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

Take heart – there will be both a Wednesday and Friday Edition.  Last week’s Friday Edition.

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 ***

 

 

And don’t forget my latest essay, Depopulation Speculations.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Neil Oliver: ‘ULEZ & the state we’re in!’

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

As sent to me by a Telegram contact:

Genocide of Banu Qurayza by Muslims

For anyone who tells you Islam is a religion of peace or Muhammad is a messenger of mercy…ask them to tell you about the Genocide of Banu Qurayza.

And so this person does not make up stories that Muhammad delivered chocolates and flowers to them, you can read the story here:

https://wikiislam.net/wiki/The_Massacre_of_the_Banu_Qurayzah

In short, Muhammad had a peace treaty with several Jewish tribes, some kept it and some sided with the pagans during a battle. The tribe of Banu Qurayza, stayed neutral but after seeing how savage Muhammad was with the other Jewish tribes, Banu Qurayza who counted at best 2000 are no match to Muhammad’s army of nearly 40,000 – had tried to reach out for some aliance elsewhere – although they strongly denied that.

The reality is that Muhammad had already decided he wanted to clear Arabia of all none muslims in this hadith.

Sunan Abi Dawud 3030

Jabir bin ‘Abd Allah said that he was told by ‘Umar bin Al Khattab that he heard the Apostle of Allaah(ﷺ) say “I will certainly expel the Jews and the Christians from Arabia and I shall leave only Muslims in it.” (Graded Sahih)

https://sunnah.com/abudawud:3030

What happened next stains the image of Islam and Muhammad forever. An absolute massacre. The tribe were attacked in the morning and they put up very little resistance. Muhammad accused them of treason for which they could not have any fair trial. Women and girls taken as slaves and sex slaves, men and boys killed. In one shocking incident presents in the Hadith, a mother pleads with Muhammad to save her boy who is only 13. Muhammad asks his men to strip him to see if he has a pubic hair (evidence that he is now an adult) and it turned out he has one single hair!!

The boy was slaughtered.

This was not just a policy against Banu Qurayza, this was standard policy of Muhammad against all the tribes as shown in the authentic hadith:

https://sunnah.com/search?q=Pubic+hair+boy

Can you not feel the love? Can you not feel the mercy of Islam?

So here’s a little more about that massacre:

 

 

I’d also strongly suggest understanding the Treaty of Hudaibiya.  Especially Jews who are feting the Abraham Accords.

 

Is Islam Religion of Peace? A Brief History by Brigitte Gabriel (heb sub)

 

 

Now, I was visiting a majority-Muslim country this summer.  While I didn’t wear my kippa – no point in being provocative where I don’t know the laws or language (and all I needed was one guy with a Jihad-mindset and a knife) – I was told by the local Chabad Rabbi that many of the Jews in his congregation do wear them out in public.  Interesting; then again, it’s not an ARAB country.  My wife, as I’ve said, is – nominally – a Muslim (in reality an atheist); our children are being raised as Jews and were converted in a Mikveh too.  Everyone there was friendly; one of my cousins-in-law drove me to that Shul for a Shabbat service to facilitate my going.

However, understand that anti-Semitism is hard-coded into the Koran.

Islamic Jew-Hatred – Geller Report

Antisemitism in the Qur’an – Winds of Jihad (sheikyermami.com)

Do I hope Islam can be reformed in a large way?  Yes.  I know there are Muslims trying to push it.  Certainly I have no stomach for slaughter in a global jihad struggle.  Meanwhile, paging the “Co-exist” symbols, here are three versions of my own:

 

 

 

 

You could do far, far worse than to visit Political Islam and perusing to start learning about Islam.  Also, their resource store:

Products Archive – Political Islam

And definitely learn about the forms of Sacred Deception.  Two videos from Dr. Bill Warner:

 

Bill Warner, PhD: Sacred Deception — Taqiyya

 

 

 

Bill Warner, PhD: Deception in Political Islam

 

 

And more on the rolling Islamic conquest:

THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS: NYC mayor will allow mosque loudspeakers to blare

Along with a chilling video about Muslim demographics:

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Muslim-Demographics_360p.mp4

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

One of these sets of “bellwether counties” is not like the other.

 

 

 

EXPOSED: Whistleblower Steps Forward – Reveals Private Facebook Group Where MI Clerks Discuss STUNNING Evidence of Organized Fraud in 2020 Election | The Gateway Pundit | by Ben Wetmore, Patty McMurray, and Jim Hoft

90 Miles From Tyranny : Mystery Swirls Over Batch of Thousands of 2020 Voter Registration Forms in Michigan (ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com)

Guaranteed it didn’t just happen in Michigan.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paging a quote from Thomas Jefferson:

I have a right to nothing which another has a right to take away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA – PSA

 

U.S. Cities Participating in Program to Eliminate Private Transportation and Dairy, Meat Consumption by 2030 (legalinsurrection.com)

I have this vision of a lava flow moving through a forest.  Slowly, but inexorably, consuming everything as it pushes forward.  That’s the image I see of the watermelon progress.  Still think you’re going to protest and vote your way out of this?

 

 

Just Living Your Life… Under the Watchful Eyes of the Swamp – Flopping Aces

Things get very much more difficult when you are surveilled 24/7 for wrongthink.  Meanwhile, back at the IRS:

Leo Hohmann: Why is the IRS Buying .40-Caliber Submachine Guns? | The Gateway Pundit | by Guest Contributor

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Covid and Medicine Related:

 

 

HERE WE GO: New Yorkers Told to MASK UP For Labor Day Due to New Covid Variant | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

 

 

 

 

 

I’m torn.  Certainly, people who thought this way early on, I could forgive this.  But, as I asked a medical doctor I know who has awakened but said “How could we have known early on”?, my question was “Then how did I know”?  It wasn’t that the data weren’t there… it was that there was the fear porn, not to mention medical boards and enemedia, suppressing dissent and questioning.  Plus social pressure.  Plus the fact that the Jab made them feel like they mattered.

—

What I have to say is unprintable – Liberty’s Torch (libertystorch.info)

RTWT.

—

The Collaborators Will Kill Us All | Dr Vernon Coleman

Video.

—

NYC Migrants in Temp Shelters Still Don’t Need Vaccinations to Enroll in School (legalinsurrection.com)

But US citizens / residents will.  Reading between the lines, one could legitimately infer they want legal residents weakened or dead, to presumably be replaced by these illegals.

—

Half of Vaccinated People Never Stop Producing Spike Protein, Study Found (igor-chudov.com) (link in original):

A clever scientific study by Brogna et al., just published, detected the presence of spike protein in COVID-vaccinated people six MONTHS after vaccination – and excluded the possibility of cross-contamination of experimental data with wild-circulating COVID infections.

Let me repeat this.  They detected the presence of spike protein production SIX MONTHS after injection.  Raising the spectre of reverse transcription into DNA.  As I worried.

Dark Thoughts in the Small Hours – Granite Grok

Also see here:

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/mccollough-on-reverse-transcription.mp4

 

—

 

The Jab was pushed very hard in Israel, with many – including my friends and family – complying.  I think in part the uptake was so high because few Jews could envision fellow Jews knowingly doing something this evil to them.  Though on a call to a customer care center in Israel for something I was ordering from there, I was told that resistance and non-compliance was a lot stronger than was reported.  And this Rabbi captures a lot.

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/rabbi-speaks-about-the-new-nazis.mp4

 

 

 

 

They lied.  Myriad lies by myriad liars.  Why do people believe them now?

 

 

Bet he’s a blast at parties.  He should go get another booster after taking choline supplements for 4-5 weeks.

 

 

 

More and more I am suspecting this is intentional.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

I’ve mentioned Israeli journalist Efrat Fenigson before.  She’s going to a conference on fighting CBDC.

 

 

You’re The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson | Substack

She’s anti-CBDC, anti-Jab, and pro-liberty.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assuming there IS a 2024 election… and assuming it’s fair (hah!)… if Hawaii still votes blue they deserve what they get.  Sorry, not sorry.

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Vivek:

 

 

Look, I don’t want to pick on the guy specifically.  But as I said before, something strikes me as “not right” here.  So, in his favor:

Ramaswamy: Today’s Politicians Are “Hollowed Out Husks Serving As Puppets” To The Globalist Machine – Summit News

And disfavor:

WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy Flip-Flops on One Issue After Another (freebeacon.com)

Let me be clear on something.  I don’t mind that people change their mind – but cite what changed it.  But then positive again:

Vivek Ramaswamy Pledges To Pardon Julian Assange, Anti-American Publisher of US Secrets (freebeacon.com)

And negative:

WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy Rules Out Use of Military Force Against Iran (freebeacon.com)

No, I’m not itching for war with Iran.  But without that potential stick to compare against the carrot, there’s no deterrence.

Again, make up your own mind.  But something – again, just MHO – just doesn’t feel right.

 

 

Do consider the date on that.  In fairness, people can legitimately change their mind.  In this case, asking him if he’s changed, and why he changed, is fair game!

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

There Is No Going Back Home – According To Hoyt

RTWT.  But:

And no one can save us from what’s to come, no matter how “presidential” and “calm” he is. Nothing will make the democrats sane again. Not until they are deprogrammed from their cult, and the scales fall from their eyes. Or they die, which given the age of their leadership is not so far distant.

There is no perfect option.  There are no perfect men.  But at least Trump fights.

 

 

 

Memo to GOP Field: Does No One Have the Wit to Attack the Bossy State? | Power Line (powerlineblog.com)

No.  They’re all too busy attending the “beautiful people” cocktail parties and feathering their nests at the taxpayer’s expense.  That’s why they won’t touch the Deep State’s pursuit of Trump with a 39 ½ foot pole.

 

 

Ruling Class Mulls Civil War Measures To Bar Trump From 2024 (thefederalist.com)

Is Trump perfect?  Far from it.  But when so many disparate forces want to find any pretext to keep him from even entering the fray, let alone be on the main ballot, I have to think they’re desperately afraid of him.  Related – FascistTube censoring the fact that Democrats questioned elections too:

YouTube Demonetizes Matt Orfeala’s Entire Channel For Making a Video Proving That Democrats Are Hardcore “Election Deniers” And Have Repeatedly Committed Insurrection – Flopping Aces

This is a good time to plug the Grok’s fundraising drive.  Please help support independent journalism.  Because the enemedia lies.  Lies like rugs they lie.

