Notable Quote – Frederic Bastiat

The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it allow education.  All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education. -Frederic Bastiat, French philosopher

Notable Quote – Stacy McCain

 Yet as Friedrich Hayek showed, social justice is a mirage — the utopia toward which radical egalitarian ideologues claim to be leading us does not exist, and can never exist, simply because human society requires social order and all social orders involve hierarchy. Once you realize that “equality” is a false goal, you realize that what progressives are … Read more

Post-Christmas Karma: “Don’t say Merry Christmas!”

War on Christmas?  A Grinch?  A militant atheist? Kicking religion from the public square?  Just a self-centered grump who needs to learn social skills?  Dunno; pick one of those or make up your own but the NY Post has a story of someone who was just SO militant in disallowing other peoples’ Free Speech, he … Read more

DCE nails the illogical outcome of the “trophy for everyone” child raising

Micro-aggression blankie and juiceWhen you’ve only been a precious little snowflake your entire life, at which every turn someone is patting your head, rewarding you for basically not much more than living, a mindset occurs that can drive the rest of us to the (WARNING: EMOTIONAL TRIGGER ALERT!) point of strangling these dear waifs that have no clue as to the hammer and anvil that Reality is about to use on them.  Weekend Pundit has a nice word of warning:

I find all kinds of “microaggressions” claims are in themselves a form of aggression, trying to make everything some form of aggression against someone.

Anyone who feels they are surrounded by all kinds of microaggressions against them or other protected classes of “victims” should seek psychiatric help. It’s obvious to me they are suffering from some form of paranoia, most likely originating in the bastions of indoctrination once known as our education system.

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Imagine if she hadn’t had an Equalizer (and forethought)?

gun controlStupid is as stupid does.  22 year old dead stupid (reformatted, emphasis mine):

A woman in Memphis, Tennessee, answered a knock at her door at around 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday. When she opened the door, she found herself in a potential life-and-death situation.  The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Nico Carlisle, reportedly forced his way into the residence and pressed a gun to the female homeowner’s neck. However, the suspected criminal was seemingly unaware that the woman had retrieved her handgun before she went to investigate the knock at the door. Police say the woman then fired multiple shots at Carlisle in apparent self-defense.

Responding police officers found the suspect lying down near the front door with multiple gunshot wounds. Carlisle was eventually pronounced deadWREG-TV reports that no charges have been filed against the homeowner.

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Freedom – and now we see where it has gone.

Obamacare -Year of the SnakeA story on when Government KNOWS what is best for you – even if you know it is not: a sad tale of Obamacare:

My older daughter, who is 28, married with 2 children, Her husband is in optometry school and she works three jobs. They have a bunch of loans and I pay their rent. They have refused to take food stamps or anything else from the government.

They went on the O’care website because their private insurance was going to go from $600 to $1000 per month. They were hoping to get a plan that would allow them to keep their pediatrician and her OB-GYN and thought they would qualify for a subsidy that would make it affordable.

Proud people.  Self-reliant people working to make it the old American way: on their own with a bit of help from family and friends and NOT an instant turn to being on the dole.  So what happens?  The Government, with all of its rules and mandates, forces your health insurance to jack up the rate.  And then it forces you to violate who you are trying to be:

Instead, they were directed to Medicaid. None of her doctors take Medicaid. My daughter spoke to a supervisor who kept telling her what she didn’t make enough to qualify for an insurance plan and all that the federal government was doing for them. No matter how many times my daughter said she did not want Medicaid and was willing to pay for private insurance, the supervisor kept telling her all about how much the federal government was doing for her and said

she had to take Medicaid.

Freedom is measured by the choices one can make for themselves.  

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They fear Ted Cruz

Credits: Johnny Hanson / Houston Chronicle / AP
Credits: Johnny Hanson / Houston Chronicle / AP

I read this on GrokTALK! this past Saturday and I figured that you might want to read this Big Government post yourselves (reformatted, emphasis mine):

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer conceded that he fears a President Ted Cruz will overturn President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty, perhaps signaling that Cruz represents the greatest threat to the progressive left.  “Our first 100 days we spent a lot of time signing executive orders undoing what [President George W.] Bush did, and I would like not to be sitting on a beach somewhere reading about President [Ted] Cruz doing that to us, so it’s very important to us,” Pfeiffertold the Wall Street Journal on Friday.  Earlier in the day, Pfeiffer declared that Obama’s executive amnesty was one of the reasons that made 2014 a “year of great progress” for the “progressive agenda.” He told theJournal that from the “perspective of advancing our agenda through our pen and our phone, this has been a tremendously successful year.”

A couple of takeaways from Pfeiffer’s words:

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An observation by Glenn Reynolds

The Question: THE GOLDEN QUARTER: Some of our greatest cultural and technological achievements took place between 1945 and 1971. Why has progress stalled?  The Answer: The Greens and the Luddites got power, just as Nixon initiated the Regulatory Explosion that brought us OSHA, EPA, and various new regulatory regimes, even as money was being diverted to … Read more

GrokTALK! for the week of 12/20/2014 – The videos

Good thing Steve got the audio right – UStream servers mangled the live stream recording and I’ve had to go back to the plain recording camera here (which is not privy to the phone calls (but you can help us get the BeachTek unit to do so by donating by clicking on the Donate button on the right!).  IF you listen carefully, you can faintly hear Grokster Mike – it seems the Rode mic is good enough to hear the audio coming out of the spare headphones) but you will have to “put your ears on”.  Thus, we don’t have the segments with Dr. Joe D’aleo of WeatherBell.

