Many of the gambits at the recent Exeter regional (SAU 16) deliberative meeting, and last year for the Brentwood elementary school, will certainly recur at a town meeting next month near you, and you should identify and resist them.

1. The Pledge of Allegiance and a youth choir singing the National Anthem are not indeed to ground the meeting in patriotism or nationhood but to soften voters up to think as a collective and to consider the young beneficiaries, as when a welfare mother steals food for the babies. (No, don’t object to saying the Pledge! Choose your shots; there are better targets to follow.)

2. The meeting begins with a presentation by the school board touting the undeniable success of its government monopoly. In Exeter, this included a litany of calls for applause for seniority, followed by a video of a series of satisfied pupils talking herd-speak. The assertions made during this propaganda cannot be debated. In Brentwood, objections and even questions were ruled out of order, as “no warrant article has been moved and seconded.” This is your first hint that Parliamentary Rules are not rules but part of the con.

3. Brentwood’s moderator would not allow the mandatory vote to permit out-of-towners to speak. (You see, this would stifle the board’s lawyer, whom we paid–with your money–to attend and argue against you.) In Exeter, a majority gave union bosses from outside the region the right to participate. No; an assertion that cannot be argued by a member of the town or voting region does not have some inherent right to be heard.

4. Warrant articles propagandize by asserting that an off-budget spending item will have “No amount to be raised by taxation.” This is the absurd notion that there can be spending without costs. All such articles would spend money that would otherwise be saved and eventually returned to taxpayers. Dittoes budget “savings” compared to a phony baseline. Compare the effect of a Yes vote only to the effect of a No vote.

5. The headline in the handout at Exeter was that the requested budget reflected a 1% decrease from the previous year. Inside, they admitted that the new school is finally paid for, and there will be $2 million less interest; comparing apples to apples, the budget is actually up almost 4%. Presenters explained which costs have increased but not why they didn’t cut back elsewhere; the reason is that they never cut back anywhere. But every recent budget has had millions of excess in them. In addition, school population continues to crash, as the legislature haltingly lets parents reclaim their state taxes in Education Freedom Accounts and do the right thing for their children without quite paying twice.

An amendment to send half the excess back to taxpayers was met with ridicule, tears, and accusations of partisanship. One opponent said this proposed cut was “arbitrary” (an argument against cutting anything); another charged that it was less well-thought-out than the committee’s budget (an argument against amending anything). (Brentwood’s budget was defended with claims that “We spent a lot of time on this.”). Debate included two union representatives railing against the use of consultants and others raising workplace grievances. Such debate, on an amendment to merely change a dollar amount, is out of order unless the moderator’s goal is to fatigue voters.

6. Citizens make modest attempts to argue dollar amounts. No one ever makes the moral case. The late Grokster Jim Johnson was the last to come close in his 2023 floor remarks referencing “genitalia,” and he was met with personal attacks.

This is SAU 16, the region that–

–Makes barely over half of its pupils proficient. Yes, this is better than the state average of majority non-proficiency. Brentwood voters are told that at least we aren’t Stratham, as our postmaster tells us the USPS compares favorably to most other nations’ monopolies.

–Benched an athlete for privately offering a Bible-based opinion on “gender”–and requires that pupils playing games of pretend be met with support and participation–that is, refuses to teach.

-Marked prom-goers’ hands with Sharpies if they refused to Biden up and wear a feedbag to the prom, to “control” a virus that notoriously did not affect young people.

–Has an “openly queer” Director of Remedial Racism (my term), hired straight from BLM, and given influence over pre-teen curriculum; and if he needs us to know he is queer, he certainly needs them to know.

–Is suing the State of New Hampshire to overturn the new law against teaching “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, but in the meantime has a website peppered with references to DEI.

And see Ann Marie Banfield’s articles on the verbal sexual games with pupils, occasionally becoming physical abuse. Is this supposed to be a surprise? Why would we expect there to be consequences?