From One Unapologetic Media Hoax to the Next › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Money And The Processes At Work – Liberty’s Torch (libertystorch.info)

Today’s dollar is approaching complete worthlessness. If we use the price of gold as a measure, the dollar’s purchasing power is less than 2% of what it was in 1944, when the Bretton Woods meetings took place. This correlates well with other, more “relatable” commodities such as food, clothing, and automobiles. If we use single-family houses as the measure, the picture is even worse, though that’s partly because of the deductibility of mortgage interest and property taxes in one’s income tax calculations.

Bustednuckles sees the rampant inflation as a precursor to the “digital dollar,” which is likely to be correct. The masters of the Federal Reserve system are pushing hard for that change, and for the concomitant elimination of physical cash. No one I’ve spoken to is enthused about that, for a variety of reasons I need not repeat here. But whether or not the Federal Reserve manages to impose it on us, it’s likely to come up hard against a vital fact that overshadows everything else about money, currency, and banking:

People
— Not central bankers nor politicians —
Decide what is (and is not) money.

 

I remember, dimly, some (African?) nation that “fought” hyperinflation by issuing new currency.  But many people didn’t really turn in their old notes.  As this new currency also started to hyperinflate people went back to the old currency which – though not officially recognized – became the de facto currency by dint of its now-rarity.

 

 

I asked my financial advisor what he’s buying.  He said “Canned goods, guns, and ammo”.

Gas prices are soaring toward an all-time Labor Day weekend high | Not the Bee

Germany: Record Amount of Shrinkflation and Deceptive Packaging Helps Hide Inflation From Consumers

 

 

The dollar’s going to fall.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IIRC it was over $300 million in “royalty payments” to government officials who work / regulate Big Pharma that those officials didn’t need to disclose.

 

 

 

>>>>=====<<<<<

 

SHOCKING Body Cam Footage: School Board Calls Police on ‘Unrecognized’ & ‘Trumpish’ Citizens!

 

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Pick of the post:

 

 

Another way to put it.  Does a person want to have a discussion or an argument?  In a discussion, you converse to learn what is right, and start out with the principle that there is a possibility you are wrong.  In an argument you each browbeat to prove who is right.

I’m willing to have discussions about what is right.  My claws come out when someone switches to arguing trying to prove they’re right regardless of what facts are.  Especially when they can’t present facts while I can.  (Surak once told me, in an email in which I cited chapter and verse on the Jab and its effects – something we agree on – that he’d hate to get into an argument with me because of my memory on things like this.  It reminds me of an argument I had with someone on gun control and whether it cuts crime.  Heh.  They ran.)

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Collected links with commentary, no subjects (too much time in that):

 

What if the ‘out of Africa’ theory is wrong? | The Spectator Australia (archive.ph)

I don’t want to get into a Creationist vs. Evolutionist argument here.  (For the record I’m the latter.)  Rather, the point is that there needs to be free exchange and debate in a science – and the humility to admit that what’s known might need to be changed as new data come forth.  See my comment about discussions vs. arguments above.

The underlined above is sorely lacking in today’s “climate science”, as one example.

—

Court Denies School’s Attempt to Give Teachers Qualified Immunity To Escape Accountability With Parents – The Lid (lidblog.com)

Like most leftists, they hate free speech and want the authoritarian power to control everything people do.

The leftist school district wanted qualified immunity to act with impunity to ban the free speech of parents and children alike.

—

In a nutshell (coldfury.com)

Spicy time definitely approacheth.  Two embedded quotes:

That’s the discussion we’re having. The people Angelo Codevilla called the American ruling class, the hegemonic academic-political-media hive people, are now casually discussing Trump and Trump voters as a conquered people who have to be dominated and kept out of the system of self-government. Because Trump is a dangerous authoritarian, you see. 

And later (bolding added):

Let’s take the phrase “inexorably threatened” and parse it a bit. Per Merriam-Webster, “inexorable” means “not to be persuaded, moved, or stopped.” What he’s saying — the reason his handlers chose that descriptor — is that there is no longer any need to try to persuade the public of their climate change scam because the “deniers” are individuals who cannot be reasoned with. On a societal level, what does one do with an existential threat that cannot be reasoned with because words are meaningless to it? One goes to war with it.

 

Remember, I used to be a “climate alarmist” and changed my mind.

Do any of these steps sound familiar in light of what Kerry and others say about “deniers”?

 

 

Related to the first part of the above essay:

Poll: 30 Million Democrats Support Extreme Violence to Keep Trump from Winning in 2024 – The Lid (lidblog.com)

A university poll finds that Democrats are a danger to the republic, as 30 million of them apparently feel that extreme violence to keep Trump from office in 2024 is justified.

—

Biggest Drone Attack On Russia Since War Began Destroys At Least 4 Military Planes | ZeroHedge

As the article notes (bolding and links in the original):

Crucially, Pskov is a mere 20 miles from NATO member Estonia’s border, which sparked internet rumors that Estonia could have been involved, also given the city of Pskov is over 400 miles from Ukraine itself. International outlets are citing Russia’s TASS to report that at least four military transport planes were damaged in the attack.

If – and this is IF – Estonia was involved, that’s casus belli from a NATO member.  If the Russians get evidence of NATO involvement in this… things could go sideways.  Fast.  Related:

Tucker: US in Hot War With Russia Within a Year – Summit News

Remember my contention – that the Globalists need to push the world into nuclear war for two reasons:

First, when nukes have flown, nobody’s going to care about bribery or corruption or anything.  Or how much of the world’s wealth they’ve already siphoned off.

Second, again after nukes, the catastrophic effects – direct and following – on populations will mask the coming Jab-pocalypse effect on the population and fertility.  (And any attempts to deliberately block the sun – because “global warming” – will be blamed on “nuclear winter”; it would not surprise me if they had the aerosol-laden rockets filled and ready, waiting for when people are too distracted by other rockets already flying.)

Related to world (in)stability:

The Rude Awakening – Vox Popoli (voxday.net)

—

Defending Pets (armedcitizensnetwork.org)

FYI.  Now this is when the system / society is functioning.  In a SHTF situation, things are likely to be different.  When it’s a looting thug vs. your guard dog?  Related to self defense:

Why I dislike doors with windows. – Gun Free Zone

The Gun Blog Black List: Biden’s Proposed Rule Will Eliminate Private Gun Sales – Ammoland.com

 

 

—

Iranian Immigrant Law Student Encounters America’s Own Revolutionary Guard (legalinsurrection.com)

The treatment she’s getting – i.e., SHUT UP – reminds me of the treatments refugees from Communist countries get by the blue-check Socialist nitwits.

—

‘Smart tattoos’ injected into the skin could someday monitor your health | CNN

Just. No.  Remember Yuval and his creeepy obsession with biometric surveillance under your skin.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Monday Music:

 

Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffett – It’s Five O’ Clock Somewhere (Official HD Video)

 

 

RIP Jimmy.  Have a Hurricane in Margaritaville.  (Song chosen before he passed.)

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

Palate Cleansers:

 

 

A thief with honor.

—

—

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

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

 

The post Memestream News: Monday Edition appeared first on Granite Grok.

Sure looks like the FBI has planted scores of agents in a couple of NeoNazi groups that recently demonstrated in Florida. Problem for the Feds was the leader of one of these groups said on camera that he supports Biden because of Biden’s support for Ukraine. Needless to say, if you depend on the Regime-media for news, you have no idea. We later learned that one of the “Nazis” is actually a Nazi … he served in the Ukrainian Azov Brigade.

Oops! Marching Nazi Forgets His Lines – Tell Reporters He’s a Biden Supporters (VIDEO) via @gatewaypundit https://t.co/cQSlmCHKsn

— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) September 3, 2023

Until the DOJ explains why Ray Epps has not been prosecuted, I’m going to assume that all “far-right radical extremists” are feds. https://t.co/4CSRP6A20R

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) September 3, 2023

LOL – paid actors and feds. Can't stop laughing at their brand new clean uniforms, flags, and hoodies. https://t.co/vuFf8c7VBe

— Catturd (@catturd2) September 3, 2023

They aren’t far right. They are Nazis who were on camera saying they want to vote for Joe Biden because they support the Azov Battalion and Biden keeps sending Ukrainian Nazi militias money.

How do I know? Because I was in Altamonte Springs today and I was verbally harassed on… https://t.co/abYuPNKAzr pic.twitter.com/HV154I3bAc

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) September 3, 2023

 

The post Nazis For Biden appeared first on Granite Grok.

We’ve explained why Ivermectin had to be beaten down. The Public Health Industrial Complex could never have imposed the vaccine plan if it was a viable treatment. Two years later, the Davids continue to fight Goliath, and Ivermectin has notched a few wins.

Related: The Next Time Someone Accuses You of Vaccine Misinformation, Give Them a Dose of This Medicine

 

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, one of three doctors who initially filed the charges, trumpeted the ruling as a victory for not only the truth, but patient rights.

“The FDA misled the public into thinking it has more authority than it does,” Dr. Bowden, a practitioner and founder of Coalition of Health Freedom, told The Epoch Times. “This decision confirms that the FDA is not your doctor and has no authority to tell doctors how to practice medicine.”

Judge Don Willett wrote for the three person panel that also included Jennifer Walker Elrod and Edith Brown Clement. “The Doctors have plausibly alleged that FDA’s Posts fell on the wrong side of the line between telling about and telling to.”

“FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise—but not to endorse, denounce, or advise. The Doctors have plausibly alleged that FDA’s Posts fell on the wrong side of the line between telling about and telling to. As such, the Doctors can use the APA to assert their ultra vires claims against the Agencies and the Officials.”

 

We reported on Dr. Bowden’s lawsuit last October. “Defendant FDA has improperly exploited misunderstandings about the legality and prevalence of off-label uses of medication, in order to mislead courts, state medical boards, and the public into thinking there is anything improper about off-label prescribing,” AAPS writes in its amicus brief to the court. “Not only is off-label prescribing fully proper, legal, and commonplace, but it is also absolutely necessary in order to give effective care to patients.”

 

AAPS General Counsel Andrew Schlafly pointed out to the court that the FDA “has engaged in a campaign of interference with the proper use by physicians of ivermectin, which has long been approved as fully safe for human use.” He alerted the court that once the FDA approves a medication as safe, then physicians have full authority to prescribe it to treat any illness, particularly a novel virus like Covid-19.

When sued, the FDA tried to get out from under its heavy-handedness by insisting that “The cited statements were not directives. They were not mandatory. They were recommendations. They said what parties should do. They said, for example, why you should not take Ivermectin to treat COVID-19. They did not say you may not do it, you must not do it. They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful.”

A fine thing to say after the fact, but why then would the FDA do nothing to contradict the tidal wave of false reporting by the media, aped by public health officials, some of whom used the FDA’s “non-directives” to justify punishing doctors of pharmacists for trying to prescribe or fill orders for Ivermectin.