Pre-Show:

Segment 1:

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SAU 2 budget finalization

There are a few activists out there that just record the stuff that generally either don’t get covered by the local media or scantily at best.  In smaller towns, this is especially true.  From time to time we get such videos to post – and we’re happy to become a hub where stuff gets such … Read more

Meredith Select Board (12/15/14) – working session on “roundabouts”

If you have passed through Meredith, NH in the “summah” time during the bigger tourism / vacation weekends, you know that traffic in and around it can be miserable.  Yes, there are some backroads that we locals use but if you want to get to something in the middle of town, well, it can suck.  A few years ago, they put a rotary in from the south coming up from the Weirs to replace one rather sketchy intersection but they are still looking for better.  Now, they want more.  Once again, a citizen journalist (‘Grok friend Rosemary) brings us the discussion on the issue (which seems to be pretty much splitting the town over the aesthetics, if it is an actual solution or a mere stopgap, and of course, the cost).

As you can see, NOTHING is simple in small towns (and that can be a GOOD thing!) – Part 1:

Oh, the existing roundabout?  Yeah, I have a personal story about it:

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Speaking of Ed Comeau…this is GREAT fun!

Like I just said here, ‘Grok friend Ed Comeau (he of the “big honkin’ camera”) goes to a multitude of local and state boards and commissions to record their meetings.  I can tell you with great authority when someone sees that staring at them, knowing that someone is going to watch that video, you can literally watch attitudes and behaviors change.  Change – yes, Ed accomplishes change at  Government Oversite in doing just this.

He also issues RTKs – Right to Know demands under NH’s RSA 91 for when one thinks that someone in Government has pulled some kind of shenanigans. This is the Citizen’s way of going “WAIT A SECOND” – and it can change behaviors as well.  And that has a couple peoples’ panties in a wad (HEH! – reformatted, emphasis mine):

Two men elected to county commission refuse to take office unless protected from Right-to-Know lawsuits

OSSIPEE – The two men elected last month to seats on the Carroll County commission refuse to be sworn in until the county delegation agrees to provide them financial coverage in the event that a Right to Know lawsuit is filed against them.  The Right to Know law covers a wide range of governmental entities such as school boards, selectmen and county commissions. The commissioners’ insurance carrier, Primex, does not cover Right to Know lawsuits. The county commissioners already have one pending Right to Know lawsuit against them as individuals and the county.

Ha!  My first reaction was “don’t do stupid things – and if you see such by those that report to you, expose it!”  And here is where “the funny” starts as it becomes clear that Ed’s reputation rightly proceeds him: 

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“Help the helpless” – not a problem. It’s the others I object to

From DCE over at Weekend Pundit: I caught this from a Dennis Miller special – America 180 – I watched on Netflix last night: I don’t mind paying taxes to support the helpless. However I do mind paying taxes to support the clueless. Indeed. Not only the clueless but those just living on “the system” because, well, … Read more

Data Point – Global Cooling ?

“In a paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, Esper et al. (2014) write that tree-ring chronologies of maximum latewood density (MXD) “are most suitable to reconstruct annually resolved summer temperature variations of the late Holocene.” And working with what they call “the world’s two longest MXD-based climate reconstructions” – those of Melvin et al. (2013) and Esper et al. (2012) – they combined portions of each to produce a new-and-improved summer temperature history for northern Europe that stretches all the way “from 17 BC to the present.” And what did they thereby learn?

Nothern Europe SUmmer Temps

As the international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland describes it, this history depicts “a long-term cooling trend of -0.30°C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe” (see figure below). Most important of all, however, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.”

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Notable Quote – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

An example for liberal bias in academia: …I have had the following experience more than once: I am speaking with a professional academic who is a liberal. The subject of the underrepresentation of conservatives in academia comes up. My interlocutor admits that this is indeed a reality, but says the reason why conservatives are underrepresented … Read more

James Pindell confirms much of “current Wisdom” – a hand behind the Throne

On today’s WMUR’s CloseUp, James Pindell is asked by Josh McElveen about Kelly Ayotte’s support of the events that led to the election of the Democrat appointed Speaker Shawn Jasper and her actions going forward.  In doing so, Pindell lays plain what many “out here” believe to be true: McElveen: If you are Kelly Ayotte … Read more

Bushisms: it runs in the family

President George H.W. Bush (“41”): “Read my lips: No New Taxes“ President George W. Bush (“43”):  “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system” Jeb Bush (President wannabee):  “Republicans don’t need Conservatives to win the White House, should not defund [Obama’s] Executive Amnesty“ I also bring up the NH State Senate Republicans (aka, the … Read more

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