7. The board’s lawyer is used as the final word against dissenters. Dissenters open the board up to litigation. (Conservatives willing to incur additional legal costs?–They must be hypocrites!)

A citizen petition proposed that we stop electing regional board members at large, in which voters in each town vote on who best represents every other town. This, like ranked-choice voting in Maine, mostly serves to win through confusion.

The district’s 3-2-1-1-1-1 apportionment of members to towns is obsolete, permissible only because all voters have the same ballot full of strangers–which is the problem, after all. The lawyer said that giving each town its own district would fail one-person-one-vote. But this is one legal opinion, not the word of God. The other side of the story is 2004, when the NH Supreme Court struck down the map of House districts and drew its own map, 88 mostly multi-town districts in which we voted for strangers. But the resulting legislature proposed and we ratified a constitutional amendment that defended floterial districts: We favored local representation over exact numerical equality.

Although the law bans Deliberative meetings from completely gutting a citizen proposal, SAU16 is the body that amended an article asserting “no confidence in the Superintendent” by deleting the word “no”! And here again, the citizen proposal was amended by voice vote to reverse its sense and reverse its binding effect. Voters in March will be asked to cast an “advisory” vote that the current arrangement is just fine. A Yes vote might be used against us next time; a No vote will simply be meaningless. The moderator claimed not to have the power to rule on whether the resulting wording twisted the proposers’ intent, merely saying it addressed the same subject matter. And no one argued that this verbal hack was “not as well-thought-out” as the original proposal had been.

A future proposal with a 7-3-2-1-1-1 reapportionment would surely be close enough to one-person-one-vote–but would be sabotaged in exactly the same way.

8. We are all told that direct democracy and public education are the linch-pins of civility. This is absurd, even to readers who have never gotten up to speak and heard schoolmarms hiss. Respect for others’ rights is the linch-pin. The form of government is irrelevant when the essence of government is taking other people’s money, using the implied threat of force, to support unionized, tenured personnel.

9. Regarding the legislature’s new law against DEI: You cannot legislate to make a racket run like a business, and government education is a racket, which would have too few customers to cover its overhead if the state really put voluntary alternatives on an equal footing. As they should: You cannot rear a principled generation with teachers whose salaries are raised at gunpoint.

The post Recurring Town Meeting Gambits appeared first on Granite Grok.

While visiting WMUR, I clicked on this (Two children hospitalized after canoe overturns; father charged with DWI). I’m familiar with the Winnipesaukee River. I’ve paddled many parts of it, many times, and at many levels. I’ve done it on New Year’s Day and countless other times in 32-degree water.

I am always dressed properly and in a variety of NON-MOTORIZED vessels. The kind Democrats Lou D’Allesandro and Jeff Goley have repeatedly wanted to tax. Pay attention to the word “non-motorized” because I’ll get back to that in a moment.

And before I forget, I send my “get well soon” wishes to the kids in the hospital.  I’m glad they and their dad are still on our side of the grass. I’m not going to defend his irresponsible behavior as a parent. The experts can discuss that among themselves though I want to point out that DSS has been weaponized against parents that the Damn Emperor has a vendetta against. Just talk to JR or the Domes guy if you want to learn more about that.

I could even take this discussion to talk about “the system” and all its dysfunction, from the 2017 death of 4-year-old Brielle Gage on Queen Heather’s watch to the current youth center litigation, but others can do that if they want. I’m not going to talk recovery stuff, either. There are plenty of fine folks in NH, many on “our side,” who can speak to that from various points of view and wearing many hats with regard to that matter.  They’re certainly welcome to share their thoughts.

And back to my whitewater experience, I’ve paddled with plenty of stoners.  Not only that, I’ve received my fair share of assistance from many of them, whether or not they were using at the time, after I had to eat humble pie on the water myself(usually resulting from an unsuccessful roll attempt after capsizing).  They’ve thrown me a rope, chased after my lost paddle, fetched my capsized boat, and many other acts of kindness.  I certainly don’t want them to appear on the next episode of North Woods Law in an unflattering way.