They took the FDA’s headline to heart: “Why you should not use Ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.” Even the FBI took them seriously, working with Social Media to suppress narratives contradicting a wide range of “statements” from government agencies or officials.

And the FDA never said stop. It never stepped up to a podium bristling with press microphones to state that doctors could prescribe Ivermectin off-label to treat COVID for their patients. It couldn’t even be bothered to send an email saying Hey, we never said that, and if we did, that’s not what we meant… until they got sued.

The result?

 

A federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled on Friday that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had overstepped its authority in their ruling that three doctors will be able to move forward with their lawsuit over the use of ivermectin off-label to treat COVID-19

That’s a win, but not the first. 

 

On Aug. 8 a lawyer representing the FDA confirmed that doctors were allowed to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID.

“FDA explicitly recognizes that doctors do have the authority to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID,” Ashley Cheung Honold, a Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

 

Unless I missed it, there was no tidal wave of reporting regarding the August 8th statement, and the FDA does not appear to have done anything to ensure it was.

 

Dr. Bowden claims that despite the endorsement from the FDA, the practice of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for ivermectin continues.

 

It is not much use for the FDA to claim physicians can prescribe something pharmacists won’t fill while the media and the Public Health Industrial Complex have plenty of time to talk about COVID-19 vaccines, masking up, and boosters.

Ivermectin has won a few battles, but the war against it continues.

 

 

The post Ivermectin Use Against COVID-19 Notches a Win appeared first on Granite Grok.

hurricane Idalia left a path of destruction across Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina this week. It was a big, impactful, dangerous storm that has negatively impacted thousands of lives, like so many big and powerful storms that have made landfall in the United States.

That said, as most of the legacy media continues to inundate Americans with all manner of hype and efforts to link Idalia to climate change, it also should be noted that there is nothing unprecedented or even all that unusual about this storm. It’s a big one for sure, but so were Hurricanes Harvey and Ike and Rita and Katrina and Ivan and many more storms that came before it.

One report on Twitter/X posted Wednesday by meteorologist Phillip Klotzbach says, “For the first time since 1950, the Atlantic has two 110+ mph #hurricanes in August simultaneously (#Franklin and #Idalia).” In response, another Twitter user noted 71% of industrial-age human-caused CO2 emissions have taken place during the period between 1950 and today.

Yet we are asked by our government to accept the notion that human CO2 emissions are the major cause of climate change, and climate change is supposedly creating increasingly powerful and more frequent storms. None of that science is supported logically or factually by that look back at history.

A look even further back through hurricane history reminds us that the Great Galveston Storm of 1900 remains the deadliest weather-related catastrophe in U.S. history. The 1900 storm inundated the entire extent of Galveston Island, bringing with it a 15-foot storm surge, taking the lives of an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 souls. Notably, that is the same level of surge created by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Visitors to Galveston can still observe the high water marks the storm left on buildings that survived the horrible storm. It is fair to note here that, again, according to scientists, the 1900 storm took place prior to more than 95% of CO2 emissions from the industrial era had come about. According to official data kept by NOAA, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1900 was about 295 ppm compared to about 420 ppm today.

 

 

Well, what about hurricane strength and frequency, then? Data since 1851 kept by the U.S. National Hurricane Center and Central Pacific Hurricane center shows no discernible upwards trend in either category over time. Indeed, the period from 1851 through 1900 was more active in terms of the number of hurricane strikes on the U.S. mainland than were the 50 years from 1971 through 2020.

In terms of intensity of the storms, the decade from 1941 through 1950 produced 10 landfalls by category 3 or higher storms, compared to just 4 such landfalls across the most recent decade of 2011 through 2020. In fact, that most recent decade produced the fewest intense storms on record since 1901 through 1910.

 

 

These are not opinions but simple, undisputed facts that are easily found by any curious person with access to a computer who knows how to conduct an Internet search. Do any of these facts mean that the scientists and media hype surrounding hurricanes and climate change are wrong? Not necessarily.

But they do mean that the reality we are able to actually observe is not in any real way conforming to the output of computer models the scientists invariably rely upon as the basis for their pronouncements that are eagerly parroted by cooperative, incurious media platforms.

Until such observations begin conforming to all the hype and fright rhetoric coming from the likes of Al Gore, John Kerry, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a major portion of our population will remain skeptical that we are being told the truth about any of this. Americans are funny that way.

 

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

David Blackmon | Daily Caller News Service

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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The post Should We Believe The Media Hype Linking Hurricane Idalia To Climate Change? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Vermont once had, at least in my Normal Rockwell-esque memory, a sense of independence and a toe-hold on sanity. That place Calvin Coolidge called home. It is an image long since painted over by the political Left, replaced with a fawning portrait of Mao.

There were signs aplenty along the decline, from growing budgets to more restrictions on natural rights to infringement on energy freedom, education freedom, and health freedom. The embrace of the borderless society, allowing illegals to vote (Burlington), defunding police, and the rising crime that followed, and a descent into a malaise that strikes a people when confronted with a Democrat-Socialist culture that swears every vote matters but only ever listens to itself.

Porn in schools. Genderless bathrooms. A Narcan vending machine in Johnson, Vermont.

They are very excited.

 

JOHNSON, Vt. —Aug. 31 is International Overdose Awareness Day, and Vermont’s first naloxone vending machine is up and running in the village of Johnson.

The vending machine serves as the state’s latest step in ending overdose deaths.

“Every person in this community has the chance to live another day,” said Dawn Tatro, a co-founder of Jenna’s Promise.

 

Johnson, VT, has a population of approximately 3,491. It is quaint and picturesque, and it needs a Narcan vending machine.

 

 

The vending machine is outside of the Johnson Health Center and provides anonymous, 24/7 access to the life-saving drug naloxone, also known as Narcan.

“It’s [in] a central location; it’s going to be free to community members — no questions asked,” said Dr. Gail Rose with the UVM Center on Rural Addiction.

It’s the latest step for the community in fighting a problem that hits close to home for many.

“My daughter wasn’t [overdose death] 330, she was Jenna Tatro, 26 years old. And maybe, if we had something like this here, we could have prevented that,” said Tatro.

According to Wikipedia, it is home to Northern Vermont University, so that might mean something, but from 30,000 feet, should it? How does a small town in Northern Vermont find itself in such dire straights as to need a Narcan vending machine so randos can access overdose meds?

Narcan can save lives, so I’m not saying they shouldn’t have it, but isn’t the issue how or why you even need it? What circumstances led to this being necessary, and is anyone interested in reversing them? Why is this normal and acceptable?

Or is this how we deal with the decline of America in places like Johnson, Vermont? Watch it from a drug-induced haze, and if, by chance, we get carried away, perhaps someone will dose us with Narcan and drag us back to reality. Maybe plan ahead and get a free dose before you go off the reservation.

That’s how we live now?

Johnson is Vermont’s first. I tried to get a sense of how many of these there are in the US, and the best guess from May was about 200. I expect that there are more of them now. You could probably put 200 in Los Angeles or New York City and barely make a dent.

Isn’t that some sort of sign?

Hey, open borders goobers. Why not let cartels put Fentanyl machines near the Narcan machines? Or, ask them to hand them out when they deliver the drugs. Living addicts will make them richer than dead ones, and there isn’t much effort to stop the drugs.

Next door in New Hampshire, a increasingly shorter step to your right, a MA man was sentenced to five years for conspiring to move 20 pounds of Fentanyl.

People who walked into the US Capitol to take a selfie on Jan 6 face more time than that guy.

WTF?

 

 

HT | NBC5

The post Vermont’s Culture – Or What’s Left of it. appeared first on Granite Grok.

Tucker makes an excellent point … when you start trying to jail your political opponents (the four bogus indictments of Trump), you have crossed a political rubicon. You cannot give up power because your opponents may do onto you what you did to them. So anything goes. Tucker, however, does not believe that Covid 2.0 will be what the Biden-Regime uses to maintain power. He believes that the Regime will “Tonkin gulf” us into a hot war with Russia in order to allow the Regime to use “war powers” to even further rig our already rigged elections.

I sure hope that he is wrong. The lunatics running the Biden-Regime’s military, cheered on and egged on by GOP lunatics like Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham, could easily cause a nuclear war and the end of humanity.

Tucker Carlson Says There Will Be a Hot War w/ Russia Within the Next Year

"They can't lose. They will do anything to win. So how do they do that? They're not going to do COVID again…They're going to go to war with Russia is what they're going to do. There will be a hot war… pic.twitter.com/SlVxQDtzeL

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) August 30, 2023

And just because I love to infuriate the GOP warmongers, here is Douglas MacGregor’s assessment of how we would fare in a hot war against Russia:

If we intervene in western Ukraine the Russians will be ready for it.

The consequences for the United States and NATO will be devastating..pic.twitter.com/cRQwajsmME

— Douglas Macgregor (@DougAMacgregor) September 2, 2023

 

The post Tucker Believes The Biden-Regime’s “October Surprise” Will Be A Hot War With A Russia appeared first on Granite Grok.

In 2016, the human rights violations in Africa fueling the technology future were well known and documented by none other than Amnesty International, which released a report on “the hazardous conditions in which artisanal miners, including thousands of children, mine cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Chinese mines in countries like Congo, Indonesia, and others have few, if any, environmental controls and little in the way of oversight, pay locals very little to work or collect Cobalt and other rare earth metals necessary for companies like Tesla, Apple, LG, Samsung, and others, who create the devices Westerners crave.

Things their societies won’t live without and are the backbone of the Left’s supposed Net Zero future.

 

UNICEF estimated in 2014 that approximately 40,000 boys and girls work in all the mines across southern DRC, many of them involved in cobalt mining. The children interviewed by researchers described the physically demanding nature of the work they did. They said that they worked for up to 12 hours a day in the mines, carrying heavy loads, to earn between one and two dollars a day. Even those children who went to school worked 10 – 12 hours during the weekend and school holidays, and in the time before and after school. The children who were not attending school worked in the mines all year round.

 

We’ve covered the issue a few times, but until this week, I was unaware of the Amnesty International report, which predates the Biden ramp-up, the piecemeal imposition of the Green New Deal, and the full-spectrum dominance approach to imposing environmental policy. It is proof that the offshoring of emissions, ecological devastation, and human suffering predates that ramp-up alongside mining operations that enrich China, a nation with an abysmal human rights record at home and a self-declared mortal enemy of the United States.

Any notion that China cares about African locals is absurd, but they do care about projecting power. Hence, they burn dirty coal to build green tech they then sell to the West that then ignores the short and long-term harm while laying claim to a greenwashed moral superiority.

