The now infamous Dylan Mulvaney is the online influencer that influenced millions of consumers to stop buying Bud Light. The brand is still reeling, while gender warrior Mulvaney claims it has resulted in so much hate (with zero support from BUD) that he had to retreat to Peru.

Where it is winter (he does look like a winter to me), and same-sex marriage is not legal.

 

Homosexuality has been used as grounds for separation or divorce. Laws meant to protect “public morals,” such as Article 183 of the Penal Code on “obscene exhibitions and publications”, have also been used against lesbians and gays.  Society’s attitude towards homosexuals has generally been hostile and is still heavily influenced by the Catholic Church.

 

Things have improved in Peru in recent years. There is more tolerance, but if you feel like no one appreciates your transvestite lifestyle or how insulting it is to actual women, Catholic Peru is not exactly the poster child for LGBT rights.

Mulvaney went there anyway – he probably didn’t know.

 

“Surprise. I’m in Peru and I’m at Macho Picchu,” Mulvaney revealed to his TikTok followers.

“I’m here by myself,” the trans influencer said, explaining that he frequently traveled alone. “I’m telling you, it’s the best. If you could ever do a solo trip somewhere, it is such a good way to get to know yourself better.”

Mulvaney revealed he participated in Shaman ceremonies – local spiritual rituals that Mulvaney compared to a decade’s worth of therapy.

Mulvaney has also found solace in the company of llamas.

 

Get to know yourself better.

You know, I think I can help you with that.

 

 

All good?

 

HT | TGP

The post Dylan Mulvaney, Peruvian Llamas, and Getting to Know Yourself Better … appeared first on Granite Grok.

This is a continuation of Skip’s post, addressing Kevin Verville’s original email comments on my post and other comments made by people (whose identities will be kept private) who joined in on that thread.  Thanks to everyone who did!

I apologize in advance for the length.  But it was an interesting discussion that covered a lot of ground.

We start with Kevin:

There are two things that are difficult to reconcile:  Desire, and reality.  We desire that all students perform at some common minimum level by age.

Is that really what we desire?  I think what we desire is that they perform at some minimum level before we declare them ‘educated’.  I don’t see what age really has to do with it.  There are people who graduate from college at 13, from medical school at 17.  Would anyone consider that ‘undesirable’?  If one kid gets to a 12th grade reading level by age 10, and another takes until age 23, do I really care, as long as they get the job done?

We do not specify the age anywhere, except that we refer to it as grade level, which is also inaccurate, as we “socially promote” almost all students every year, so grade more often than not, refers to number of years attending school.

It seems to me that ‘grade level’ makes more sense if it means something like ‘prerequisite level’.  In other contexts, we use the word ‘grade’ as a way of talking about quality, or state of completion.  When we want to talk about the passage of time, we use words like ‘year’.

So it would probably be a step in the right direction to start talking about ‘First year’ instead of ‘First grade’, ‘Second year’ instead of ’Second grade’, and so on, if the passage of time, rather then the accumulation of knowledge, is what we’re trying to denote.

So I just stated the quiet part out loud, and revealed the decoder ring.  We socially promote students based on age, not based upon academic ability.  Why?  Because we do not want to commingle students across broad age ranges…such as having 10 year olds in the same class as 16 year olds.  OK, fair enough.

The value of using age as a shortcut for assigning grade level appears to be convenience — which is why we use it as a shortcut for determining whether someone can vote, enter into a contract, get married, buy a gun, and so on.

The alternative is to have to treat people as individuals, and evaluate their capabilities on an individual basis.  It’s so much easier to just treat people as statistics… which is more or less the idea behind social justice, right?  We know about the groups to which you belong, so we don’t need to consider you as an individual.

But convenience is its only value.  And that convenience comes at a tremendous cost.

The joke about the lamppost is relevant here, where age (and not money) is now the lamppost.  If we focus on age, then we’ll never actually consider what factors should control who gets grouped together in a class.

Is it better to have a bunch of 10-year-olds, some of whom are predisposed to violent or disruptive behavior; or a bunch of kids of ages 8 through 16, who have demonstrated the ability to interact with each other politely, and exhibit self-control?

Is it better to have a bunch of 10-year-olds who are at wildly different levels of preparation for what is going to be taught; or a bunch of kids of ages 8 through 16, who are at the same level of preparation, and ready to be exposed to the same material as a group?

Age isn’t a reasonable way to group people for anything.  It’s an excuse for not doing the work to find reasonable ways to group them, or to get along without the need for such groupings.

We used to segregate school kids by race.  Then we decided that was a stupid idea.  Eventually, we’re going to come to the same conclusion about age.  One can only hope that it happens sooner, rather than later.

Except that when we promote on age, then we need to instruct at many different levels in each grade.

Which is okay, if you’re just going to have individualized education.  But if you’re going to try to teach the same thing to a bunch of kids at once, it’s completely inappropriate, possibly worse than just doing nothing:

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/10/in-praise-of-assembly-line-schools

We used to “track,” group students by academic ability by grade.  We, far and large, no longer do that.  Now we “mainstream” students.  That is to say we work to ensure that this is a mixture of academic ability in each classroom, in each grade…almost always with one teacher per classroom.  If your gut tells you that this is a recipe for disaster in the traditional American public school, then you have good instincts.  The reality is that this “mainstreaming” system results, more often than not, in a race to the bottom.

We use the idea of ‘least restrictive environment’ for some to create what would more accurately be called a ‘most disruptive environment’ for everyone else.

The other elephant in the room is how American public schools deal (actually fail to deal) with discipline.  This is a topic for another day.

Actually, I think it’s a topic for right now, since the capacity for self-discipline is one of the metrics that we ought to be using instead of age when deciding who should share a room.

Unless we are willing to return to tracking, providing classrooms for students of particular academic abilities by grade, then we cannot improve the system.

Think about how you would run any other kind of school, like a martial arts school, or a music school, or a gymnastics school — you know, the kind of school where the teachers only get paid if the students actually learn.

Students would progress at their own rates, and be grouped — if at all — by what they’re working on, rather than by ‘age’, or ‘academic ability’, or any other vague assessment.  You work on what you’re ready to work on.  And how would a teacher decide what a student is ready to work on?  You give him some tests.

Why do public schools ignore this incredibly obvious idea?

I don’t see why it’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around… except for the sheer convenience of being able to use age to label and segregate students.  And the fact that the easiest thing to do next year is whatever we did this year, and last year.

(Another joke:  A guy walks into his kitchen just in time to see his wife cut the end off a roast and throw it away. He asks why she did that.  She says, that’s just how you cook a roast.  It’s the way my mom always did it.  They call up the mom, and she says the same thing.  They call up the grandmother, and she says:  I always threw away the end of the roast because my roaster was too small.  That’s our education system in a nutshell.)

Assessments were demanded as a vehicle for academic accountability.  We got the assessments, but not the accountability.  There are no easy answers…  Well, there is one “easy” answer.  That is expanded school choice.

As long as schools are run in the same basic way — and the state will make sure that this is the case — school choice isn’t an answer at all.  It’s a distraction from having to address fundamental questions like:  Why do we organize the education of children in a way that is optimized for sharing the kinds of resources that existed in 1780, or 1880, or even 1980?  Why don’t we educate children using the kinds of resources we have now?

If we were starting from scratch, we wouldn’t have anything that even remotely resembles ‘schools’, whether public or private.  Schools are to education what arcades are to gaming.  Except that arcades didn’t offer subsidized daycare.

One participant chimed in with a question:

This is an interesting discussion.  However, what is the standard you want the children to achieve?  Does anyone have a definition for proficiency?

Actually, I do. You have a written and oral exam in which people try to mislead you, and you have to identify the means — logical, emotional, rhetorical, statistical — by which they’re doing it. To pass this test, you would have to be literate, numerate, and rational enough to participate intelligently in public policy discussions as a citizen, and capable enough to learn any trade or profession that you want to go into.

