stream costs are lower than for paper or paperboard replacements.
• They weigh about 80% less than paper substitutes. – (Why would that matter? Shipping and transportation “carbon costs” are higher. The amount of carbon emitted to move them from A to B to C.).

 

And,

 

 Making paper and cardboard is almost certainly the third-largest industrial use of energy on the planet. By contrast, plastic is light, durable and its manufacture is generally not particularly energy-intensive – at least by comparison to paper.

 

Recycling itself has been called a bad idea that contradicts the stated goals.

 

It’s been documented and reported for close to two decades. Look it up. The energy wasted to clean recyclables before you ‘recycle them?’ The energy needed to recycle into a reusable form for glass, cardboard, paper, and metal is carbon intensive. Trucks, facilities, power, people, and process all consume more energy than just burying the stuff in the ground. Which is where it came from, if not in that form.

 

All that plastic pouring into the oceans in Asia is a product of the movement (and offshoring recycling) itself, whose virtue signal has led activists and policymakers to reach back into the past for a more energy intense, environmentally unfriendly alternative. Paper. But paper isn’t better for the environment.

Banning single-use plastic is a stupid idea, but it is one of those checkboxes I mentioned. Environmental science doesn’t matter. Nor does the cost. A mad, broad move to paper will not just make the packaging cost more (and the stuff in it), it will impact the timber market and everything that relies on it, passed down to consumers. The economics will force you to have and do less, and that’s where Canada is headed.

We could thank them for the lesson, but Libs don’t learn lessons like that because the actual objective is always the opposite of the stated objective. If you need another example, take an honest look at wind, solar, EVs, and net zero.

 

Exit Question: Shouldn’t these new containers bear a warning label”? “This product created more CO2 to make than plastic, will require more CO2 to recycle than plastic, and will release significant amounts of methane if composted or placed in the waste stream.”

 

HT | CTV News

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On March 24, 1984, my Marine Corps infantry company took off on a night training mission in South Korea. Tragically, the CH-53 helicopter behind mine lost altitude and slammed into a mountaintop. Thirty-three Marines died. Memories endure of helping carry bodies down that mountain.

At a memorial service, our battalion commander spoke to the tragedy and said the many lost lives had special meaning. “They died for their country,” said LtCol Jack Kelly.

They also died for South Korea—casualties in a conflict first precipitated by North Korean Communist aggression in 1950. Thirty-six thousand Americans were killed there from 1950-53. In southeast Asia over 58,000 Americans died countering similar Communist aggression. Their names are engraved on a shiny black granite memorial in Washington D.C.

But the American death toll in these Asian conflicts pales next to the millions of civilian victims of Communism. We should never forget the Cambodian genocide or the Vietnamese boat people. Imagine facing a Communist regime so horrific that you’d take your chances on the high seas with storms, sharks, and pirates on flimsy crafts just to probably die and drown on your own terms.

And estimates of the number of victims of the Communist Chinese revolution range from 40-70 million souls—lost not only in battle but to starvation, persecution, prison labor, and mass execution. (All this before they gave us the COVID virus.)

According to researcher R.J. Rummel, an incomprehensible 62 million civilians were murdered by Communist authorities in the former Soviet Union between 1917 and 1987. Four million Ukrainians were purposely starved to death just from 1932-33.

Communism is a political and economic ideology that positions itself in opposition to liberal democracy and capitalism. Atheist and ostensibly classless, it calls for state ownership of means of production and generally forbids ownership of private property.

Inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, Communism has long had an intellectual appeal to leftist statists, an attraction at odds with the reality that Communism doesn’t work (except for party leaders) and can’t be maintained without a vast police state with little individual freedom.

Although the Soviet empire finally imploded in 1991, proponents of its deadly Marxist dogma still survive on college campuses and in leftist enclaves like Concord. And ponder that current Russian dictator Vladimir Putin once headed the KGB—the Soviet secret police.

Communism is the mortal enemy of western liberal democracy, where freedom and wealth creation create such a stark contrast with Marxist failures. Consider Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, et al.

Indeed, Communist China today represents an existential threat to American interests, values, and way of life.

So why does Concord now have a new historical marker—a plaque—honoring the memory of a felonious local traitor?

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was an avowed Communist who spent time in prison after being convicted of advocating for the overthrow of our American government. She died in 1964, in Moscow, of all places, where she was given a state funeral in Red Square by sworn American enemies. “Progressives” who railed against statues of Robert E Lee—and even some of our founders—are in high dudgeon as they sing the praises of Flynn. Just let that sink in.