But there is no energy future without fossil fuels.

You can’t make steel without coke from coal or energy-intensive aluminum.

80% of the sulfur “required for the production of phosphorus fertiliser and manufacturing lightweight electric motors and high-performance lithium-ion batteries” comes from the desulfurization of fossil fuels. Banning or reducing the use or access to fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides will dramatically drop global food production, with some estimates suggesting that 40-60% of the world (mostly likely the third world) would starve to death.

Related: Not Even a Pencil Could Exist without Fossil Fuels

The Left likes to whine about Colonialism and Settlers wiping out societies in favor of their preferred lifestyles and livelihoods. What would they say about embracing an energy policy that results in 4 billion brown people starving to death?

Is it environmental justice when your programs are pogroms?

Children are dying, and entire ecosystems are being destroyed, so you can smugly attest to how much empathy you have for a planet your “planet-saving” priorities are destroying.

 

The post Another Look at the Human Cost of Net Zero and The Green Agenda appeared first on Granite Grok.

The most important issue that this country faces is its rapid spiral into a Police State. It’s far, far, far more important than inflation, the debt, Ukraine, etc., etc., etc.. For example, how are you going to get rid of DEI and CRT … the systemic brainwashing of America’s children in order to turn them into unwavering, unquestioning foot-soldiers of the Communists Democrats, the equivalent of Mao’s Red Guards … when the Communists Democrats make it a crime to criticize DEI/CRT? It can’t happen you say. You haven’t been paying attention.

For more than two years, the corrupt USDOJ … aided and abetted by corrupt DC  judges (including judges appointed by Trump) … has been conducting a Robespierre-like reign of terror against Trump voters, with the objective of making people afraid to criticize rigged-elections. In stark contrast, rioters who bombed, burned and looted cities during the 2020 “summer of love,” in order to turn voters away from Trump and to Biden, have gotten a comparative “slap on the wrist”:

A man just got 17 years in prison for tearing down a fence on January 6. Meanwhile a guy responsible for burning an entire police station to the ground during the BLM riots got only 4 years. No sane person thinks this is justice. pic.twitter.com/5HUh04x7uu

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 31, 2023

 

Yet all we get from the GOP Presidential candidates is … at the most … some pablum about how he is going to somehow “end the weaponization of government.” And when the “GOP” House fully funds the corrupt USDOJ and FBI in the coming months, we won’t hear a word of criticism of Kevin at-best-useless McCarthy from these Presidential candidates.

The GOP, in the aggregate (there are some exceptions … for example, Julie Kelly has been exposing the J6 political-persecutios from the outset), just wants to pretend that it’s all somehow going to go away after the last J6’r is locked up. It’s NOT. The federal judiciary is packed with faux-judges nominated by Obama and Biden who have zero fidelity to the constitution and the rule of law, and total fidelity to their political ideology. And it’s only a matter of time until the Communists Democrats start using the State courts against their political enemies the same way the Biden-regime’s DOJ is using the federal courts to prevent Trump from winning the Presidency a third time. For example:

REPORT: The Los Angeles City Council voted to pursue a lawsuit and criminal probe against Gov. Greg Abbott and the State of Texas for busing illegal aliens to the city.

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) August 31, 2023

 

The post But Just Keep Pretending America Is Not A Police State … Part (I’ve Lost Track) appeared first on Granite Grok.

This week, the US Government held an auction for major wind projects in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s bad news: The US Interior Department tried to lease out three wind blocks in the Gulf of Mexico off the shores of Texas and Louisiana.  There were zero bids for the two wind blocks in Texas.

We want to thank Mark Abear for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
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There was one bid for the Louisiana wind block.

The Louisiana wind block went to a German company for about 1% of the normal offshore wind price.

• Why would we sell our energy production rights to Germany?
• Why would we do that for 1% of market value?
• Why would we sell our sovereignty for any price?  Isn’t energy independence critical to national security?
• Does national security matter?
• What happens when you don’t have it?

According to a senior wind analyst at the energy intelligence firm Wood Mackenzie, the reason why the US Government got that paltry amount is that the wind doesn’t always blow and sometimes the wind blows too much.

That is especially true in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s also true the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico is notoriously soft and silty which raises the cost of sinking wind turbines and keeping them in place.

If the Louisiana deal goes through, utility companies and residents in that state will be paying upwards of $150 per megawatt hour for this energy.   That is about double the average for similar offshore projects, according to the outlet Semafor.  This means offshore wind is around $75 to $100 per megawatt hour, give or take.

Now, compare that to nuclear at $60 or coal at $50 per megawatt hour.

If market forces were at play here, no off-shore wind projects would be built. We would not build off-shore wind projects because of how comparatively expensive they are.

So why is it that we are paying $75 to $100 per megawatt hour for the average wind power facility when we could be going with nuclear at $60 or coal at $50 per megawatt hour?  It sure seems like we would want to keep our electric bills down.

Well, here is one reason.  States like New York, Massachusetts, California, New Hampshire, and others mandate utilities serving their jurisdiction buy this expensive stuff.  The legislated mandates, followed by utility companies, are then passed off to you, the ratepayer, in your electric bill.

State and federal governments are forcing the economics of offshore wind to work. This is a masked use of governmental taxation power against you.  The government is forcing you to pay more for an essential good than you otherwise would be willing to pay.

This means your politicians, by subsidizing or mandating or both, are forcing the adoption of high-priced wind energy.  That is why there was one non-market rate bid for that Louisiana project.  That’s why, analysts say, the upcoming bids for offshore projects in Oregon and Maine are expected to do better.  How are you going to do any worse?

The states of Maine and Oregon, these states are Leftist controlled.  They have mandates and subsidies legislatively in place.  That means, eventually, the cost of those mandates and subsidies does get passed down to you, the electric rate payer.

Like it or not, your government is forcing you to pay more than is necessary for electricity.  Can you do without electricity?  So the next time you hear an offshore wind farm argument, keep that in mind. There is a lot of political funny business going on in the offshore wind power business, and you are going to be sent the bill for the decision-making that certainly should be controversial.

You are going to unnecessarily, “voluntarily,” have to pay exorbitant electric rates.  You are going to pay excessively for something you cannot do without.  Not only that, you will need more of it if you have an EV than you do today.

Leadership requires courage, commitment, communication, and competence.  It is being an effective communicator with a clear purpose, a well-defined role, a clear understanding of who you serve, what your values are, and authenticity in presentation. Who are your representatives working for?

Does political leadership today provide the best possible service at the lowest practicable cost… to you today? Why are your electric rates the highest in the nation?  Are you getting a competitive advantage from their actions?  What are these governmental actions doing to your future?

If you want to shiver in the dark because you cannot afford the electricity to light and heat your home, and you’re not going to work because you cannot afford to charge the car’s battery, our state and federal energy strategy is working.  Remember, if they sell it, you “will” buy it.  They do not tolerate debate.

The post Politicians, Wind Power, and Another Hidden Tax appeared first on Granite Grok.

Discussion of the republican debate last week; some say Vivek won, some say he looked immature; some say DeSantis won; should any candidate raise a hand at a debate or respond that way to a question? Will DeSantis be hurt by insurance laws in Florida in the aftermath of today’s hurricane? The attempt in some States to keep Trump off the ballot for taking part in an “insurrection”; Ed P. opined that Trump can’t possibly lose the nomination; others disagree; is Trump’s campaign weak because of so much money and attention to his legal issues?

The post The Conservatarian Exchange Podcast #169 appeared first on The Liberty Block.

New Hampshire voters rank affordable housing as the state’s No. 1 problem, according to a UNH Survey Center poll released on August 28. State business and political leaders agree, saying housing affordability is the top problem holding back the state’s economy.

“Oh, it’s number one,” Gov. Chris Sununu told Drew Cline, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center, on the WFEA Morning Update. “The lack of housing for middle and lower-income families is absolutely number one because…. Without the housing, you don’t have the employees. Without the employees, the businesses can’t grow. If the businesses can’t grow, then economically everything becomes stagnation.”

In June 2023, housing affordability in the state reached a new record low for the second consecutive month, according to the New Hampshire Association of Realtors. With an affordability index of 61, the state’s median household income was only 61% of what’s necessary to qualify for the median-priced single-family home at current interest rates.

At the same time, median prices for single-family homes in New Hampshire hit their highest point ever at $495,000—an increase of $30,000 from the previous month’s record high. Condos notched a record median price of $400,000 in June too.

Rents are also hitting new heights. The median cost of a two-bedroom apartment soared 11.4% over the past year alone to $1,764 a month.

Despite New Hampshire’s growing economy—ranked fourth overall, third in economic growth, first in economic opportunity, and last in poverty rate by U.S. News & World Report—the state is 36th in housing affordability.

“I would rate housing affordability number one currently among issues or challenges impacting New Hampshire’s economy,” Michael Skelton, president and CEO of the Business & Industry Association (BIA), told the Josiah Bartlett Center.

“It’s unquestionably the single most important problem facing New Hampshire’s economy,” said Jason Sorens, senior research faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research and author of the Josiah Bartlett Center’s landmark 2021 study linking local land-use regulations to the state’s housing shortage.

Several leaders also agree that land-use regulations are a leading cause of the issue.

“Most of the affordability problem is due to local land-use regulations,” Bob Quinn, CEO of the New Hampshire Association of Realtors, concluded. “They increase development costs or eliminate the opportunity to build entirely.”

“Local land-use regulations are certainly part of the issue, on par with NIMBYISM [Not-In-My-Backyard-ism],” Keene Mayor George Hansel said.

It comes down to a problem of supply and demand: Limited supply of housing with steady or increasing demand leads to an increase in prices. By restricting what can be built and where, zoning laws are suppressing the supply of housing, resulting in New Hampshire’s current housing shortage, state housing experts and business leaders say.

“There is simply not enough housing for people to rent in New Hampshire,” Ben Frost, deputy executive director of New Hampshire Housing, said on WMUR.

According to the CATO Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States—an index of personal and economic freedom—New Hampshire ranks 40th in land-use freedom, a product of local land-use regulations obstructing supply.

These zoning regulations include minimum lot size, setback, frontage, minimum square footage, and design requirements, among others—all of which make it difficult to build and/or increase the costs of building.

“We know developers are interested in building more housing and there are generally financing options and capital available to do so, [but] the challenge they most often face is finding a place to build,” BIA’s Skelton observed. “Local land-use regulations and zoning (minimum lot size being the most prominent) and infrastructure (water/sewer, etc.) availability and requirements, to me, are the most significant local regulatory issues impacting what can be built and where.”

