The experts have been reluctantly niggling at the edges of the truth for a while. The COVID vaccine wasn’t as safe or effective. The Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions didn’t do anything useful and might have done harm (and no one knows whose ideas they were to begin with). Oh, and post-vaccine, an awful lot of people died.

There is some willingness to admit that Covid vaccines could be partly to blame for the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic.

Researchers from The Netherlands analysed data from 47 Western countries and discovered there had been more than three million excess deaths since 2020, with the trend continuing despite the rollout of vaccines and containment measures.

They said the “unprecedented” figures “raised serious concerns” and called on governments to fully investigate the underlying causes, including possible vaccine harms.

You Don’t say?

The study found that across Europe, the US, and Australia, there had been more than one million excess deaths in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, but also 1.2 million in 2021 and 800,000 in 2022 after measures were implemented.

Researchers said the figure included deaths from COVID-19 and the “indirect effects of the health strategies to address the virus spread and infection.”

They warned that side effects linked to the Covid vaccine had included ischaemic stroke, acute coronary syndrome and brain haemorrhage, cardiovascular diseases, coagulation, haemorrhages, gastrointestinal events and blood clotting.

We won’t wait for them to acknowledge that you were right because that won’t happen. It is still too soon. Maybe after the election, we’ll get more research, and one day, more research – politically driven, of course – will find a need to lay bare the systemic fraud, probably as a distraction to cover more of it disguised as the new and improved safer more effective priorities of the public health industrial complex.

If any conspirators still live, maybe someone will be put on trial. It is, after all, part of the game. Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim are getting a good look at, perhaps, an appearance of judicial balance to offset the legal assault on a presidential candidate in a campaign year.

Another act in the play, but look – someone let someone else say vaccines might have contributed to a rise in all-cause mortality.

We are winning.

Are we?

The FDA just approved the latest COVID Booster—for Fall. It is formulated (at least on paper) to help with the latest “variant.” That’s misleading. These mRNA COVID shots are ineffective and more likely to result in infection and transmission, but if they kill the host, the virus in them will eventually die, too.

That’s never been properly disclosed.

But to end on a positive note, fewer and fewer people are volunteering to be test subjects for the latest thing in the covid vaccine universe. Uptake is way down.

I’ll take that win.

The post It’s Almost Okay To Admit That the Response To COVID Killed Some People appeared first on Granite Grok.

Senator Carson exemplifies the arrogance of power. She is seeking re-election as well as the powerful position of Senate President. But she needs to be retired by the voters.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she virtually singlehandedly hijacked and managed to kill a bill passed by a voice vote the House in 2017 that would have strengthened the rights of gun owners in our state. The story is a bit complex, but here goes:

New Hampshire is not a “home rule” state. This means that local governments cannot lawfully purport to legislate on any subject unless they have been explicitly authorized to do so by laws passed by our General Court and enacted into law. If a local government does something in contravention of this principle (sometimes called the “Dillon Rule”), there are at present only very limited avenues available for citizens to put the local governments back in their places, usually involving the hiring of lawyers and the spending of lots of money.

In 2003 and in 2011, New Hampshire enacted what is known as a state pre-emption law, RSA 159:26, that made it abundantly clear that “Except as otherwise specifically provided by statute, no ordinance or regulation of a political subdivision may regulate the sale, purchase, ownership, use, possession, transportation, licensing, permitting, taxation, or other matter pertaining to firearms, firearms components, ammunition, or firearms supplies in the state.”[emphasis added] Although probably not strictly necessary under the Dillon Rule, RSA 159:26 made it, once again, very clear what local government could not do regarding firearms.

However, RSA 159:26, which consists of about 11 lines of unambiguous text, fails to contain any enforcement mechanism that ordinary citizens could use against local governments that ignore the prohibitions of the state pre-emption law.

So, this writer was the prime sponsor of HB307, which materially strengthened RSA 159:26 by providing for a detailed enforcement mechanism that ordinary citizens could use without incurring large legal expenses. The text was modeled on a very successful law from another state.

The text of HB307 was drafted, ultimately modified, and adopted by the House on a voice vote after review and input from representatives of the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the NH Firearms Coalition.