Someone else responded to Kevin’s remarks about discipline:

I have no faith in the ability of administrators or teachers to adequately discipline students.

I don’t see why this should be their job. If what you are trained to do is teach, then you should be working in an environment in which students are ready and equipped to learn.  Students who aren’t ready or equipped to learn, or who simply don’t want to learn, should be somewhere other than in your classroom.

There used to be something called a ‘finishing school’, where students would go to learn, not academic subjects, but how to behave socially in certain situations in society.  How to dress, how to dine, how to converse politely, how to put other people at ease, and so on.

Perhaps we need to have ‘beginning schools’, where students would learn, not academic subjects, but how to behave socially in schools — or more generally, in society.  Until you get through beginning school, you don’t get to attend regular school.

I suppose ‘pre-school’ and kindergarten are supposed to deal with this.  But they are age-based.  And kindergarten has become more like other grades.  You get out when enough time has passed, and not when you’ve learned what you needed to learn.

These 6-7-8 year old children are now 8-9-10 and have no idea how to socialize, how to problem solve on the playground how to share a swing, they don’t understand how to take turns on the slide or how to play throw to the crowd at recess. They have no idea how to engage in a conversation where they disagree.

And they should learn these things, not in school, but before attending school.  To put these kids into an academic environment is… I don’t think insane is too strong a word.  Telling teachers that they have to try to teach such students is like telling surgeons that they have to try to operate without anesthesia.

If we tried that, the surgeons would quit.  Teachers should do the same.

Someone else jumped in:

Yes we need change in our public education.  I had a Mom tell me that she pulled her son out of school for home schooling.

This is becoming increasingly common.

She discovered her son did not know how to read and really did not know the alphabet.  She took responsibility for not picking up on this.  He was either in 4th or 5th grade.  I was disgusted that he had just got pushed through from one grade to another.  Many of the children get pushed through school from one grade to another  not knowing how to do the basics like reading or math.  This is nothing new and has been going on for years.

I’m often reminded a lot of a cartoon that I saw years ago.  (Please excuse the nudity, but it’s the only cartoon I’ve ever seen that makes this particular point.)  The guy on the sidewalk is like a lot of parents before COVID:

No idea what was going on in school, and just assuming that everything was as they expected…  Then, with so-called ‘remote learning’, they got to peek behind the wall.  Many of those who realized what was happening pulled their kids out.  Others are trying to ‘reform the system’.  That’s been going on for a long time, with entirely predictable results:

She continues:

How do we change it and expect more from our teachers?

I suppose the first thing to do would be to stop paying teachers regardless of whether they are successful at teaching.

Would we run any business where we actually cared about the results in the same way that we run public schools?  Would a restaurant hire cooks who don’t actually know how to cook?  Would a garage hire mechanics who don’t actually know how to fix engines?

The teachers themselves, perhaps unwittingly, often tell us that they want to be ‘treated like professionals’.

I say, let’s take them at their word:  Professionals have to go out and find clients, and keep them happy, if they want to stay in business.  Which means they have to provide results people want, at a cost people are willing to pay.  And if they’re not up to it, they have to go find other ways to support themselves.

But in the end, it’s probably less about what we ‘expect from teachers’, and more about what we expect from students, and parents, and society in general.  In particular, as long as we think of education as an entitlement, instead of as a responsibility, nothing is going to change:

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/03/amendment-2-and-article-83

Someone else turned the conversation to the topic of standards:

The standards are supposed to measure the students abilities for each grade before moving on. Unfortunately they still allow students to the next grade stating he/she will learn more in the next grade with extra help. That is why they are promoted. That’s why the students are always behind. Some teachers claim that if they have progressed throughout the year they can move on. We are currently rewriting our standards in the district. Wakefield never adopted Common Core, a bonus. During the past couple years getting rid of administrators who were not helpful, it has been challenging. Hopefully everyone will stick to the standards and what is best for the students’ learning. Behavior can be its own thread!

Even if you ‘stick to standards’, it doesn’t help if you’ve standardized the wrong things.  Standards that focus on content that needs to be ‘delivered’ by teachers, rather than on the ability of students to learn independently, miss the point:

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2019/04/a-standard-for-school-standards

Of course, the aim of such standards would be to make teachers progressively less necessary over the course of a student’s education.  Which is why you’ll never see them adopted.

They changed the definitions too. Now our curriculum policies don’t match up. They have kept them simple up to now. The board is reviewing them as they move along. It has been working so far. Our biggest issue is when a subject is added to the curriculum. Teachers say it’s not curriculum, it’s a program. Parents want to know what materials, course work and programs they are using. Not hard to list it or as a parent, ask the teacher.

If the kids can read the curriculum (or program) materials, then it should be up to the kids (and their parents) to decide whether to read them or not.

If the kids can’t read the curriculum materials, then they should be working on whatever skills they lack that prevent them from being able to — whether those skills involve literacy, numeracy, or rationality.

How’s that for simple?  :^D

For example, if you want to ‘teach CRT’, first teach the kids to read and understand explanations that are based on logical or statistical reasoning; and teach them to be able to detect the rhetorical and emotional tricks that people use to mislead each other; and then give them the same materials that you’d give to the teachers.  (This would have the added advantage of letting the kids see how the authors of the materials are assisting the teachers in jerking the kids around.)

The same is true for teaching history, civics, economics, sciences, literature… pretty much everything.

How much better would this be for the kids?  How much less would it cost the taxpayers?  How much power would it take away from politicians and bureaucrats?

Someone new jumped in to support Kevin’s idea that school choice is the answer:

supporting and propping up the School Choice movement is the proverbial “poke in the eye” to Public Education.

But ‘school choice’ still uses taxes to pay for education.  Using taxes makes something inherently political.  So control over the schools that parents are allowed to ‘choose’ will become political — or more precisely, more political than it is already.  School choice is a feint, a delay tactic, not a solution.

The ‘solution’, if there is one, is to minimize — ideally, eliminate — the use of taxes for education.  To use education funding as a last resort (like food stamps, or heating oil subsidies), rather than as a first resort.

In other words, to start treating being educated — like being armed — as a responsibility, rather than as an entitlement.

Absent that, school choice just changes the particular arena in which the political battles take place.  And the thing about political battles is, they are ultimately won by the side with the least scruples.  The problem with poking Argus in the eye is that he still has 99 of them left.  It’s not a winning strategy.

Hit them in the pocketbook. Demand accountability of the huge amounts of money spent providing a less than adequate education.

Great idea.  How can we do that?  We could elect officials to collect the money, and to oversee how it’s spent.  Oh… isn’t that what we have already?  Why isn’t it working out?

Maybe we could pass a law to require schools to get all students to proficiency!  Oh, wait… we already have one, RSA 193-H:2.  (There was a bill — sponsored by State Senator Ruth Ward, chair of the Senate Education Committee — to repeal it this year, which thankfully got tabled.)  Why aren’t the schools doing that?

The main thing we need from graduates is for them to be literate, numerate, and rational enough to be able to guard their freedom from politicians and bureaucrats who want to manipulate them into giving it up.  The probability of creating a tax-funded, government-controlled system to produce this result is the same as the probability of creating a perpetual-motion machine.

If accountability is going to work, it has to be in the hands of the people most directly affected:  the students.  Without mandatory attendance laws, kids who are not being well-served by a school would be free to leave.  It would then fall to the parents to convince the kids of the value of getting an education, which would force them to consider the question of whether public schools — or just schools — are the right places to get one.

Those laws won’t be repealed, because a guaranteed captive audience is one of the things that keeps the whole enterprise afloat.  But if accountability is really what we’re after, that’s what it would look like.

A new participant backed me up on school choice:

If you watch a lot of the national trends and conversations surrounding school choice, many of the bills at the various state levels that support or enhance school choice simply make the alternate education choices beholden to the same standards that the public education system can’t manage to meet or uphold now. They then use tax dollars as a carrot and stick to enforce compliance and make the alternate education solution look exactly like the failed government model that it was supposed to replace.