As the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas demonstrates, single-family housing is allowed by right on 90% of the state’s 3.6 million acres of buildable land, yet most municipalities don’t allow single-family homes on small lots (less than one acre).

In fact, homes on lots of less than one acre are permitted on only 16% of the state’s buildable land.

The median lot in New Hampshire is 49,223 square feet, according to the Angi U.S. Lot Size Index. This is the second-highest in the country.

In New Hampshire, minimum lot size requirements can exceed dozens of acres. Districts in Groton, New Boston, Peterborough, and New London require lots to be a minimum of 25 acres (1.089 million square feet).

Zooming in on the Greater Manchester Area, 89% of the buildable land in the city and surrounding towns (Auburn, Bedford, Goffstown, Hooksett, Litchfield, Londonderry, and Merrimack) allows single-family housing, but only 33% of that buildable area is open to new single-family homes (after accounting for existing development, vacancies, and growth potential).

Just 21% of Greater Manchester’s buildable land allows single-family homes on small lots. This drops to merely 7.8% when considering only vacant or underdeveloped space.

“It’s not the only factor, but it’s the predominant factor, and it’s easily the most important factor we can actually do something about,” Jason Sorens, the principal investigator on the New Hampshire Zoning Atlas, noted about local zoning laws.

“We can’t do much about steep slopes and poor soils, and expanding sewer and water service takes time and expense. Growing the construction workforce is another lever, but that will take a long time. Local land-use regulations drive at least 50% of the affordability problem, and we can change them,” Sorens added.

Multifamily development is heavily restricted as well. While housing for five or more families is permitted on 44.2% of New Hampshire’s buildable area, only 21% of this land allows these large-family developments on smaller lots.

Reforming a city’s zoning regime can be quite an undertaking. “Keene has dramatically streamlined and rewritten our land-use codes in the last three years,” Mayor Hansel said. “This was an expensive effort, costing more than $500,000 on top of internal staff time devoted to the rewrite effort. Smaller communities, without full-time planning staff, would have a hard time tackling something like that.”

Though some communities might want to avoid a full rewrite, smaller changes such as reducing minimum lot sizes, eliminating overlay districts (zoning districts that overlap original zoning districts), and increasing density limits (how many housing units can be built in a given area) would have significant impact.

Mayor Paul Callaghan offers Rochester as a model for other municipalities looking to make quick progress on this front.

“In 2018 we increased the density allowance in and around our three urban centers (East Rochester, Downton Rochester, and Gonic) to allow for more density (and therefore less cost to developers),” Mayor Callaghan said. “And then in 2019 we did away with density requirements altogether in Downtown Rochester and allowed for some residential units on the ground floor level.”

“The system really works when it’s clicking, and the number one thing holding it all back…is housing,” Gov. Sununu told Cline. “And it isn’t, ‘Well, the government needs to build more housing.’ We’re investing more in housing than we ever have.”

In fact, the 2024–25 state budget spends a record $25 million for the affordable housing fund.

“But the locals need to permit it,” the governor continued. “Local, even small towns, need to talk to their businesses who are struggling to find employees and say, ‘Maybe if we just put five units up here or we let a small multifamily complex with seven, ten units go over here,’ that in itself can just be a game changer for a lot of small businesses in town to make them more economically viable.”

Capturing the full economic extent of the challenge, the governor added, “Everything moves positively when you have the housing and you can bring in the employees.”

 

Mitchell Scacchi | Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy

 

The post Affordable Housing Is NH’s Top Economic Problem, Leaders & Voters Agree appeared first on Granite Grok.

Ian Underwood has a great article on education priorities. He talks about the goals for which schools and their advocates (parents, lawmakers, taxpayers, society) should strive. That if you teach kids to read, they can then learn anything.

He writes,

 

‘This state should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of bringing 95% of students to a 12th-grade level of proficiency in reading.’

Note that in achieving this goal as a society, we would position students to achieve their own goals as individuals: To create their own bright futures. To attend college, or train for a career, or start a business. To learn more about whatever they want, whenever they want, for the rest of their lives. To be active creators, rather than passive consumers, of public discourse on subjects like tolerance and inclusivity — or taxes, public health and safety, criminal justice, welfare, or any other matter of public policy. They would be able to participate intelligently in the political, economic, and social systems of a free government. And in doing so, help preserve a free government.

 

There is no truer statement you can make about education. A school system that fails to teach reading has failed at everything if education is the point of the exercise. It is the foundation of something I say often: teach them how to learn, not what to learn for which reading is fundamental.

If you can’t read or read well, that system is bankrupt, and declining proficiency scores, especially in inner-city schools, is the greatest crime against minorities.

Black Lives Matter famously grew fat, attaching its name to protests in the interest of minorities, but, in the end, only a handful of them benefited: the organization’s leadership got filthy rich while the lives it claimed mattered found themselves worse off. Black-owned businesses burned, and lives were lost as crime skyrocketed in the wake of direct action in honor of a career criminal who overdosed on Fentanyl.

The Democrat party, and anyone afraid to disagree, lionized George Floyd in the name of making Black Lives Matter, but did any black lives get better? Other than Patrice Cullors and her family, I don’t think they did. But no one was marching to make black lives better. If you wanted that, you’d invest every dime and bit of energy into solving the problem of illiteracy.

The single biggest injustice heaped on any class or race of people anywhere is funding an education system that can’t even teach a kid to read, but that is what has happened, and to hide their failure, they graduate them anyway. And it is not the product of white supremacy, whiteness, or white fragility. It is a direct result of the cabal of Democrat-run cities and teachers’ unions, many of whom, in these places, are minorities who can read.

The face these same people run the police department some claim are so oppressive should not be lost in the debate, but the answer to their failure is to hand you someone else money, but that’s not going to save you from the social cage in which you are kept. Reparations, welfare, free housing, or health care make you slaves. Learning to read can set you free.

And there is indeed no shortage of people who can read and have failed in life (or perhaps have not exactly succeeded). It is also true that we each have our own concept of success and failure. But few, if any, illiterates free themselves from poverty or dependence, not in this generation or the next. It begins with the ability to read.

Given the amount of money or resources directed at public education, there is no excuse for a student with poor or limited reading ability, and this not only continues to be the case, but illiteracy is on the rise.

If you want to protest something and demand change, you should start with the waste, fraud, and abuse of a public education system that spends obscene amounts of money but has denied students the one thing they need more than any other to succeed—the ability to read.

 

 

The post If Black Lives Mattered They’d Be Demanding Reading Proficiency not Reparations appeared first on Granite Grok.

This started out as an entry in a meme post, but it got long enough – and a truly serious enough topic with a lot to discuss – that IMHO it’s worth making a standalone post.  But first, please do recall my four essays on depopulation:

The 7.3 Billion Dollar, er, Person Question – Liberty’s Torch (libertystorch.info)

Proverbs 16:18… and What’s Coming? – Granite Grok

Dark Thoughts in the Small Hours – Granite Grok

Borrowing from a Dog Food Ad – Urban Scoop

To be read in your “copious free time” of course.

 

>>>>>=====<<<<<

 

PREDICTIONS

 

 

In this vein, understand that the central meme of this post, the one that inspired it, just below. is anonymously sourced and unvetted.  Almost by definition considering what it says, I am hoping that this prediction does not come true, and that it is a fabrication.

So here’s that central meme, courtesy of the RebuildNH Discussion Group on Telegram:

 

 

I suggest you read it a couple of times.  In vino + cocaine, veritas?

 

ASSUMING

Now first, two assumptions:

1. That this is an actual and accurate account of a real event / conversation

2. That the coming events discussed are, in fact, in the works and being launched later this year

For the purposes of this essay – again, even as I hope that they’re not true – I’m going to assume the above two things are true.  So the first thing is to note, as Surak often noted back when he was active: They really do want you dead.

 

 

We don’t have to wonder if they want us dead.

WEF-Infiltrated Dutch Gov’t Begins Euthanizing People With Autism, Disabilities, and Alcoholism – The People’s Voice (thepeoplesvoice.tv)

Euthanasia Is Now A Leading Cause Of Death In Canada, And Ethicists Are Freaking Out | The Daily Caller

We now have suicide pods.

Introducing Modern, High-Tech, Self-Assisted Suicide Pods – Yes, They’re Serious – Granite Grok

Inventor dubbed Dr Death unveils grisly ‘suicide booth’ the Sarco Pod that asks three questions before suffocating user | The US Sun (the-sun.com)

And overall a culture of death not valuing human life at all.

‘Somewhere around 10am or 11am she went to an apartment complex on the west side of Dothan and placed a live newborn in a trash compactor,’ he added.

He said officers later found the baby’s remains still in the unemptied dumpster at a landfill site, wrapped in a mattress protector inside a zipped duffel bag.

We see rising “died suddenly” counts with excess deaths being at unprecedented levels.  We know that birth rates are dropping with the Jab having horrific effects on women’s fertilely; sperm counts are falling globally and have been for decades – whether intentionally or purely “serendipitously” (I’d argue both).  Our sedentary lifestyle doesn’t help, when rigorous exercise is a testosterone-production stimulant.  Multiple things seem to be aligning to drop the growth rate of population and – likely – turn that growth negative.  Remember, they want a less populated world.

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/club-of-rome-bearded-guy.mp4

 

Scientist Given Award, Standing Ovation after Anti-Human Diatribe – The Heartland Institute

Much less.

 

 

Certainly fewer surviving children because of the Jab’s effect:

Safe and Effective® – Small Dead Animals

If people choose to have them at all, assuming they’re able to.

My vote is for the lunatics to not have children, that way they are not bringing kids who will be turned into complete mental messes from the scary cult propaganda.

 

DEFINING TERMS

IgG4 antibodies in particular.  Now there are myriad sites defining them, mostly in highly biology-jargon terms, but my understanding from conversations with a couple of people deep into immunology – one with a PhD in it – can be put this way in my layman’s analogy, which they said was accurate:

Imagine you’re in a strange town, you’re hungry, and there’s a crowded-lot tavern that looks appealing.  You go in, and it’s a “bad” bar.  Bikers – real bikers, not the weekend-warrior type.  Other thug types.  They’re all looking at you and all reaching for weapons.  Standing up.  Not a good thing for your long-term health and well-being.

But suddenly an arm descends on your shoulders, and a guy who is clearly known to the crowd says “Hey, don’t worry, this guy’s cool”!  Everyone relaxes.  You go on in and nobody harasses you.

That’s the IgG4 antibody.  Among other factors, it’s why our immune systems don’t go after allergens.

(If I’m wrong in any of the above and someone can point me to correct information, I’ll welcome it.)