What I’m here to protest is the father being given a DUI. As referenced earlier, a canoe is just as non-motorized as a bicycle.  This man is being charged with the wrong charge. He might not even drive. Maybe. And another question I have is why couldn’t the local police do their own dirty work of arresting him?  This incident took place far from 93, where the Gestapo hands out most of their DUIs.

Furthermore, I am interested in seeing a copy of this man’s criminal complaint, which should be interesting. That document, which we learned in the fall of 2021, does NOT have to be issued when bail is made. In fact, we all remember nine people having to wait 23 days (from 10/13/21 to 11/5/21) to receive theirs and only to have the signature of the disgraced Officer Provenza instead of the specific stormtrooper who did the deed.

Is this recently arrested man someone who criticized the Damn Emperor?  Or was it that he simply said “amen” after being rescued and seeing his kids rescued?

The post Is There a Law Against CUI in New Hampshire? (Canoeing Under the Influence) appeared first on Granite Grok.

While today’s political dynamics spotlight our need to clean house, today’s situation also offers the latest in a series of gradual steps which, similar to the movement of the clock’s hands, continue unnoticeable.

At our beginning, our Founders all took into account the frailties of man and the adverse potential which human nature can offer; so much so that Madison acknowledged such tempting in Federalist #51 when stating, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary…”

Jefferson was more poignant when stating, “….In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man; but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

The “mischief” that Jefferson mentions first became public over one hundred years ago with President Wilson’s declaration to “make the world safe for democracy.” Years later, in 1940, FDR doubled down that America “…must be the great arsenal of democracy.” One may wonder where did these fables come from without democracy being mentioned in “the law of the land,” our Constitution!

More unsettling was how this became echoed throughout America.

Since that time, while this false governing has become America’s standard, it doesn’t make it legal or correct! However, the manner and speed to which this was adopted makes one wonder, especially when every school child, in earlier days, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, which in part stated, “…and to the Republic for which it stands…”

Back in 1928, the War Department’s “Training Manual No. 2000-25 defined democracy in part as “A government of the masses…attitude toward property is communistic…” It also stated that our framers “made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy…” It also cited that the Founders “had formed a republic.”

Jefferson’s mischief re-emerged when, in 1936, Senator Homer Truett (D-WA) called for the Manual’s removal. By 1952, our Army praised democracy in it’s Manuel 21-13, The Soldier’s Guide; by falsely stating; “Because the United States is a democracy…” I emphasis this misunderstanding of democracy since it misaligns the public’s understanding and patriotic regard onto what America isn’t and because it represents a necessary and final step preceding socialist rule.

An indication of how near socialism is to taking effect is the heightening of the violence. Eventually it’s level will welcome any method for control. Democracy is only a temporary pause, or in our American situation, a conditioning prior to the main event. Whatever structure which a democracy claims, it’s majority rule alone, is self defeating and suicidal by nature. As Madison stated, “…as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.”

It stymies our thinking that in these highly developed and progressive times, what was crystal clear to our Founders is cloudy at best, especially within our band of intellects who disperse their foggy knowledge onto our young. Clearly, facts and histories of our past are available. However, as this democracy belief reveals, true understanding is not today’s objective.

Consider a few more of the Founder’s universal thoughts: Edmund Randolph’s understanding of democracy, “…in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy.”

Alexander Hamilton, “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in the despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.”

Fisher Ames considered democracy, “a government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders.”

These words reflect the general distaste and even fear of our Founders for such an unruly version of authority.

Hopefully, this will open eyes as to this drum beating of this indoctrination, which these weasels continue to douse upon all Americans. With the up coming elections, our prep needs to begin with the truth about our essential American being and governing substance; our Constitutional Republic.

Remember Benjamin Franklin’s answer to “..what have we got, a republic or a monarch?” Franklin’s reply, “A republic, if you can keep it.” First things first; our Republic needs to be realized and then, at that time, we must protect such an American Blessing!

The post How Did a Free People Become So Persuadable and Meek? appeared first on Granite Grok.