Exactly.

I say failed government model because too many people say failing. They say our schools are failing. This is not a present tense matter. Our school system as Americans has failed.  That is past tense. (Although really, in terms of producing Marxist education camps, progressives could say they are a great success) We are now on the other side scratching our heads looking at ourselves and asking the hard questions of “what can we do about it?”

My children are not grown; these issues are not theoretical political or social; they are very real! I appreciate each and every one of you and your contributions to this discussion; I can personally testify that this generation of parents needs us asking these questions more than ever.

I couldn’t agree more.  And the distinction between failing and failed is one that we need to keep front and center.

I would just suggest that one of the first questions for any parent to consider is:

Is my goal to get my own kids an education?  Or to reform an entire system, so that my kids can use that system to get an education?

Or to put that differently:

To avoid stepping on sharp objects, should I try to cover the world in leather?  Or just wear shoes?

He answered my question this way:

As a parent, the goals are separate for me. My goal is apparent is to get my children a quality education, which public education is not going to provide.

Separate from that, as a veteran, citizen, taxpayer, My goal would be to reform the system so that our children can be sufficiently educated to safeguard our Constitutional freedoms and participate competitively on the world market.

I would suggest that the first (being able to safeguard our freedoms) implies the second (being able to compete economically), but not vice versa.

I only have a few short years to provide goal number one and I do not believe we will accomplish goal number two in that time frame. I do believe that what occurred in Croydon and what has occurred since COVID has sown seeds. However, We have been going in the wrong direction for a generation or more, and we will not rebuild Rome in a day.

I think that if enough parents who are clear on these priorities (first, educate my kids; second, fix the system) find ways to educate their kids outside the system, what will happen is that we’ll eventually realize, as a nation, that one of the biggest problems with ‘the system’ is that we think of it as a system:

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/03/the-education-system

https://granitegrok.com/blog/2020/06/unfit-for-liberty-part-2-education

Someone added:

God help us all but I say we keep trying to protect the children. Not just ours but all.

Sure, but do you know of any situations in which children have been protected by placing them in the hands of government employees?  Where — even if it has succeeded in a handful of cases — it hasn’t ended up doing more harm than good as a whole?

There’s a game I like to play with my progressive friends.  I tell them I’m thinking of a government project, which we’ll call X.  We’re not going to say what X is, but we’re going to set aside a pile of money — billions of dollars, say.  Maybe hundreds of billions.

Then I ask:  How much of that money is actually going to end up being applied towards the goals of the project, and how much of it is going to end up being siphoned off to people with political influence?  How much of it might even end up being used to work against the goals of the project?

When they don’t know what X is, they can see right away how things will go, how things have to go, based on both experience and common sense.  Almost none of the money will be used for its intended purpose.  Almost all of it will go to people with connections.  A significant portion of it may be used to undermine the goals of the project.

But then when I reveal that X is something that they like — ‘improved education’, or ‘affordable housing for the poor’ — they lose that clarity and think that in this case, things could be different.

It’s almost like someone who understands that the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes it impossible to build any perpetual motion machine; but who then sees a clever design for a particular one, and starts wondering whether it can work.

I think something like that happens with schools.  If you just think abstractly, and ask yourself:  Under what conditions, and for what purposes, should we be putting children in the hands of government employees, especially during the most vulnerable and formative years of their lives?  You see that the answer is:  Never.

But as soon as you start thinking concretely about ‘schools’ and ‘education’ and ‘bright futures’, clarity vanishes, and you think:  Maybe if we could just spend the right amount of money, or get the right curriculum, or make sure the right people are in charge, it can work out.

Samuel Johnson once said that remarriage represented ‘the triumph of hope over experience’.  I think the same can be said of efforts to reform the public schools.

The post SDGANH Conversation, Continued … appeared first on Granite Grok.

The idea of lactating men reminds me of a saying I can’t exactly quote verbatim, but it has something to do with how much sense there is with regard to mammary glands on a bull, if you take my meaning. As in – welcome to a bizarro world where that has become a gender slur.

Of course, you can have T**s on a bull, you bigot, but they may discover that inducing lactation creates challenges for Bos taurus, and not just because “Significant research gaps exist in this field.”

That’s the opinion of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine Protocol—no mention of whether it is acceptable for lactating men to chest-feed on a commercial flight. I’m guessing that is another significant gap in the research. But they are otherwise confident enough about the topic to issue a 12-page paper titled “ABM Clinical Protocol #33: Lactation Care for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Plus Patients.”

 

A central goal of The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine is the development of clinical protocols for managing common medical problems that may impact breastfeeding success. These protocols serve only as guidelines for the care of breastfeeding mothers and infants and do not delineate an exclusive course of treatment or serve as standards of medical care. Variations in treatment may be appropriate according to the needs of an individual patient.

 

Breasts and breastmilk seem to me to be the two biggest hurdles which, as it turns out, the science has yet to resolve when it comes to men who think they might be women. The paper gets to those “issues” after spending several pages on definitions and language so as not to offend anyone.

Seriously.

Women who think they might be men but who want to breastfeed (presumably a child) are encouraged to wait until after they are done doing that before having extensive hormone or surgical treatment. Translation: if you chop off your breasts, you can’t breastfeed.

Good advice. But not good enough to stop them from fantasizing about the other side of the social construct we call the gender spectrum; men who think they might be women that want to breastfeed. There are lots of words and speculation, but at the end of the day, good luck with that, mostly because … there just hasn’t been enough research directed at the problem. It’s not a biology problem. It is a money problem.

It’s not beyond the pale, you see; they just need bigger Grants. Not guys named Grant but cash, dollars, scratch, dough, clams, or dineros. The proper funding will miraculously present solutions to the problem of … the diminished lifestyles of scientists who write these sorts of papers.

It’s all quite nutty, so allow me to summarize how you might respond to a debate on this topic.

 

 

I think that sums it up.

 

HT | TGP

The post “Inducing Lactation May Present More of a Challenge for Transgender Individuals.” appeared first on Granite Grok.

There was an attempted coup in Russia. Remember that? The Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, turned on Russia. He took the Russian city of Rostov, the Russian military stronghold nearest Ukraine. The Russians couldn’t take Bakhmut, Ukraine, for months.

Wagoner took Rostov in a matter of hours and was greeted like a conquering hero by the crowds. Wagner then started toward Moscow. Suddenly it all stopped. There was some kind of deal. Prigozhin is in Belarus. Putin is still in power in Russia. Everybody watched this unfold. Now, everybody’s gone silent. Nobody is talking about any of it. Why?

The questions we need to be asking are: Why is there so little media coverage of this? What does this tell us about our intelligence about Putin’s Russia? What does it mean about our position with respect to Ukraine? Why does China have better intelligence about Russia than we do? Why aren’t we backing the Ukrainians to kick the crap out of Russia? Why didn’t we support Prigozhin? Why are we buying into another endless war?

Our military, intelligence, and State Department had no idea what the hell was going on with Wagoner. They didn’t see this coming. They didn’t see the risk. They didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. They were deer in the headlights… frozen in place.

A lot of the assumptions American leadership made about Russia appear to have been false. During the Cold War, the CIA was often in error, rarely in doubt. They said the Soviets were hugely strong, the Soviet economy was doing extremely well, and the Soviet military capacity was outstanding. Once the Soviet Union came crashing down, we realized that the emperor was wearing no clothes.