Pressed by these misguided leftist activists, local decision-makers are guilty of a colossal misjudgment vis-à-vis the marker. So now what?

 

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The contest was about to start, and the two coin bank prizes were on display. One coin bank was the coolest ever. It was a mechanical Rooster that when presented with a coin, would reach down with its beak, pick up the coin and deposit it into a nest-like bank.

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The other coin bank prize was an ugly pink ceramic piggy bank. Excitement was in the air. Which team would win the Rooster coin bank and use it for the whole school year?

The 1964 Long Island first-grade class was divided into boys and girls {back then, this was not an issue}, and each team chose a champion. The little boy won, and as his team cheered, he went to claim the prize. When the teacher offered the little boy the coveted rooster coin bank, he shook his head. As his team stared in disbelief, he chose the ugly pink piggy bank. It turns out the boys in the class just assumed their champion would represent them, and now they were stuck with the ugly pink piggybank booby prize.

In 2016 Chris Sununu, with the help of his family name and reputation, won a tight Republican primary and the governorship. With a Sununu in the corner office, New Hampshire Republicans breathed easier. After all, his brother and father had been solid Republicans. Pro-life, anti-tax, and always practiced Reagan’s first commandment of (say no ill about another Republican). The young Sununu seemed to be following suit. There was some background noise that he was pro-choice, but Sununu kept a low profile on the issue. In 2018 he won a close reelection contest, and without his vetoes over a majority NH Democrat House and Senate, New Hampshire would have become Massachusetts.

Then things changed, and an entitled arrogance emerged. Publicly Bad-mouthing other Republicans who disagreed with him. He even resorted to profanity, calling former President Trump F—ing crazy in front of a group of 100 progressive Washington DC Democrats {including Congressman Adam Schiff}. When redistricting came to New Hampshire, the Governor initially supported a map that tilted one district in favor of Republicans. Suddenly he did an about-face, describing the new districts as having a bad odor and killing the bill with a veto threat. Effectively throwing 200 Republican representatives and 12 NH State Senators under the bus.

In 2021 Governor Sununu signed a State Budget bill that had attached to it one of the most permissive abortion laws in the country. Only after 24 weeks was the procedure not allowed. Finally protecting viable intrauterine babies. From that moment on Sununu has tried to sabotage the bill. Recently supporting the removal of any penalties for performing the post-24-week baby-killing procedure. Knowing full well if a law has no teeth, there is no law.

In 2022 Governor Sununu was the odds-on favorite to flip a NH US Senate seat to the Republicans but instead, he froze the field and when he finally decided against the run it was too late to recruit a competitive candidate. The vulnerable Democrat US Senator raised 40 million dollars and flooded NH with propaganda, defining all Republican candidates as extremists. Yet, despite the concerted opposition, 2 weeks before the 2022 election the polls showed the Republican candidates were doing well and Sununu publicly took credit, implying the candidates were on his coattails. When once again the tide shifted, Sununu turned on his fellow Republicans, labeling them as extremists, adding fuel to the Democrat propaganda narrative. When the election was over NH Republicans had lost all the Federal races, most of its NH House majority, and self-serving Governor Sununu won reelection.

America desperately needs a promise-keeping President who is not formed by or is motivated by the political process that perverts the will of the electorate. The country received a taste of this when Donald J Trump was President. His accomplishments dwarf all recent presidents except perhaps Ronald Reagan. Despite his well-documented personal flaws; the fundamental reason why he was successful was because he was a true outsider who could not be bought and tried to hold the corrupt swamp of Washington DC accountable.

There is one candidate who is a true outsider, not tainted by the political swamp, and his name is Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy is articulate with well-thought-out positions, which he does not hide. He may not win the nomination but his presence in any debate will force all the candidates to sharpen their message or go home. Perhaps one of the politicians {think Governors DeSantis and Haley} will rise above political rhetoric and speak to America’s real needs, and mean it. Or perhaps President Trump might re-invigorate his game by reacting to the real possibility of being upstaged by a young powerful version of himself.

In-depth vetting of the Republican Presidential candidates is imperative, and Vivek’s presence will ensure it happens. If not, America could end up like the 1st grade Long Island boys’ team. Wondering how their champion {think Chris Sununu} could turn his back on those who gave him the opportunity to lead. Saddling all of them with an ugly Pink Piggy Bank booby prize

Because in this case, it is not just an ugly pink piggy bank that is at stake. The next Presidential election is for the soul of America, and everything we hold dear is the prize.

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