But IgG4 antibodies don’t just prevent reactions to allergens like peanuts or pollen – a good thing.  IgG4 antibodies create immune tolerance of the spike protein.  And now, not only do we know that the spike protein is, itself, toxic and immuno-suppressive:

“To that question as well, the immune suppression because of the spike [protein], because of the pseudouridine, it changes patterns of receptors on cells,” said Cole, adding these receptors could enable T cells to fight off all kinds of viruses.

“Now, you don’t have a defense system. This cancer cell can invade over the wall. This pathogen can invade over the wall because your immune system has been suppressed to a degree that allows that to happen. When does that stop? We don’t know. How do we reverse it? We don’t know. Is it happening to everybody? No, thank heavens. Is it happening to a degree that’s alarming? You bet.”

It also appears that people are being found to be producing it over six months after they’ve been Jabbed.  And from the article – RTWT and shudder – this about igG4 antibodies specifically – echoing the above:

Immune tolerance is perfectly acceptable for allergens, irritants that do not replicate and exist persistently. Ignoring allergens, instead of suffering from annoying hay fever, is why immune tolerance is a good response to such environmental irritants as pollen or dust.

However, immune tolerance is deadly when it comes to resisting live, replicating pathogens!

So, do you see how high, permanent levels of IgG4 antibodies related to the Covid virus and its spike protein might not be such a good thing?  Having your immune response downgraded, if not turned off, by igG4 antibodies that this non-sterilizing Jab creates in your body?  Never mind all the other damage we know the Jab and spike proteins do to your immune system?

And what did that meme talk about?  IgG4 antibodies in high density, in a large swath of the population.

Check.  That corroborates.  More importantly, that’s a highly-specific claim that corroborates; after all, how many people even knew what an IgG4 antibody was, let alone knew of its existence, before the above?  I’m a curious, wide-reading sort, and I didn’t know about them until less than a year ago.

 

MORE CHECKMARKS

Geert Bossche: Halt All Covid-19 Mass Vaccination (Open Letter to WHO) (darachi.com)

Geert Vanden Bossche, PhD, DVM, is a vaccine research expert. He has a long list of companies and organizations he’s worked with on vaccine discovery and preclinical research, including GSK, Novartis, Solvay Biologicals, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr Vanden Bossche also coordinated the Ebola vaccine program at GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization).

He is board-certified in Virology and Microbiology, the author of over 30 publications, and inventor of a patent application for universal vaccines. He currently works as an independent vaccine research consultant.

Sounds like a knowledgeable person who would know, right?  So what has he said about this non-sterilizing “vaccine”?  From that same article:

He claims his beliefs are basic principles taught in a student’s first vaccinology class – “One shouldn’t use a prophylactic vaccine in populations exposed to high infectious pressure (which is now certainly the case as multiple highly infectious variants are currently circulating”).

He states that to “fully escape”, the highly mutable virus, “only needs to add another few mutations in its receptor-binding domain”.

He’s not alone in sounding this warning.

 

 

More on that warning:

Luc Montagnier: “They are not vaccines, they are poisons” – Speech to the Luxembourg Parliament • Soul:Ask | Unlock your mind and soul (soulask.com)

(For a little broad history, look at the “conventional wisdom” and how it fared against a Smallpox breakout – and how going against THE SCIENCE was what ended it.  This history aligns with Bossche’s warning about not trying to vaccinate your way out of a pandemic.)

So as an analogy consider chickens and Marek’s disease – a disease for which there is a vaccine, but it’s leaky and non-sterilizing.

Leaky Vaccines Enhance Spread of Deadlier Chicken Viruses (nationalgeographic.com)

This chicken vaccine makes its virus more dangerous | PBS NewsHour

Chickens with the vaccine don’t get sick, but they still spread the virus; they still carry a viral load (sounds familiar).  Meanwhile, the virus evolves fast; getting around any protection the vaccine creates and in the process often become more lethal in that local cluster.

Is the Covid Jab leaky and non-sterilizing?  Yes, to both.

As to fast evolution, in the below video Dr. David Martin talks in front of the EU and says that from 1990-2018 it was universally known that it was fruitless to attempt to create a vaccine against Coronavirus because it mutates too quickly and escapes the ability of a vaccine to block it.  (Watch the whole thing.)

 

David E. Martin talk in the 3rd International Covid Summit | European Union May 2023

 

 

So, in the Jab, we have a non-sterilizing agent that is driving a highly mutable virus’ evolution to evade it.  Paging a human-version of Marek’s disease analogy, anyone?  Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche has predicted:

Is Geert’s Deadly Prediction About to Come True? (substack.com)

Repeated COVID Shots Driving Dangerous Variants, Turbo Cancers • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

These in turn have subclasses, and one that is central to Geert’s concern is one of the SARS-CoV-2 spike-specific IgG subclasses called IgG4.

So that seems to align with the meme too.  Again, take this with as many grains of salt as you like.  But while I find the prediction outlined above in the “loose lips” meme likely, again, I hope not.  But it would not surprise me if it did happen.  Pray for those you love who have taken The Jab.

 

TWIN IMPLICATIONS

So whether by design or accidentally – and I firmly believe it’s by design – we have billions of people whose immune systems are not just compromised in general through immune disregulation, as Dr. Ryan Cole states:

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ryan-cole-on-immune-disregulation.mp4

 

https://granitegrok.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ryan-cole-2.mp4

 

but have been “set up” to not react to the Covid virus by IgG4 antibodies specifically.  We also know, through the analogy of Marek’s disease and and natural effects but also, potentially, through possible deliberate engineering (one example) that it’s only a matter of time before a variant emerges that fully escapes the immune response of whatever protection the Jab gives.  This variant, again through both observation of multiple epidemics in humans and animals in the past, will rip through the population.  It will likely have immense virulence – whether through natural reasons or engineering – again, based on history and medical experience.

Billions.  They’re talking billions.  So let’s assume that the three billion estimate is about right.  That’s over one third of the human population right there, dying in such numbers and, presumably, with such a velocity that it will be impossible to keep up with the deaths in an orderly manner.  Captain Trips in real life.  So, too, is the conjecture that with that many people dying in such a short time, many others dependent on a functioning society will also die.  Look left, look right, look in the mirror.  Statistically, one of you three isn’t going to make it.

That aligns with the meme too.  And if it really is deliberate to create death on such a scale?  Chaos will reign.  And into that chaos, hunger, uncertainly, and desperation will step the “benevolent hand” of the Globalists, promising order, stability, and predictability, with just a small little price:

 

(Link to AZQuotes per their policy.)

 

Logic, again, agreeing with the meme.  After all, never let a crisis go to waste.  And, parenthetically, how much more chaos if the news gets out that world governments knew?  If you thought people were chaotic and panicked beforehand as they see people dropping across the world, imagine adding in the idea that their governments had known this was possible and had still pushed forward with multiple Jabs.  Panic, rage, betrayal trauma, and revenge rage.  Politicians being murdered (no great loss IMHO), but also doctors, nurses, pharmacists – you know, the people who we’d need to try and combat this.

We know that there have been forces at work for decades trying to slow down and reverse population growth.  For example, while Dr. Rima Laibow initially struck me as loonie-central when I first saw her, she’s been consistent on this for years and years:

 

Dr Rima – The Globalist Agenda: The Great Culling

 

 

This would definitely fulfil her warnings about the “new aristocrats” wanting to cull the Useless Eaters.  After all, the supposed conversation partner spilling this is one of the uber-rich.  Another checkmark.

We have legions of statements from all sorts saying they want to depopulate the planet.  Paging Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel:

When someone says they want to kill you, believe them.

Especially when they have the means and motive to do so as well.

And one other implication.

If this is being done by design, and there are videos and speeches and text aplenty of people saying we need to reduce the population drastically, this speaks to a genocide on a scale absolutely unheard of save by natural disasters like the Chixalub extinction or, even larger, the Permian extinction.  Except unlike those, this is done knowingly and deliberately, and focused on one species only.  And it speaks to two things:

First, an absolute amorality on the part of those doing this.  Whatever the belief driving it – it could be fear of cliiiiimate dooooooom, or just wanting to get rid of those pesky peasants so the “royalty” have more, or some other reason – it takes a dead soul to be willing to murder, let alone murder on such a scale.  Those people ruling over an abattoir planet would not have human souls, not by any measure I hold dear.  Just remember that they believe they’re doing good.

Second, and I’ve commented on this before, this has been decades and decades in the works.  Countless millions of experiments.  Thousands of scientists over the years, tens if not hundreds of thousands of technicians and lab assistants.  Has nobody broken ranks at a sudden realization of what the end goal is?  If not, why not – what possible hold could be over so many?  Or is it simply that such a thing has been exposed time and again by people who connect the dots, smuggle data and pictures out to blow the whistle, but this happens?

 

 

Certainly, in the main, when I try to talk with people about even a shadow of a scintilla of this I get dismissed with some version of Oh that’s just not possible.  Twenty-niners, all of them (bolding in the original).

Hence my term, “Twenty-Niners”.  People who cannot grasp that anything that could radically change the situation in which they live are actual possibilities, and completely dismiss concerns that others present even when backed by evidence.

Yuri Bezmenov was right.

 

 

CONCLUDING

If, as predicted by the end of 2023 / start of 2024, we’re seeing people dying by the bushel, rushing upwards towards three billion dead from a virulent Covid strain, with doubtless billions more dead as the world falls apart, we’re in trouble.  As an example, recall the Deagel report.  That the US will lose over 200 million of its population by 2025 (though admittedly it doesn’t say HOW – the looming threat of a radioactive-hot war with Russia also plays into consideration)… and it does beg the question of whether this is a prediction or a goal.  Regardless, 100 million Americans was 1914-1915.  We had a functioning country then and – absent other factors – I’m sure we’d pull it together given time.  It’s the getting down to that level – plus inevitable outside machinations – that would be the issue flummoxing the regaining of stability.  But society in general would be wounded spiritually from enduring that.

Also consider that, OOH, the Globalists want us to be pure renewable, but OTOH want to block out the sun because of cliiiimaaaaate doooooooom, so there’s no reliable electricity (as if it’s able to power civilization now) – let alone if they do block the sun there’s unreliable farming or even plant growth.  Imagine the surviving Millenials, etc., trying to cope with the loss of the grid & internet?   Let alone having to forage, farm or – gasp –  milk a cow?

But broadly, there goes America.  There goes Western Civilization and all the others too.

Pray this is not going to happen.  But in vetting and investigating, a great many of the pieces in that meme do line up with outside information.  Enough to worry me greatly.

Prep.  No, you may not survive… but go down trying.