How could they have been wrong about this? The answer is that not only is our intelligence not very good, but it is almost always dictated by assumptions that are no longer tested. The Biden administration is making a lot of important decisions based on this intelligence about the Russians. Their position is we can’t provoke Putin. He’ll hit us. As Biden says, it’s going to be Armageddon, World War III. He’s going to hit us with nuclear weapons. But the emperor was wearing no clothes…

The thing this exposes is: Putin is not the viper that attacks. Actually, when confronted with pressure, a threat to his regime, he begs for mercy, negotiates or cuts a deal. So here is this guy, Prigozhin, who is Putin’s creature. Putin funded Prigozhin, created him and they were best friends. Prigozhin was Putin’s caterer, his most trusted ally. Lots of Prigozhin people from catering built a private army. That’s what happened in Russia. Prigozhin was Putin’s creation to counter-balance the military.

Why are we so afraid of him? Why are we afraid to give the Ukrainians long-range missiles because it might provoke Putin? Why are we afraid to give them Abrams tanks? Why are we afraid to give them F16 fighter jets because Putin might get upset? We are allowing a Putin strongman mystique to deter us. Aren’t we really just deterring ourselves? In reality, what we just witnessed shows us Putin is weak. Doesn’t the Wagoner action expose Putin’s weakness?

We are being subjected to the pacifist counter-arguments coming from Berlin and Washington. Could we, should we do more to destabilize the Putin regime? Do we really want him in power? Why did we say we were supporting Ukraine?

Putin was the key element in allowing the Assad regime to stay in power. Hezbollah couldn’t do it. Iran couldn’t do it, but the Russian troops actually saved Assad in Syria. For that, Putin got, for the first time since the Cold War, a port on the Mediterranean through Syria.

Russia is now supporting Iran, and Shia over Sunni. Russia is destabilizing a whole variety of other countries. Maybe Putin is nothing more than a paper tiger. If that’s the case, why are we not pushing on him harder?

The Ukrainians are asking for weapons to fight the Russians. Wouldn’t it be great if they won and Putin fell? Wouldn’t it be great if we did what we said we were in Ukraine to do and got the hell out?

And even if things in Russia were worse after Putin, the Russians would probably be internally focused for a while as opposed to focused on threatening the West and NATO. If the Ukrainians win quickly and Putin falls as a result, isn’t that good for us? And again, why the silence? Why the inaction? Why did we not seize the opportunity when it was presented? Who is lying, and what are they lying about? What are we not supposed to see here?

 

The post Were We Wrong About Putin? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Democrat policy is built on a pile of lies, deceptions, misdirection, and deceit. But you can’t openly admit you are just making stuff up so you can use people to accumulate unassailable political power. Even rank and file Dems might balk at that.

You instead invent or create problems you then promise to solve. One of those problems is the lie that a trace gas will end the planet, and you must abandon your lifestyle to save the world. After decades of secular humanism, the godless vacuum has grown to such a degree that pandering to a socialist economic program disguised as meaning appeals. You have a purpose. I’m helping to save the planet.

You are being used to end free markets and secure one-party-state socialism. But again, that’s what is behind the curtain. What you see if the nearly intolerable heat and hate of Oz, the great and powerful. Do his bidding, an you might get some consideration. But much like the movie, no matter what you do, it is not enough, and only until you reveal and accept the truth can you be free.

The United Auto Workers is having something of a road to Damascus moment on the subject of good-paying green jobs.

 

The United Auto Workers (UAW) is going after President Joe Biden’s so-called “green energy” agenda for its wage-cutting outcomes while showering billions in American taxpayer money on the three largest automakers in the nation: Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis.

…

UAW President Shawn Fain, as well as the union’s members in Lordstown, Ohio, are sounding the alarm on severe cuts to auto workers’ wages as a result of the Biden administration’s push to steer automakers towards EVs, enticing them with federal subsidies.

 

Money a plenty is being dumped on the idea but most of it is going – according to Fain – to well-connected and well-heeled investors and executives. It’s a real class struggle, a class-based conflict. The thing unions claim justifies their continued existence. And here we have it in real life and real-time, perpetrated by Left-Wing robber barons of the Church of the Green Utopia.

And auto workers should be concerned, though not just about how the EV market might be impacting wages and jobs. Ever since The Green New Deal landed inside the DC Beltway, the Dems have not been shy about their plans. Privately owned automobiles are an outdated concept whose shelf life has reached its end. The UAW’s workers are clinging to obsolete skills (learn to code, right?).

And EVs are not the future of individual transportation. They are the means by which personal transportation will be limited to the wealthy and connected, and you won’t have auto plants all over the nation to meet that need. You will have a few, run by the approved oligarch, using increased automation.

You need to listen to Lawrence Garfield (played by Danny DeVito) in Other People’s Money.

 

This company is dead. I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here. It’s too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We’re dead, alright. We’re just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let’s have the intelligence, let’s have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future.

 

Except that there is no insurance, and no one is coming to invest in your future. The automobile business, as we know it, as the UAW knows it, is being bled out by the political left, and they could care less how many hard-working union laborers suffer as a result.  In fact, you are no worth more to them on the dole – dependent on their largess – than anywhere else. Absent the union, the need some other way to influence you, and making you a full-time dependent “employee” of the welfare system is that ticket.

That’s no reason to lie down. In fact, I’d like to suggest you stand up and do the one thing you still can. Stop electing Democrats. Take control of your Union’s priorities. UAW President Shawn Fain appears to have gotten a glimpse behind the curtain but not enough. And is he alone in this, or are other union leaders more interested in representing the workers who elected them or the politicians that invite them to parties?

Those union bosses are a bad as the Democrats with whom they rub elbows, but the workers have more power than both unless they refuse to step up and protect their livelihood. And that begins by accepting that the Democrat party agenda is an enemy of that livelihood.

 

The post The UAW is Wondering Where Those “Good Paying” Green Jobs Grow? appeared first on Granite Grok.

In one of the last rulings of the 2023 session, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive up to $20,000 of current balances of student loans was unconstitutional.

By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its authority last year when it announced that it would cancel up to $400 billion in student loans. The Biden administration had said that as many as 43 million Americans would have benefitted from the loan forgiveness program; almost half of those borrowers would have had all of their student loans forgiven.

When proposed in 2022, Joe Biden knew, and then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared, that the President did not have the authority to forgive or cancel student loans. Forgiveness of the loans was never the intent of the proposal. The goal was to buy the votes of young voters for Democrat candidates in the 2022 midterms by dangling a $20,000 check in front of them. It worked, and the ruse did secure that voting block for the Dems, proving that empty promises are more important to younger voters than effective government. The Red Tsunami predicted for the 2022 midterms never happened because of a major Con by President Joe Biden.

Within minutes of the High Court’s announcement, Biden stepped to the microphone and blasted the MAGA radical Supreme Court for abandoning college students and graduates of America burdened with high-balance loans preventing them from enjoying the fruits of their college degrees. Biden used this ruling as an example of how out of touch the Supreme Court had become and why the makeup needs to be revised by adding more justices to balance the ideology of the Court. Biden’s belief was echoed by most politicians and media from the Left.

But this decision will not stop Joe Biden from benefiting from his original proposal. He promised his team would get to work and find ways to circumvent the High Court and get relief for current holders of student loans. The Con continues, and will, right up to the 2024 general election. There are votes to be bought, and damn it, the Democrats are buying.

Within days, Biden was back to the podium to announce step one of his effort to overturn the crushing defeat of his plan by the Supreme Court. His plan is to forgive the loan of any college graduate who has been making payments on their student loans for at least twenty years. Biden’s plan will not impact young recent graduates but rather graduates already in their 40s and in the major earning years of their lives.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona immediately praised the Biden proposal and said it was about time we leveled the playing field for college graduates burdened by high-balance student loans. Why is there a need to level the field? College graduates earn an average of $1.2 Million more in their lifetime than non-college graduates. Why, then, should people who did not attend college, paid for their children’s education out of pocket, or went into a trade have to dip into their pockets to pay the loan of a 40-year-old attorney? They absolutely should not, and that is what the Supreme Court ruled.