But when HB307 was passed to the Senate and Carson’s Judiciary Committee, she engineered a vote of “non-concurrence” by the Senate, meaning that the Senate would not go along with the House bill. A Committee of Conference was held to try to iron out any issues.

In the Committee of Conference, Carson sought to condition approval of HB307 on a revision that would have removed a very critical word (“use”) in the prohibitory language of RSA 159:26, the effect of which would, in the view of this writer and many others, have effectively gutted RSA 159:26 as it exists.
Because what Carson wanted was so egregious and unacceptable, HB307 died and was never adopted, and we are stuck with RSA 159:26 without any meaningful enforcement tools.

As a side note, when this writer personally called Carson to try to discuss the issue, she said she was too busy to discuss it and brushed it off.

Carson is the Senator from District 14, consisting of Auburn, Hudson, and Londonderry, which reportedly has a small majority of registered Republican voters.

Because Carson has been a fixture in Concord for so long, it is assumed that she has substantial financial backing for her re-election campaign. So, anyone opposing her needs to be able to muster sufficient resources to make a run meaningful. IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO FILE TO RUN.

Carson has been in the Senate for far too long, and as previously noted, she exemplifies the arrogance of power. She needs to be primaried and ultimately retired.

Full Disclosure: This writer is a Life Member of the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America, as well as a member of the NH Firearms Coalition.

The post Senator Sharon Carson: No Friend of Gun Owners appeared first on Granite Grok.

June 1st marked the beginning of hurricane season in the Atlantic basin. As we reported previously, everyone has been saying how warm the water is and appears desperate to see some storms. They were so desperate that on June 1st, the news was that they were tracking five tropical waves. FIVE!

Related: Atlantic Hurricane Season is Almost Here – Get Your Climate Hyperbole Ready!

They meant the weather. Five bits of weather.

Yesterday that number was down to three, same alarmism, but at no point—if you actually looked—did the National Hurricane Center ever report anything other than this.

Weather Underground – a great site with details, radar, and all that geeky business, has looked like this.

None. But there could be! And boy, oh, boy, we’re watching because we’re due, and everyone agrees it could be a hairy Atlantic Hurricane season. That is all true. We’ve done the research and looked to more reliable sources, and they all say the same thing. Lots of storms and lots of landfills. It has been a long time coming—just not this week.

This is the Atlantic Basin as of 9 AM ET Today (6-6-24).

There is weather with the potential. But week one is a nothing burger as the media plants its climate alarmism seeds. Again, I am not saying they are wrong about the potential. It looks like we could have a hell of a summer, but it has nothing to do with angry climate gods, and subjugating the West under a regime of taxation and declining lifestyles won’t make the weather better.

 

The post Media Jumps The Shark With Early Hurricane Hysteria appeared first on Granite Grok.

This question was posed to me the other day by a friend (I will paraphrase and omit the profanities): “How is it that New Hampshire, a state roughly the same geographic size of Vermont with about twice the population spends half the amount of taxpayer money that we do?”

Here are the actual numbers. New Hampshire’s population is about 1.4 million, and Vermont’s is about 640,000, so we’re slightly less than half. Vermont’s current budget is $8.5 billion while New Hampshire’s is $3.1 billion, so we spend well over two and a half times – nearly triple — more. Naturally, this means that, compared to Vermont, New Hampshire is in a state of total neglect. Children wandering the streets uneducated. The sick left to suffer and die. The poor abandoned hungry and unsheltered. Criminals terrorizing the citizenry…. Umm… no.

In fact, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, New Hampshire has 11.6 homeless people per 10,000 population, while Vermont has 43 — nearly four times as many! There are a few possible explanations for this. One is our economic and social welfare policymakers are such inept doofuses that they’re driving more citizens into systemic poverty. Another is our policies are so out of whack “generous” that homeless people are flocking to Vermont to free ride on the backs of Vermont taxpayers. But since homeless advocates are adamant that the latter is not happening (yeah, sure), we’ll have to go with the doofus hypothesis for now. (It actually applies to both scenarios).

When it comes to educating children, Vermont, according to US News & World Report, ranks 11th for student outcomes. Pretty good! But New Hampshire ranks 4th. Do they spend more to get better outcomes than we do. Nope. New Hampshire spends twenty percent LESS at $19,633 per pupil compared to Vermont’s $24,666 – and these numbers are before the coming 14% property tax increase, new internet service tax and short-term rental tax fueling a $200 million plus K-12 spending increase for next year.