 

I’m not afraid! You will be

 

 

The post Depopulation Speculations appeared first on Granite Grok.

It may be the case that Andy Sanborn applied for COVID relief money for a business that was not eligible for relief and lied on the application in order to get the money.  If true, that would be scandalous.

Having received money that he didn’t need, he had more money available for personal desires, such as sports cars.  That’s a separate issue, and it is not scandalous at all.  It is the kind of thing that well-to-do parents of school-age children do all the time.

For example, we have a woman in Croydon who owns at least five properties.  How did she pay for all those? Well, every year, the town pays more than $30,000 in tuition for her children — money she could afford to pay but doesn’t. As a result, every year, she has a pile of extra money to spend on her personal desires.

She spends the money on real estate rather than on sports cars, but the principle is exactly the same:  When the government buys something for you, the money you didn’t have to spend — on your employees, on your kids — is yours to do whatever you want with.

Taking money from your fellow citizens under false pretenses?  That’s wrong and illegal.

Forcing your fellow citizens to buy something for you that you could afford to buy for yourself?  That’s wrong, but legal.

Spending the money freed up by government largess on luxuries?  That’s just normal behavior in modern America.  One wonders why it’s taking up so much space in news reports on Sanborn’s activities.

Maybe he should have spent the money on real estate instead.

 

The post Andy Sanborn – Scandal, or Normal? appeared first on Granite Grok.

For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” President Joe Biden yelled as he wrapped up a March 2022 speech in Warsaw. The man in question was Russian President Vladimir Putin. When asked later whether he had just committed to a policy of regime change against a nuclear-armed power, Biden desperately tried to walk back the claim.

“I wasn’t then, nor am I now articulating a policy change. I was expressing moral outrage that I felt,” Biden said a few days after the speech. So intense is the president’s righteous hatred of Putin that he is apparently unable to restrain himself from provoking nuclear war. (RELATED: Biden Claims White House Didn’t Walk Back Europe Comments, Says He Doesn’t ‘Care’ What Putin Thinks)

There are plenty of reasons to hate Putin — such as his ties to the old KGB or the atrocities his military has committed against civilians in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine. But perhaps Biden’s revulsion has a deeper, more psychological source.

 

President Biden ends his speech in Poland calling for Putin’s removal:

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” pic.twitter.com/nIcs3izzOA

— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 26, 2022

An old Russian proverb, which Putin himself has quoted, warns that “one should not criticize a mirror if you have a crooked face.” Vladimir Putin is a mirror in which Biden sees his own worst impulses reflected back at him. How much of the deformity is in the mirror and how much resides in his own falsely rejuvenated countenance, even Biden himself no longer knows. He cannot bear to look.

There are similarities between Putin’s rise to power at the end of the millennium and Biden’s in 2020. Both offered themselves as safe consensus candidates in an age of political chaos. For Putin, it was the disorder and corruption of post-Soviet Russia under President Boris Yeltsin.

For Biden, the source of the instability was Trumpian populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the prospect of Bernie Sanders running away with the Democratic nomination.

Both promised to restore faith in democracy. Once power was secure, however, the open hand became a closed fist.

Putin wasted no time in persecuting his enemies. Much has been made of his thuggish assassinations, but Putin’s preferred weapon is the legal system. Six months after he took office, media magnate and Putin critic Vladimir Gusinsky found himself charged with fraud and forced to flee the country. Boris Berezovsky, a lawmaker and billionaire who helped fund Putin’s rise before turning against him, also became the target of a fraud investigation. He fled to the United Kingdom in 2000. Oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky called for political reforms. In response, Putin’s government investigated him for corruption, destroyed most of his net worth by freezing shares of his energy company, and finally threw him in prison.

And it’s not just the wealthy and powerful who have reason to fear Putin’s courts. When members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot staged a blasphemous anti-Putin protest outside a Russian Orthodox cathedral in 2012, three members of the group got two-year prison sentences.

Biden’s administration has taken similar steps against his enemies, arresting not just his predecessor and likely 2024 opponent Donald Trump, but also the lawyers who advised him. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and refused to play the Biden admin’s censorship game, he quickly found his company SpaceX, which depends largely on government contracts, facing a DOJ lawsuit for failing to hire enough asylum seekers. Pretexts can always be found.

 

She’s depriving people of their right to discovery and citing cases that don’t further her arguments but liberals are cheering her on because they’re actually big fans of how Putin’s legal system works. https://t.co/Xdu9oQyfrW

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 31, 2023

 

Biden is just as defensive of America’s state religion as Putin is of Russia’s. And his Justice Department is just as willing to crush any who dissent. His FBI spies on parents who go to school board meetings to complain about transgenderism. The same bureau sent a SWAT team to terrorize a father who dared to defend his son against a psychotic pro-abortion radical. On Tuesday, a federal court found five activists guilty after they peacefully blockaded an abortion clinic. Each could face up to 11 years in prison. (RELATED: Jury Finds Pro-Life Activists Guilty After 2020 Abortion Clinic Protest)

In neither case, however, does the leader’s zeal for law and order extend to himself and his allies. Before his meteoric rise in Moscow, Putin did work for St. Petersburg’s mayor, who was closer to organized crime than government bureaucracy. And yet, when he became president, every investigation into those activities quietly vanished.

Similarly, when allegations emerged that Biden and his son Hunter had engaged in corrupt dealings with overseas business partners, U.S. Attorney David Weiss found himself facing pressure to drop the investigation. It’s only thanks to two brave whistleblowers and one eagle-eyed judge that the case hasn’t been buried alive.

Putin has been accused of rigging elections in his own favor. In the 2021 legislative elections, for example, one estimate suggests that Putin’s tame United Russia party inflated its share of the vote by nearly 20 percent.

But again, Biden is in danger of becoming that which he despises. In 2020, he convinced his old friends in the intelligence community to sign their names to lies in order to suppress the unflattering story of his son’s sordid laptop. Once in power, he quickly moved to enshrine in federal law the COVID-era early and mail-in voting expansions some states had implemented. He knew he wouldn’t have won without them. Only principled opposition from Biden’s fellow Democrats stopped this scheme to create a permanent one-party state.

Putin, we heard ad nauseam throughout most of the Trump administration, interferes in foreign elections. What, then, are we to make of Biden, whose Agency for International Development is subsidizing anti-Orbán media outlets and NGOs in Hungary and who oversaw, as vice president, the coup that illegally deposed Ukraine’s duly elected leader? (RELATED: The Real Reason The Democrats Are Determined To Punish Hungary)

Speaking of Ukraine, perhaps the greatest objection to equating Putin with Biden is that Putin is a bloodthirsty imperialist and Biden is not. But is that the case? Biden inherited and continues to pursue a policy of aggressive NATO expansion. Considering the breakdown of military expenditures, it would not be a stretch to describe NATO as an American empire of sorts. Putin’s invasion was an act of unjustified aggression, but at any point, the U.S. could have averted it by pledging not to admit Ukraine to the alliance.

 

I spoke with my friend President Zelenskyy today to wish him and the people of Ukraine a happy Independence Day.

May today be a reminder that the forces of darkness and dominion will never extinguish the flame of liberty that lives in the heart of free people everywhere.

— President Biden (@POTUS) August 24, 2023

 

Biden could also have prevented the war by deploying 100,000 U.S. troops to Ukraine. Putin wouldn’t have dared to fire on American soldiers. But that wouldn’t do. From Biden’s point of view, the primary utility of the war in Ukraine is that it kills Russians. The longer and bloodier it is, the better. (RELATED: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Hasn’t Gone As Well As Expected. Here’s Why)

Arming Ukraine in the early months of the invasion, when the defenders strove to halt and then turn back the Russian onslaught, was an admirable act. Eighteen months later, American support looks less heroic. Instead of pushing for a just peace or sending Ukraine what it needs to win, we provide just enough material to ensure that waves of Ukrainian infantry keep dragging themselves across Russian minefields to hurl themselves against Russian fortifications.

Biden surely knows that Ukraine is unlikely to secure total victory. The president’s true goal is to blunt the military might of a geopolitical rival. His allies even brag about how cheaply they’ve been able to do it. Cheaply, that is, from an American perspective. For the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian parents who will receive their children back maimed or in boxes, I imagine it feels quite costly.

Setting aside the justice of the cause, which is more noble? To order one’s own countrymen into the hell of modern combat? Or to pay a country halfway around the world to do your fighting and dying for you?

Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.

 

Grayson Quay | Daily Caller News Service

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline, and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The post Biden May Hate Putin, But He’s Well On His Way To Becoming Him appeared first on Granite Grok.

The state of Virginia used to threaten residents with revocation of their driver’s license if they failed or refused to pay court fines or fees. Any fee of fine regardless of offense. The law has been changed, but not before a lawsuit was filed, and the plaintiffs were left holding the bag full of legal fees.

 

“In July 2016, a lawsuit was filed against the DMV, alleging that the automatic suspensions violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection.

 

If you were too economically challenged to afford to pay a fee or fine, you would also lose your ability to drive legally.

 

The complaint charged that many people lost their licenses through being too poor to pay fines, “effectively depriving them of reliable, lawful transportation necessary to get to and from work, take children to school, keep medical appointments, care for ill or disabled family members, or, paradoxically, to meet their financial obligations to the courts,” Rutherford explained.

 

The state legislature changed the law while the case meandered through the legal system. The Department of Motor Vehicles could no longer revoke licenses on these grounds, so it claimed it could no longer be held responsible for any violations of rights or the court costs required to regain them. The Legislature fixed it. We’ll be on our way.

Not so fast, says the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

 

“If the government is allowed to avoid the financial liabilities associated with violating the Constitution, it will violate the Constitution for as long as it can get away with it,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of “Battlefield America: The War on the American People.”

“Such a practice cripples the ability of the citizenry, especially the poor and vulnerable, to effectively seek protection from the courts and hold the government accountable.”

 

I am reminded of the City of Nashua and Laurie Ortolano’s ongoing battle concerning Right to Know requests. She asks for public documents. The city does everything it can not to provide them. She brings them to court, and it’s expensive. Laurie happens to have the means to hold the Mayor and City accountable. Still, most people have neither the resources, the patience, or the hours required to wait out the expensive crapstorm the bureaucracy is prepared to bring at taxpayer expense.

To them, money is no object. They want what they want, and to hell with the rest of it. And since it’s not their money, why would they care?