Biden’s team will continue their creative attempts to get the student loan forgiveness bill passed or the Court ruling circumvented. A check will never be written, but that does not concern Joe. Joe is concerned with how many votes he can secure with a political scam. Loan holders should be apoplectic at how they are being used. Instead, they continue to pull the lever on the Left, proving they learned nothing in college while racking up loans.

 

 

The post SCOTUS Says No, Joe Says Yes! appeared first on Granite Grok.

A black woman decided she could no longer affiliate herself with the priorities of the Democrat party. Her reward for switching sides was an onslaught of – no, not well wishes or even good riddance – but epic hate rants—nasty, racist epithets or exactly what you’d expect from Democrats.

First.

 

Georgia Stae Rep. Mesha Mainor made headlines when she announced last week that she was leaving the Democratic Party — and in the days since, she has received a virtual tidal wave of hate mail, much of it overtly racist and profane.

 

Language Warning.

 

Dear Democrat,
Sorry you feel this way. pic.twitter.com/wH0zBNp7jy

— Rep. Mesha Mainor (@MeshaMainor) July 16, 2023

 

There are many, and you can review them here or here, but I’ll offer one more again for context (feeling, impact) and, again, language warning.

 

Dear Democrat,
I’m sorry you feel this way. pic.twitter.com/IYIyukVw1W

— Rep. Mesha Mainor (@MeshaMainor) July 16, 2023

 

These Democrats seem to have forgotten that they are the party of peace and civility – especially when it comes to women of color. Maybe Ann Kuster can loan some of those Dems her duct tape.

 

 

 

That is, after all, the best and perhaps the only way to keep a Democrat from spewing hate.

Exit question: Do any NH Dems want to step up and denounce this sort of thing, or are you gonna let this actual hate against a black woman slide because it’s your people doing it, and (maybe, just maybe) you agree with them?

We’ll be waiting …

 

The post Party of Civility™ Unloads Racist Hate on Black Lawmaker After She Leaves the Democrat Party appeared first on Granite Grok.

Given the Democrat party’s affinity for incrementalism, what appears to be a gimme to teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria is more likely the threshold to denying parental rights to younger children.

The gateway drug for this journey is HP 340. LifeSite News reports that,

 

Despite strenuous Republican pushback, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed the new measure on Tuesday. 

Maine Public reported the law will allow 16- and 17-year-olds in the Pine Tree State to receive cross-sex hormones “if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, have received counseling, are experiencing harm from not receiving care, and have parents that refuse to support treatment.”

The law also requires teens to “receive counseling on the benefits and potential consequences of hormone therapy,” according to the outlet.

 

The legislators added a lot of if-thens, which is nice, but those will be the first to go if they are not meaningless already. In New Hampshire, for example, if you have gender dysphoria but want to live as your biological sex, you can’t find counseling that will help. They can only encourage you to change genders. It is a violation of state law to promote any other choice.

These sorts of caveats, if not present, will appear as future legislatures push to lower the age and further rob parents of influence over their children. That is, after all, the true goal. Democrats don’t give a rat’s ass about your gender rights; ask anyone claiming residency in any one of the LGBTQ+ family of characters who supports Republicans or, say, Donald Trump. You might as well be Clarence Thomas, whose race and rise from poverty affords no protection from the hate. Or JK Rowling, an otherwise reliable liberal with the wrong ideas about “women.” Rr Tara Reade – a lifelong Democrat excommunicated for daring to say something about Senator Joseph Biden ‘raping her.

No black man will ever get the same deference for drug use or possession as his son Hunter, nor would anyone who violates firearms law in Biden’s America.

The Socialists must control the kids to achieve ideological victory. It is inevitable. And if you do not push back while you still can, that end will arrive sooner rather than later instead of not at all.

 

 

 

The post Maine Robs Parents of Their Rights – “Kids” can Get Gender Drugs Without Parental Consent appeared first on Granite Grok.

The momentum is growing within the Left to push Joe Biden aside for 2024. These people are either seeing the signs we have for three years or are moving past their directive to ignore them. Since the campaign for the 2020 election, the Party and media have been in unison telling the American people not to believe their eyes but the storyline they were being fed. Anyone with a modicum of sense could see the play, but the Left was willing to destroy their credibility to muster support for their Manchurian President. As the election season is gaining speed, they realize Joe Biden cannot play his part in this ruse on America. This is not a game but the future and existence of the United States.

That last sentence is not hyperbole. Joe Biden wants a second term to “finish the job.” That is an ominous statement considering the damage he has inflicted in his first two years. To finish the job means to complete the promise of Barack Obama to transform America into a Socialist country. That disgusts and threatens those who love this country as it has always been. Biden also needs a second term for the financial well-being of the Biden Crime Family. He knows the money train derails the day he leaves office, and he is no longer in a position of power to attract money from unscrupulous foreign sources. He and his family need the time to fill their coffers at the expense of embarrassing this aging man and endangering the country.

This week, there were reports of secret emails sent to prospective candidates to prepare in case the Party moves on Joe. Newsom, Whitmer, and Buttigieg, but not Harris, were supposedly notified to prepare their teams and supporters for a potential run. With the slow pace of Biden to raise money and get his campaign team in place, a decision would have to be made by the Fall by the DNC for the direction to take. This action will not sit well with Biden and Harris, who feel the run for a second term is their right and not the Party’s decision. This is where the danger lives.

Biden, and his family, are addicted to the power they have enjoyed for the last fifty years. They have corrupted the system, and their financial lives depend on the continuation of that corruption. To pull the plug on their scheme would be tantamount to cornering a wounded animal. These people will do anything to survive, and those actions will not benefit Americans.

Biden has been erratic in his governance and has opted to use the pen rather than legislation to accomplish his goals. He has also shown disdain for the Supreme Court and often disrespected them when disagreeing with their rulings. This week included two such situations. In his continued support of Ukraine, he pledged cluster bombs and money. There appears to be no limit to the amount of aid and no accountability for the taxpayer dollars transferred to Zelenskyy. SCOTUS had ruled the President had no authority to forgive Student Loans. That ruling does not stop Joe Biden. He announced his first step in a multi-step process to forgive debt and buy votes for 2024.

If Biden’s future aspirations are cut off, there will be no limit to what he tries to accomplish before he rides off to Delaware. With no concern for how his decisions will impact his standing with voters, he will be reckless, fearless, and unAmerican. His moves will not be for America but for a new version of socialized America. This will be an extremely stressful year ahead and will be sealed in the next few months.

The post What If Dems Decide Joe’s Gotta Go? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Today marks the first full day of Camp Constitution’s 15th Annual Family Camp, which is being held at the Singing Hills Christian Camp in Plainfield, NH.  “This is our fourth year at this beautiful facility,” said Hal Shurtleff, the camp’s co-founder and director.

“Families as far as Florida, Texas, and Michigan made the drive to participate in this unique camp program.”

In addition to camp activities such as swimming, hiking, marksmanship, and campfires, adults and older teenagers take in presentations by some of the nation’s leading experts on history, the U.S. Constitution, and education, which include author Alex Newman, Professor Willie Soon, and Pastor David Whitney of the Institute on the Constitution.   Valery McDonnell, the youngest elected official in the United States, will conduct a class on how to get elected and on Thursday. Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy will give a class titled “The American Dream.”

 

 

Mrs. Edith Craft runs the program for campers ages 5-12, where they learn American history, its founding documents, and Christian history.   Classes are videotaped and will be available on the Camp’s YouTube and Rumble channels.

 

 

In the fall, Camp Constitution will host a weekend family camp in Tuftonboro, NH. For more information, please visit our website http://www.campconstitution.net

 

News Release                                                       Contact:  Hal Shurtleff

For Immediate Release                                       (857) 498-1309

The post First Day at Camp Constitution’s 15th Annual Family Camp appeared first on Granite Grok.

There was much ado when UNH was finally forced to shut down its Confucius Institute. A partnership with the government of China that the Feds had long warned was likely a cover for intelligence gathering and the theft of intellectual property by the CCP.