Healthcare? According to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Vermont comes in 9th for overall quality. Still, New Hampshire comes in 6th. Is New Hampshire paying more for that higher quality. No. Oh, no… MoneyGeek reports a New Hampshirite’s annual health insurance bill comes in at $6072, or the tenth lowest nationally. A Vermonter’s? (Scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down…) There we are! Number 47 at $10,236.

What it comes down to is “Return on Investment” (ROI), or in layman’s terms, bang for the taxpayer’s buck. WalletHub does an annual analysis for ROI on state spending and, low and behold, New Hampshire is number one. Their legislators spend wisely and to good effect. Vermont is (scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down…) 43rd. Sandwiched between New Jersey and Arkansas of all the appalling places to find oneself. Our legislators, it seems, have a propensity to, rather than “invest’ our money as they would have us believe, something akin to piling it on the State House lawn and setting fire to it.

According to the WalleHub analysis of New Hampshire,

The Granite State’s tax resources have had a good impact on crime prevention and the environment, as the state has the second-lowest crime rate and the second-lowest air pollution in the country. It has one of the best public school systems as well…. New Hampshire residents are doing very well for themselves, considering they’re paying out less money in taxes, and the state has some of the lowest unemployment and poverty rates in the country.

And they do this with no income tax, no sales tax, and the sixteenth-lowest per capita state and local tax burden versus Vermont’s (scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down) forty-seventh. So, when you get your next property tax bill with its massive increase and try to cover it with a paycheck suddenly made smaller by a new payroll tax, etcetera, and so on, know that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Our politicians on the Left tell us Vermonters want more expensive government. No, we don’t. We want a cost-effective government. We might be willing to spend more if it meant getting better results, but that’s not happening. We’re paying a lot more for, quite frankly, really crappy service. The solution: stop electing doofuses who think your tax money is their ideological plaything, and start electing responsible adults who take seriously their responsibility according to the Vermont Constitution, Article 18, to apply a “firm adherence to… frugality.”

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

The post How Does New Hampshire Spend Half the Money for Better Results? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Teachers across America are speaking up about the lack of controlled behavior in public schools. What changed? Why are teachers frustrated because behavior problems have become unbearable?  Why are they leaving the profession in droves?

I believe there are many factors contributing to this problem. Parents who believe the school is a daycare center for their children are failing to do their job of raising respectful children. As a parental rights advocate in New Hampshire, I make no excuses for poor parenting. This is becoming a bigger problem that schools must deal with. But even if parents are failing to raise respectful children, that doesn’t mean that schools should be failing students, too.

The national fad is to provide students with Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and more school counselors and social workers are being added to the payroll. You might be asking yourself, what does bad behavior have to do with any of this? Send these kids to the Principal’s office, where consequences will be administered. Sorry folks, a lot has changed since you were in school.

Classes have become chaotic with poor quality pedagogy practices. Instead of teachers teaching, teachers are told to have the kids work in groups. This will help them build collaboration skills for the workforce. Remember, public education is workforce training–it’s no longer about teaching them academics. The classroom can become chaotic, which then requires additional paraprofessionals in the room to help the teacher manage the class. This drives up the cost of education and requires a great deal of classroom management.

Schools use Project Based Learning or Inquiry Based Learning, which can add to problems in a classroom. Gone are the days of teacher-focused instruction which leads to higher levels of proficiency, kids are expected to teach each other in groups or go figure it out.

Social and emotional learning is supposed to help children self-manage their emotions and behaviors. But it can extend to group therapy and mental health assessments. This SEL data is collected, stored, and even shared without parents’ knowledge.

How does SEL replace consequences in the school for children who need that?

In this study, SEL Equity-based social-emotional learning (SEL): A critical lens for moving forward, they report: (emphasis added)

Authors King Lund, Hillis, Green, and Mofeld in their article, Mind-Sets Matter for Equitable Discipline: Aligning Beliefs to Practice Among Middle Grade Educators, also call attention to SEL. They write about how Restorative Justice Practices (RJP) offer a positive approach to disci-
pline while also providing middle school students opportunities to develop social-emotional skills (confict resolution and self-management). In contrast to other more traditional, punitive, and systemically inequitable models, RJP offers an approach where students of color are especially considered.