In most instances, they don’t. And quite often, insurance covers the costs, but not always. Oberlin College famously lost a lawsuit filed by Gibson’s Bakery, resulting in a settlement amounting to just over 36 million dollars. Oberlin had played fast and loose with one of its pet Woke-a-sarus, whose direct action resulted in a defamation suit the College lost. Their insurers are refusing to reimburse the Liberal Arts school, which, regardless of the outcome of their lawsuit to get that money, will likely have trouble with coverage and rising costs.

They’ll pass them along to the wealthy parents of students who attend in the tuition, but repeated court losses could make it difficult to buy coverage.

Municipalities rarely find themselves in that situation. The well or “revenue” is unlimited – in their minds – and it is easy to blame one persistent citizen (like Ortolano) for increased costs (paying unnecessary court and legal fees) when the real problem is the government’s refusal to follow the law.

The 4th Circuit has handed down a ruling, while different in some respects, that touches the foundation of the common problem. The government will always try to punish you to its advantage and then use itself as an excuse not to pay for the trouble they created.

In the Virginia Case (Stinnie V. Holcomb), the ‘State’ didn’t escape the cost of its cavalier misfeasance. The court agreed with The Rutherford Institute, which “warned that allowing the DMV to avoid fiscal accountability would encourage further constitutional mischief by the government.”

Not that one case in one Circuit Court, or even the highest court, will slow the roll of every deep-state stooge from inside the beltway to your backwater berg. But it’s a start.

 

HT | WND

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I have written about BRICS in the past, but their latest activity requires a closer look. BRICS is an alliance formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to create an international monetary system and currency based on the gold standard.

In recent weeks, six more countries have joined BRICS. These new members are Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The latest additions to BRICS bring the current membership to eleven countries, including some of the world’s largest economies and producers of oil. The primary goal of BRICS is to be the dominant global economy by 2050 and to make the BRICS currency the exclusive monetary system for petroleum trade, replacing the dollar. If successful, this bloc of countries will make the U.S. Dollar insignificant in the global economy and severely damage our economic value.

If this growth trend with BRICS continues, America will be forced to continue buying oil from OPEC but must convert dollars to BRICS currency to pay for our petroleum needs. We will no longer be able to use dollars to pay for our national debt or print money as needed. Our economy, and therefore our national security, will be in tremendous jeopardy with very little recourse.

Three years ago, we were energy independent and actually exporting oil and natural gas. If this condition continued, we would not be in a position to be negatively impacted by BRICS. Unfortunately, Joe Biden killed our energy dominance on his first day, bringing us back to buying oil from OPEC, Venezuela, and other unfavorable countries. BRICS will further complicate our energy needs and purchases, and the blame for this situation lies entirely at Joe Biden’s feet.

As the BRICS leaders met in Johannesburg, President Joe Biden’s administration renewed promises to step up funding for the developing world through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. As usual, the Democrat response to any threat is to throw money at it.

Washington publicly played down the BRICS expansion, saying that countries can choose their partners. Sullivan, noting the vast policy differences among the nations, earlier told reporters, “We are not looking at the BRICS as evolving into some kind of geopolitical rival to the United States or anyone else.”

Biden and the Democrats do not see BRICS as a problem that needs to be addressed directly. These are the same people who scoffed at Mitt Romney for calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe. These people are no longer laughing as we spend billions to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia. NATO countries are on high alert against a possible Russian expansion of its Ukraine assault.

Those of us who have been critical of Joe Biden look at the possibility that Biden’s hands are tied because of his illegal money laundering scheme, including money from Russia and China. Biden’s poor policies continue to hurt us at home, and his illicit activity with his son Hunter is hurting us globally.

We must continue monitoring BRICS, note the countries that join the pact, and reverse course on our energy programs. Joe Biden is not concerned about any of these and gives us another reason not to provide Joe with another four years in the White House.

The post BRICS: The Acronym Is Not Growing, But It’s Power Is appeared first on Granite Grok.

Victor Davis Hanson has a video that looks to be about a week old, titled, ‘We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This.’ In it, he catalogs the things about America today framed around the idea that if he’d said they would be true ten years ago, you’d think he was just wrong or crazy.

But they are all true.

Our new reality is outlined thoroughly with the understanding that not that long ago, it would have been absurd to suggest. Hanson rightly defines the period from Obama today as a cultural revolution and then makes a note of a handful of folks who are pushing back. People we should listen to and follow (he doesn’t mention us, but that’s okay because we feel like we’re part of the solution).

“We really need people to speak out. It doesn’t matter what party or what ideology, this country has so much potential…”

 

The post Victor Davis Hanson – ‘If I Told You Ten Years Ago …’ appeared first on Granite Grok.

Threats to freedom of speech and efforts to suppress dissenting views and voices have been on the rise over the past decades. They were exponentially intensified since the ascent of social media, and as the political polarization in the West truly took hold of our societies, the powers that be have been using any and all tools at their disposal to “defend” the interests of the establishment against those who might try to publicly question its policies (or even worse, its purpose).

Many of us who have been keeping tabs on restrictions on all kinds of individual freedoms have been aware of this dangerous trend for quite some time already. However, it was during the covid crisis that it became obvious to a lot more people too. Anyone reluctant to fully embrace and follow the state’s edicts and “science-based rules” (which, if you recall, kept changing from week to week) was, at best, branded a “denier” or, at worst, actually arrested in some jurisdictions.

We saw dramatic evidence of that extreme response coming from China, Australia, and the United States, among other places. That’s to say nothing of countless other cases of people who lost their jobs or were denied access to basic public services.

Apart from those “straightforward” scenarios of punishment and retribution, though, there were other instances that were much more subtle and indirect. The story of the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” stands out as a solid example of how the banks themselves can be weaponized in the war on dissent. Individuals who supported the antilockdown convoy with donations found their bank accounts frozen, without any warning or due process. This was (or at least should have been) a serious wake-up call for all freedom-loving citizens, whether they agreed with the protesters’ views at the time or not.

Fast-forward to this July, when the “debanking” scandal of Nigel Farage made international headlines. The story, involving political angles, the banking sector, and the mainstream media, was very illuminating, and it revealed just how far establishment forces are willing to go to silence those who disagree with them. The bank at the heart of the scandal is the 330-year-old private bank Coutts, which is owned by NatWest, which in turn happens to have the United Kingdom government as its biggest shareholder following its taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008.

Mr. Farage’s Coutts account was summarily closed without any explanation. When he publicly insisted that it was due to his political beliefs, the bank shrugged him off, while the BBC went on to publish reports suggesting that the move had nothing to do with his ideology. Instead, according to the public broadcaster, it was the state of his finances that was to blame—his account supposedly had fallen below a certain threshold. Mr. Farage didn’t take long to hit back: he obtained a forty-page dossier from the bank exposing internal communications and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that his allegations were justified.

The documents showed that Coutts’s reasons for the account closures were his support for Brexit and Donald Trump and his “transphobic” and “xenophobic” views, among many other beliefs that he had expressed that were not “compatible with Coutts.” As Mr. Farage himself highlighted, “This story is not just about me. You could be next . . . if this situation is left unchecked, we will sleepwalk towards a China-style social credit system in which only those with the ‘correct’ views are allowed to fully participate in society.”

Indeed, the story clearly struck a nerve with the general public, and it quickly snowballed into an industry-wide and soon nationwide cause of outrage. The BBC had to apologize, and the CEO of NatWest, Dame Alison Rose, was forced to resign, but that wasn’t enough to appease all those who finally realized the disproportionate and largely illegitimate and unchecked power that banks can have over their customers.

As the Financial Times reported, “It raised wider questions about the ability of banks to remove accounts without explanation, leaving them or their small businesses cut off from the mainstream financial system. In an increasingly cashless world, having a bank account has become an essential service. David Davis, former Brexit secretary, likens closing someone’s bank account to cutting off their water or electricity supply. ‘You should be able to get a bank account regardless of your political views, whether you are a communist or a fascist,’ he says.”

The key takeaway from all this, however, is not this particular story itself. It would not be wise to regard it as an isolated incident or as something that could only ever affect account holders that have a high profile or a large audience. To the contrary, if it can be done to Nigel Farage, it can be done to anyone.

The lesson to be learned is that the threat is posed by the banking system itself, and that is why it is more important than ever to rethink your own financial structure and your plan. Keeping part of your savings outside the banking system and in physical precious metals is the only reliable way to protect yourself against the whims and trespasses of both governments and banks.

 

Claudio Grass | Mises Wire

Claudio Grass is a Mises Ambassador and an independent precious metals advisor based out of Switzerland. His Austrian approach helps his clients find tailor-made solutions to store their physical precious metals under Swiss law. ClaudioGrass.ch.

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Climate Change isn’t just about changing the climate outside. It is about you changing the climate inside becasue of their claims about the climate outside. It is undoubtedly a mental disorder, but the inmates running the asylum will not be persuaded to stop the madness.

If you’d like another example,

 

The U.K.’s Climate Change Committee, an independent statutory body established under the 2008 Climate Change Act and tasked with hectoring the nation over emissions targets, has urged millions of families not to heat their homes at night, reported the Telegraph.

In its “Sixth Carbon Budget” paper advising Parliament on the “volume of greenhouse gases the UK can emit during the period 2033-2037,” the CCC, which sets legally binding limits, implored households with electric-powered heating systems, including heat pumps, to shut off their radiators in the evening.

 

I find this fascinating in light of the current trajectory of the climate plan in neighboring Vermont. They are committed to moving everyone to electric heating systems and heat pumps despite the costs and lack of available power production to run them (faux-clean or otherwise). The UK, which has been a committed resident in this ‘green’ asylum for longer, though not much, puts it further along the inevitable path to failure, and they sound a lot like California, whose policies Vermont is aping. ‘Don’t charge your EV at night, turn off or turn down your AC – there isn’t enough electricity for the electrified future we’ve forced upon you.

 

What to some might come off as coercive social engineering, the CCC simply calls “behaviour change.”

Similar proposals, which in practice look like wartime rationing, have been advanced and executed in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California. However, in the case of California, the Independent System Operator had to call upon consumers to ration power because the state’s shift to renewable energy has left it with an unstable power grid and sporadic blackouts.

 

And despite all the trillions spent on wind and solar and this or that, you must not use the things we told you to use to save the planet … to save the planet.

Have you got that, especially in places that have not yet leaped off the cliff with only the promise that we will probably sprout green wings (and learn how to use them) before hitting the bottom?

Not likely, and we’ve posited that they all know this and don’t care. People emit CO2 as well, and a few billion fewer is as much a priority to those who aren’t worried you might freeze to death in your sleep.

So you will switch to heat pumps and switch them off when we say, or they will use those smart meters they made you get and do it for you.

Tyranny will, after all, always require a monopoly on the resources in decline due to its policies.

 

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