The #wokesters in the Commie Campus systems of America have no objection to such things, and institutes are not the only way to buy a #woke anti-American universities heart. Large cash gifts will purchase plenty of loyalty, and they are not exactly illegal. Anyone can donate to a college or University.

China donates a lot!

The last large dollar exchange between China and UNH appears to have been for a contract worth $738,000, starting June 2020. In July 2021, UNH officially ended its Confucius Institute relationship, but the contract above keeps funds from Communist China rolling into  UNH until June 2024.

They are still doing business with China, just not as openly.

Dartmouth College is also well endowed with Communist Cash. It has accepted nearly 2.8 million in cash gifts from China or Hong Kong (still China) since 2020. No legacy data or details are attached to the gifts, so these are not likely from appreciative Asian Alumni. And (oddly) there were no donations to Dartmouth from China in this Database before COVID.

Is that suspicious?

Dartmouth Medical and Dartmouth Hitchcock have both been eager, if not zealous, supporters of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global COVID response, including masks, lockdowns, distancing, the ventilate and Remdesvir till death protocol, the alleged efficacy and need for mRNA vaccines and boosters (safe and effective), jabbing hospital staff or bust policies, as well as nearly every other fool idea peddled as necessary to “prevent the spread.”

China has a good deal of influence over the WHO and BioNTech.

Is any or all of that million COVID blood money, or are they also encouraging the sterilization of future generations via Dartmouth’s ardent passion for hormone blockers and childhood mutilation surgery?

Both?

I know someone will ask, so I checked. Many other IVY league schools (scores of US colleges and universities) are swimming in cash CCP gifts.

 

• Cornell received 440.000 from China in 2021.
• Columbia has received nearly 63 million since 2020.
• The University of Pennsylvania, close to 20 million in the same period.

 

I’d expect much the same at the rest of them; awash in Chinese influence. And before you scoff, you need to understand something. China doesn’t let anyone come to America without expecting them to gather intelligence. Everyone’s family back home is assumed to be a hostage if anyone dares to refuse. China also does not give gifts without some expectation of something in return. We can debate what that is without hard evidence, but the CCP is highly invested in influence peddling in America. The President and his son are but two high-profile examples.

And while the Dartmouth money looks like a pittance compared to Columbia, Dartmouth has about 6700 students. Columbia has nearly 20,000.

2.8 million buys a lot of influence at a small rural college, even an Ivy League one. So what, exactly, did they buy?

 

The post Since COVID, Dartmouth College Has Accepted 2.8 Million Dollars From China … For What? appeared first on Granite Grok.

The idea behind voir dire  (which is French for jury tampering) is that a jury should be ‘impartial.’

An impartial jury is one that hasn’t already made up its mind, one that will be able to judge the facts of the case without having already pre-judged them.

Sounds good, right?  But judging the facts in a case is only half — less than half, really — of the job that a jury is supposed to do.  The more important job is judging the law as it applies to the case.

But jurors who might disagree with the law — who might be willing to nullify the law — are routinely excused from serving on juries.  The voir dire process exists, in large part, to weed them out.

This undermines — destroys, really — the ability of a randomly selected jury to do something that no judge, however wise and however well-versed in the law and the rules of evidence and procedure, can ever do:  Represent a cross-section of the beliefs and values of a community.

That’s really the only necessary function of a jury. Everything else could be handled by judges.

So ironically, the government says an ‘impartial’ jury is one that hasn’t pre-judged the facts but has pre-judged the law.  It’s completely ass-backward.

And it is how juries have been transformed from a tool designed to check government overreach from the outside — the closest thing we’ve ever had to requiring the consent of the governed ¹ — into a tool that is used to promote government overreach from the inside.

 

 

¹  Suppose that 10% of the people in a community believe that a law is bad — that it exceeds or abuses the authority delegated to the government.

If you randomly select members of that community for jury duty, getting a jury that will convict someone of breaking that law is like rolling a 10-sided die 12 times, and never seeing a 1.

How likely is that?

The probability of pulling that off is

(1 — 0.10)12 = 0.28

So there is only a little more than a 1 in 4 chance of being able to convict someone, even if he’s guilty.

If the number of people who oppose the law increases to 20%, that probability drops to

(1 — 0.20)12 = 0.07

or about 1 in 15.

If 60% of the people have used ‘democracy’ to force something on the other 40%, their chances of enforcing it drop to

(1 — 0.40)12 = 0.002

or about 1 in 500.

And setting aside probabilities for a moment, consider that — like David standing up to Goliath — a single juror, standing alone against an entire government, can derail a miscarriage of justice.

Randomly selected juries are the best mechanism ever invented for protecting the rights of the minority from the will of the majority.

They are the nearest thing we have to requiring the consent of the governed (one of two principles from the Declaration of Independence that the Republican Party was created to protect).

Nothing else even comes close.

 

The post ‘Impartial’ Means You Agree With the Government appeared first on Granite Grok.

Something happened that I haven’t seen in a long time was a moderator that’s more Conservative than Progressive, and now Tucker Carlson has come and filled that need by interviewing the major Republican candidates at the Family Leader Leadership Summit in Iowa.

Republicans have, for too long, adjusted their debate spiels to counter Progressive journalists. In reviewing some of the videos from the event, Tucker had all of their numbers – they just were not prepped for Tucker properly.

While Asa Hutchins (again: “WHY?” was the operative question by most when he announced he was running) got severely pummeled (to the point of “WHY do you think you should continue after that?”), what everyone seems to be talking about is this.

 “I know you’re running for president. You are distressed the Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years. Drive around. There is not one city that has gotten better in the United States. And it’s visible. And yet you’re concern is that the Ukrainians, a country that most people can’t find on a map, who have received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don’t have enough tanks, I think it’s fair to ask, where’s the concern for the United States in that?”

“Well, it’s not my concern,” starting at 00.46 when Tucker starts his run up and asks the question that GOPe Pence hadn’t wargamed:

 

 



 

Wow, just wow. But it fits. Out of touch, dying to be a “World Stage Leader” instead of being an American Leader? Look, I’ve been honest about my outlook on Pence since the time he went belly up like a beaten dog when and gave into the corporate pressure to defenestrate the just passed Indiana defense of marriage bill. He made a huge deal of it in the bill’s run-up when it was signed and then, in fear of his political life, caved.

This answer to Tucker, in all truth, should end any of his aspirations to be in the Oval Office. “Not my concern” is his attitude towards American cities. Yes, I know – they are all Democrat-run and have been for decades; I have no problem with letting them fail on their own if for no other reason than to let the city electorates learn the lesson to stop voting stupidly. Vote for the wrong people and policies, and, of COURSE, your city is going to turn into a third-world hellhole. We’re watching it happen in real time.

However, I’m looking at his answer from the viewpoint of the REST of us. We love this country, see that it’s in bad shape, we’re looking for a fighter that is going to come along and protect OUR values, and he says THAT?  That Ukraine is a higher priority? And then followed by a litany of talking points.

Now, I have no idea who the guy at the end is, and I haven’t decided who I’ll support (I have three in mind). But to say Ukraine first and America isn’t his top priority? That’s just nuts. Even Tyler Durdan over at ZeroHedge said:

Tucker Carlson utterly dismantled the necon talking points of Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, during an on-stage interview before a large audience of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit in Iowa on Friday”

“American cities aren’t my concern.”

HT | Conservative Treehouse

 

 

 

The post A Few Thoughts On Candidate Mike Pence and His Lack of Concern for the United States appeared first on Granite Grok.

Another Monday has rounded the calendar corner, which means it is time for another edition of Monday Memes – an ambitious imposter edition – doing my part to keep the meme alive until Nitzakhon returns from “special assignment.”

Nitzakhon is due to take the helm back beginning next Monday, so yippee for that, and he assures me he will have some on-the-ground reporting from his adventure overseas, which he will share with our readers upon his return.