You can see the call to move away from the “punitive and systemically inequitable models” of consequences in schools. They then reference, “students of color are especially considered.”But does that work in the classroom? Many teachers across America are speaking up and talking about the behavior problems they are now expected to manage.

This article from Education Week attempts to explain Restorative Justice in the Classroom. But if you read the comments from educators, you will see that many of them don’t buy it.

 

 

It’s not that these teachers have “biases” or are racists, it’s that they know how kids work. They know that if you let kids off without any real consequences for their behavior, many will repeat bad behavior.  This isn’t rocket science, if you’ve raised children you know that boundaries must be set, and consequences administered, if the child defies those boundaries.

Can there be other factors to consider when a child breaks through those boundaries? Of course. Some kids learn the first time, some go on to repeat their actions to see how far they can go.

Teachers have become desperate for SEL or other fads because administrators are failing to bring order and discipline to the school. Some teachers are better at managing their classrooms but some of these faddish practices set teachers up to fail. They are there to teach, not become the enforcers.

When we were kids, we didn’t visit the school counselor for mental health if we were misbehaving. This isn’t a mental health issue, but that’s how some of them are treated. Or when you finally see the administrators punish the school bully, sometimes they go and reverse it. What kind of message is that sending the child?

Parents need to do their jobs, but it’s no excuse for the school system to fail these kids, too. This is one big set-up for failure when these kids get older.

MORE HERE:
Restorative circles are unethical and have no place in schools
Nine Criticisms of School Restorative Justice

The post Social Emotional Learning, Restorative Justice, and Rewarding Bad Behavior appeared first on Granite Grok.

I think we’ve been going about this all wrong. People “on our side” keep asking to fly flags in front of city hall and getting rejected, which hints at unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. The City just rejected a revolutionary-era flag.

And now it has rejected a trans-rights flag.

Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess rejected my appeal of the city’s decision to not allow me to fly a flag commemorating Detransition Awareness Day. I hope he has a change of heart as this medical scandal unravels.@NashuaOEM @JimDonchess #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/lbsucXhHBa

— Sidewalk Steve (@Sidewalk_Steve) March 9, 2024

Trans rights. Yes. If you have a right to transition, you must also have a right to not transition (a choice) and the right to transition back. Otherwise, what you call trans rights is nothing of the sort, and by refusing to fly that flag, the City of Nashua and Mayor Donchess are anti-trans rights.

Prove me wrong.

We could say the same for a pro-life flag. Ask any pro-abortion supporter – even the intolerable harpies, and they will proudly announce that no one is making you get an abortion. It is a pro-choice argument, but I doubt Nashua would ever let anyone fly a pro-choice flag (where life is the choice) if such a thing even exists. Perhaps someone should try.

Going About It the Right Way

Some other pro-liberty person should request to fly a BLM flag or pride flag or some such thing. See if the City approves that. Or, if you can’t stomach the notion, take pictures of the flags they do fly, and we’ll probably have enough evidence for a case you can send to any number of pro-bono national liberty law firms who chase these sorts of things through the courts at their own expense.

In the name of rights and stuff and junk. Detransition rights, for example.

Just find a flag the City will fly that proves it is guilty of viewpoint discrimination unless you already have evidence, in which case it’s off to the races. Or just because it’s fun.

What’s the worst that could happen? The City has to stop pretending to be non-partisan and unbiased; no more citizen flags of any stripe. That’s what Boston did after wasting two million dollars defending its viewpoint discrimination and losing. Let them do that and then we get to ask them what else about their administration is just like the flag pole

The answer is probably everything.

The post Mayor Refuses to Fly “Pro-Trans” Flag in Front of City Hall appeared first on Granite Grok.

Rep she/her Selig wants you to know that she has a vagina and is heterosexual. This, apparently, is very important to her because in her tweet celebrating “Pride Month,” those are the first things she tells us … she has a vagina and is heterosexual. This is narcissism.

She/her Selig is actually celebrating her opinion of herself … I am different and better; yeah, I may have a vagina; yeah, I may like sex with men, but I am part of the elite, the enlightened, the chosen! 