While we wait –  I’d like to thank the numerous meme curators at Minds for most of this week’s cache.

And yes, there are at least a few that are bound to offend, so please scroll responsibly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Monday Memes – The Last Ambitious Imposter Edition appeared first on Granite Grok.

The headline in VT Digger read, “Officials issue warnings about flood-related scams,” and, “Natural disasters make people more vulnerable to scams.” Surely, they do, and Vermonters should indeed be on the lookout for those praying on people’s fears and emotions in the wake of the tragic flooding so many areas of our state are experiencing.

But, ironically, the biggest scam artists of them all are those same officials telling us that if we just send them a few billion or so of our tax dollars over the next couple of years, they can change the weather and stop things like this from happening again in the future. Watch out for these scammers to double down in the days to come!

After Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont legislators had a choice to make. Should our policy be primarily geared toward preparing for the next extreme weather event by investing our limited resources in strengthening our infrastructure and disaster response capacity? Or should we instead put the overwhelming bulk of our efforts into stopping the next storm from occurring by lowering our carbon footprint? They chose the latter. How’s it working out?

This criticism isn’t hindsight or Monday morning quarterbacking. A look back at the September 7, 2021, meeting of the Vermont Climate Council highlights the issue and the problem with the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA), passed by our Democrat-controlled legislature over the veto of Governor Scott in 2020. During a discussion about how much “resilience and adaptation” the Climate Action Plan should incorporate (the terms in this context meaning preparations for weather-related events, such as floods), several members noted that the GWSA is very clear that its priority is greenhouse gas reduction, not adaptation.

 

 

As Council member Jared Duval reminded his colleagues, “I just don’t want to overstep our bounds when we know that the initial target for this plan is most focused on for 2025 and 2030 are about gross emissions reductions…. I want to make sure that in our attempt and responsibility to address adaptation and resilience that that does not become a way that we take our attention away from what is in the Act [GWSA], the very first thing listed,… the most present, legally binding requirement, which is this has to add up to a plan the meets the gross emission requirements.”

And, in the ensuing two years, they most certainly did not get distracted by addressing adaptation and resilience. At all.

Asked to respond to Duval, Chris Campany, one of the few voices of common sense on the Council and there to represent municipal governments (you know, the folks now dealing with flooded downtowns, washed out roads, etc.) was clearly frustrated. “Maybe the work of adaptation and building resilience is something they need to do in the legislature next session. Chairman [Tim] Briglan [of the House Energy & Technology Committee] actually offered a mea culpa that it [adaptation and resilience] wasn’t given equal billing in the original act.”

But the legislature did not take up adaptation and resilience in 2022 or 2023, instead putting their efforts into passing an estimated $2 billion over four years Clean Heat Standard “Rube Goldberg” carbon tax scheme on home heating fuels in order to reduce Vermont’s already minuscule carbon footprint.

Campany went on to issue the warning, “I can tell you in my work here [as a municipal planner] having gone through our biggest disaster since Irene on July 29th [2021], then dodging three potential direct hits from three other tropical storms…, in my world we can go negative emissions tomorrow and for everybody living in Vermont we’re still going to be dealing with the same issues…. I’m going to keep beating that drum [for adaptation and resilience] because of fundamental life and safety issues, whether we reduce greenhouse gas emissions or not.”

And here we are, more than three years after passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act, dealing with the same fundamental life and safety issues associated with extreme weather events.

We could have been spending our taxpayer dollars on things like shoring up our roads and bridges, strengthening our culverts, upgrading our sewage treatment facilities, investing in first responders and emergency equipment, and, where possible, relocating houses and buildings out of floodplains. They might have started on that last project by moving the Vermont Emergency Operations Center somewhere uphill from the banks of Winooski River in Waterbury, but no…. And it was one of the first places that needed to be evacuated during the storm. Brilliant minds at work!

Instead, our legislators decided to use that time, money, and effort mostly for subsidizing heat pump installations and electric vehicle purchases and building a bunch of EV charging stations – many of which are now underwater. Still waiting for the stories about the heroic role electric vehicles played in rescue operations. And I wonder how all of those solar panels have been performing under a month of rainclouds.

If we are expecting more frequent extreme weather events in our future, there are practical actions we can take to make sure future damages are limited. Unfortunately, the people we have elected to make these decisions would rather virtue signal to most radical activists, pouring our tax money down a rat hole that they privately (and some publicly) will admit won’t do a darn thing to affect climate change — or, as we just witnessed, prepare for it. We’ve been scammed. What a shame.

 

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank.

The post Biggest Flood Related Scam: The Global Warming Solutions Act appeared first on Granite Grok.

The thread that streams from one generation to the next is that the next generation are complete dunderheads. While there are more than a sufficient number in any generation that behaves in such ways to keep this saying around, this satirical (and hysterical!) video from Live Action offers proof.

“Now that Roe v. Wade is overturned, a woman can get pregnant just from having sex.”

Gosh, even at my now-advancing age, I never would have known that something that was never found in a document could magically make cavorting couples create something. And I have thought, for my entire marriage, all that was needed was that special nod, the shy smile, and a raised eyebrow asking that question.

 

 

 

Heh! The “dangerous path of abstinence”?

 

“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives,” the opinion states.

 

Sorry, this did NOT remove a Right; it did give back the freedom (and responsibility) for each State’s people to decide for themselves whether to allow it or not instead of nine black-robed Justices.

It also makes fun of people that refuse to take responsibility for themselves – as it should.

And that does seem to be a generational issue.

HT | The Blaze

The post “Now That Roe v. Wade Is Overturned, a Woman Can Get Pregnant Just From Having Sex.” appeared first on Granite Grok.

Boston, Massachusetts, mayor Michelle Wu has done a decent job of making enemies on both sides of the aisle. The Democrat Mayor is often subject to disruptive first amendment exercises, which have become a list of names.

According to reports, the Boston Police Department requested a list of those names from the Mayor’s office. You could assume (true or not) that they intended to determine if any of them presented any real threat to the Mayor. And while that sounds like something the police are supposed to do, if the list reads like a who’s who of your political opposition on either side of the aisle, as Mayor, your first response should be to stop the list from leaving your office.

The optics are terrible.

Walking along a parade route with a bullhorn shouting at you for 90 minutes is annoying but protected speech. Business owners who objected to targeted taxes directed at them are also among the names, according to Fox News, and why would you even mention them? There are even political opponents who oppose vaccine mandates, which looks petty.

It happened, and now Mayor Wu’s enemies list is national news.

But that’s not what got my attention.

The report invokes Nixon’s name several times, but that story is fifty years old. Why reach that far back when there are examples nearer to our own that were more devious or sinister and – given Wu’s party affiliation, Democrat?

Hillary Clinton had stacks of FBI files on her husband’s “enemies” and used to build dossiers for future use when needed. Rumor has it Obama did the same thing.

Obama is credited with the partisan weaponization of the intelligence and surveillance states against his citizens and (more famously) used the IRS to infringe on the rights of non-profit groups to engage in opposition speech before the 2012 Election with no cries of interference from the Left. The IRS stonewalled and delayed applications for non-profit status, demanding unnecessary details not required from left-wing groups. There were threats of audits against organizers, lawfare, and other forms of intimidation.

That same administration later targeted and spied on a presidential candidate, using the weaponized FBI to target the same man as President, along with his campaign and White House Staff.

Again and again, the Left has shown their inclination to develop and work enemies lists, including – more recently, the railroading of J6 protesters incarcerated without due process rights and parents who spoke out at school board meetings.

By comparison, Nixon’s list looks like a love letter, so why pick him? He was a Republican. Better to remind us of that than the more egregious violations perpetrated by more recent Democrat administrations. All of which begs another question. Who asked the Boston Police to ask the Mayor’s office for a list?

That might be the best story of all.