She/her Selig and he fellow Woke-Communists are … I repeat … narcissists. They believe that their religion, Woke-Communism, makes them special, better, superior.

The post “Pride Month” Is Really About Woke-Communists Celebrating … Themselves appeared first on Granite Grok.

Most of you knwo about the years or fire predictions in the 1970s. Scientists believed we were at the beginning of another ice age. Experts, along with a compliant media, pimped story after story about the precipice of frozen doom and what we should do about it.

By 1978, everyone was well aware of the situation, but four years later, in 1982, the compliant media was singing a different song. The experts had been warning us about global warming “for years.”

Credibility, much?

Forty years into the latest thing and what experts believe has resulted in forty years of failed predictions, models that calculate the size of future grants but nothing about the earth’s climate or even the local weather.

Trillions have been wasted on non-productive purposes. A decades-long political movement whose only purpose is to realign the means of production.

Four years, and the narrative completely flips.

Tony Heller at RCSB shares a few of the receipts.
cc

The post Night Cap: The Rapid Change in “Climate Change” … Narrative appeared first on Granite Grok.

Incredible show of support for Donald Trump at last night’s (6/1) UFC 302. The pop he got when he walked in with Dana White gave you goosebumps. And it was not just the crowd … IN NEW JERSEY … showing Trump the love. The fighters did to … shaking his hand, taking selfies with him, giving him shout-outs in the post-fight interviews.

It’s very simple … real men support Trump, while the “men” who support BidenX are unhappy, low-t, no-t, pussy-boy, woke-commies. Don’t believe me … just look at the “men” with Ds after their names in the NH-House.

 

 

The post Real Men Support Trump … Low-T, No-T, Beta-Male Woke-Commies Support BidenX appeared first on Granite Grok.

A former Superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) is alleged to have used the power of her office to coerce financial institutions to refuse to do business with the National Rifle Association (NRA).

We see a good deal of this alleged misconduct as partisans engage with banks and insurance companies as a way to stifle an operation or impair its ability to operate, which includes the ability to freely associate, do business with, and engage in public expression.

Maria Vullo, while serving as DFS superintendent, appears to have made it her mission to ensure that those over whom her office had regulatory authority chose not to do business with the NRA. And while the action was based on a legitimate violation of state law.

[An] investigation revealed at least two kinds of violations of New York law: that Carry Guard insured intentional criminal acts, and the NRA promoted Carry Guard without an insurance producer license. By mid-November, upon finding out about the investigation following DFS information requests, Lockton and Chubb suspended Carry Guard.

Lockton and Chubb paid fines in the millions and made every effort to comply with New York State law, but Vullo used this single instance as an excuse to reach out to everyone and anyone associated with insurance lined to the NRA. Vullo used DFS letterhead. Vullo spoke as the Superintendent of the DFS. Vullo, upon finding minor violations, offered to dismiss or ignore them if the business promised to cease all relationships with the NRA (and any other gun groups). These companies complied, aiding Vullo’s viewpoint discrimination to make it difficult or impossible for the NRA to operate in the State.

The case made its way up the judicial food chain to the US Supreme Court which arrived at a 9-0 unanimous verdict. In the opinion written by Justice Sotomayor, Vullo is shown to have clearly violated the First Amendment rights of the NRA (citations removed).

Nothing in this case gives advocacy groups like the NRA a “right to absolute immunity from [government] investigation,” or a “right to disregard [state or federal] laws.”  Similarly, nothing here prevents government officials from forcefully condemning views with which they disagree. For those permissible actions, the Constitution “relies first and foremost on the ballot box, not on rules against viewpoint discrimination, to check the government when it speaks.”  Yet where, as here, a government official makes coercive threats in a private meeting behind closed doors, the “ballot box” is an especially poor check on that official’s authority. Ultimately, the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries.

The Left hates the NRA, so they will hate this decision, but I have yet to see any email alerts from MoveOn listing Justice Sotomayor or Justice Jackson (for example) as “constitutional Threats” who must be impeached. I guess they can’t fundraise off of them, even when their BIPOC justices “vote” the wrong way.

 

The post Sotomayor Writes 9-0 Free Speech Decision – NY Official Violated NRA’s First Amendment Rights appeared first on Granite Grok.