 

HT | Gateway Pundit

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For years we’ve been told that Renewables are THE answer to all the Greenie prayers (who or what they’re praying to or for remains a mystery). All we have to do is spend TRILLIONS of dollars to buy all this stuff from the Chinese, and then we’ll be all set…oh wait.

Germany has done that – their electrical prices have shot sky-high, and energy was rationed. Now, “Confronted by a toxic cocktail of high energy costs, worker shortages, and reams of red tape,” German companies are starting to head to the exits.

This, too: “They replaced decarbonization with deindustrialization.”

And then there’s California:

We’re finally having a summer heat wave out in California, after, it should be noted, an extremely cold summer so far, but that won’t slow down the climatistas. The chart below of California electricity sources as of 7:30 pm this evening is a little hard to de-cypher, but if you study it a bit you can see how crazy California’s fetish for wind and solar power is.

First, the inverted u-shape curve is wind and solar power, which spikes huge in the middle of the day. So much so, in fact, that we have a surplus of power that we export to other states (and may even pay them to take, though perhaps not on a region-wide hot day like today). See the red line at the bottom which is labeled “imports,” and you’ll see it goes negative mid-day, but we start importing power from other states again in the evening. If tonight is like last night, overnight we’ll be importing ~5 GW from other states.

…Natural gas (the orange line) has to double output to fill the gap, which means that wind and solar power actually have the real world effect of locking in natural gas production. This the greenies refuse to grasp.

I would prefer to say that last bit as “they don’t want to admit it or let you know this ‘issue'” exists.” They will not be so inclined to say, “Yep, NatGas saved our collective butts yet again.” It can happen – REs capacity rose in Texas, and their heat wave, REs made a significant difference – as long as the Sun was out.

Everything is always roses and unicorns with them – like the transgenders, there can be no dissent from their Narrative. But, there it is – actual data laying out exactly what most of us that follow this even superficially know – we’re rushing headlong into a wall of their making. The problem is, WE will be paying the price for their follies and overarching ideology.

Long term, does it make sense? Probably. Collapsing the time frame – a disaster in the making. We, as voters, need to make it clear to our elected representatives AND employees (re: the Administrative State) that we should be making that time frame determination for ourselves.

In the private sector – not the Government sector.

 

HT | Powerline

 

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The art of bedroom design entails combining a variety of components that individually add to the space’s comfort, elegance, and ambience. Lighting is one such important component that is frequently ignored. Lighting is a potent instrument that may change the mood and improve the aesthetic appeal of your space. It is not just a practical aspect. A bedroom that has been expertly lit can be transformed into a private haven that exudes class and elegance.

Exploring personalised solutions

You can seamlessly integrate lighting and storage in room design with a variety of stylish lighting options that not only illuminate the space but also enhance the functionality of storage areas. By strategically placing lights within wardrobes and shelving units, every corner is well-lit, making it easier to find and access stored items. This thoughtful combination of lighting and storage solutions creates a harmonious and efficient environment for individuals, optimising both aesthetics and practicality. Consider partnering with experts like those at myfittedbedroom.com for a professional finish.

Strategic light placement for accentuation

Deploying several light sources at different levels throughout the room is essential to creating a smart lighting strategy. Aside from the primary overhead lighting, think about adding accent lights to draw attention to artwork or architectural details and task lighting for dressing rooms or closets. Lights can be strategically positioned to create eye-catching focal points and to give your bedroom a cosy, welcoming atmosphere.By incorporating both natural and artificial sources, it is worthwhile to investigate the dynamic range of lighting as an extension of this method. During the day, natural light is a great advantage since it gives your bedroom a light and airy impression. The mood and vitality of the space can be improved by utilising large windows, skylights, or glass doors to take advantage of daylight.

Employing dimmers and understanding colour temperatures

The ability to adjust light levels can significantly improve the functionality of your bedroom. Dimmer switches ensure a seamless change in your room’s atmosphere depending on the time of day or activities. Additionally, it is crucial to understand colour temperature. Warm (yellow) or cold (blue) tones can be seen in lights. Warm lights create a calm and cosy ambience that is ideal for relaxing, whilst cold lights are appropriate for tasks that need attention to detail.

Merging style and functionality

Lighting serves as both a functional necessity and an accessory that gives your space a touch of elegance. A glitzy chandelier may add a touch of luxury to your bedroom, while modern pendant lights can give it a feel. Even a beautifully crafted table lamp can enhance the aesthetic appeal of your space. For a unified aesthetic, take into account how your lighting choices will work with the colour scheme, furniture type, and general theme of your bedroom.

Conclusion

More than just ensuring visibility is involved in creating a well-lit bedroom. The ambience, tone, and feel of your space can be greatly influenced by the right lighting, displaying your own taste and refinement. You can choose lighting fixtures from businesses like myfittedbedroom.com that not only illuminate your space but also exactly match the colour of your chosen wardrobe, giving it the finest potential appearance. Your bedroom is, after all, your sanctuary, and with the correct illumination, it can truly exude style and charm.

 

 

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There is no candidate more perfectly suited for the U.S. presidency in 2024 than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

If anything, the United States of America as a country owes the Kennedy family for continuously allowing its members to be killed on U.S. soil and in U.S. airspace. That is a tragedy that too many are willing to sweep under the rug, for whatever reason. Mostly due to negligence for duty to nation and country. 

That is the primary plague sweeping the world right now. Too many people are distracted by screens, by false narratives in major media channels, and by their own state of spiritual and financial poverty to stand up and push back against the powers-that-be. 

There is a serious power problem on the planet today. A small group of entrenched corporations and wealthy individuals are shoving a disastrous and destructive agenda onto the entire planet. Rather than build a global society focused on developing a wealthier, healthier, and stronger planet, these corporations and select individuals are hell bent on forcing poverty, illness, and weakness onto as many populations as possible. 

RFK Jr. epitomizes the fight against that corporate fascism and will be the most effective champion of freedom, liberty, and prosperity to combat its pernicious influences. 

In order to elect RFK, the People of the United States must do one thing– speak to each other and spread his messages of intelligent skepticism, informed opposition to vulture capitalist corporatism, and democratically enforced global peace. Everyone in Washington, the globalist-corporatist leftist syndicated media, and what is called the U.S. deep state will push back against RFK’s messages. 

This pushback has already started. The U.S. Democrat Party attempted to stem RFK’s campaign by announcing that there will be no debates. What kind of party calling itself a supported of democracy refuses to hold debates? One that is essentially based on a lie. The name of the party itself has become a misnomer. This Democrat Party today is a party of thieves, criminals, communists, socialists, and totalitarians. Precisely the wrong lot to be anywhere near seats of power in the USA.

The current structure of the Internet has already been sown against RFK Jr. Due to Google, and its parent company Alphabet, internal corporate policy, most every search result is a hit piece on RFK calling him a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer, or some other trendy slur or smear. These are designed to trigger sheepish U.S. leftists into immediately rejecting RFK’s legitimacy as a candidate. 

Google’s complicity with globalist-corporatist fascism is another reason why speaking to each other in person is key. We must detangle ourselves from the Silicon Valley tech overlords in order to reclaim our sovereignty as individuals. This is part of RFK’s message as well, but it is implied. We must be able to live our lives without carrying a smartphone on our bodies. RFK has also spoken about the dangers of 5G technology and wireless frequencies. Indeed, there is key truth to this, and it resounds in RFK’s message of protecting and strengthening human health and individual sovereignty. 

Beyond speaking about RFK, the People of the United States must go out and make every effort to ensure that the U.S. Democrat Party does not commit egregious election fraud again in 2024. The field is already being prepared for fraud perpetrated by a widespread network of illegal immigrants and ultra-left brownshirts for the Democrat totalitarians. 2024 must be an election of integrity, and real democracy must prevail over the U.S. Democrat Party’s brand of totalitarianism.

Spread the word about RFK. By the best avenue for communication possible- word of mouth!

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