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Co-founder of GraniteGrok, my concern is around Individual Liberty and Freedom and how the Government is taking that away. As an evangelical Christian and Conservative with small "L" libertarian leanings, my fight is with Progressives forcing a collectivized, secular humanistic future upon us. As a TEA Party activist, citizen journalist, and pundit!, my goal is to use the New Media to advance the radical notions of America's Founders back into our culture.

Of course he is….

Politico reports: Jason Collins, the pro basketball player who outed himself as gay this week, will appear alongside First Lady Michelle Obama at a New York fundraiser, according to a source familiar with the event. Collins will appear with Obama at the May 29 Democratic National Committee LGBT gala, the source said. The event is … Read more

Competency counts

Exhibit A.  Barack Obama.  My, he looks so uncomfortable “skeet” shooting (one of those photo-ops trying to show him trying to “be one of the guys”). Then there is a guy who actually knows how to shoot a long gun; of course, it’s the guy from Texas: It was unfortunate how his run for President … Read more

Christian? It’s a private thing. Gay? Tell the whole world! What’s that say about our culture?

Tebow vs CollinsIs the culture, led by the MSM and other cultural “elites”, anti-Christian?  Seems to be, when one reviews how denigrated Tebow has become these last couple of years – simply for being a man of faith, giving credit to a higher power than himself, professing a traditional sense of faith, and sticking to set of morals that, at best, is considered “prudish”.  With all that, we have seen how intolerant the tolerant Left truly has become to traditional mores.  Expressing them publicly gets you knocked down – by those, perhaps, that realize that they do not measure up (either can’t or decide to go “the low road”)?  No, I don’t mean to be “holier than thou” – I do wish to point out that those holding to values other than what is in the current popular culture are always in for a hard time.  Winning two national championships and the Heisman should a concentration on what he has accomplished in his field. Instead, he has been skewered for his faith.

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Why 10 rounds is not enough

I’ve been shooting for a couple of years now and while I can “game out”a situation like this, I do not know, can’t know, what my reactions really would be.  Would 10 rounds be enough?  Certainly for one intruder, I hope.  Two?  Didn’t work out for that Dad – or his family.  And if Reid … Read more

Carlee87, these polls are for you!

And they don’t exactly help your supposition, do they? Quinnipiac:   NYT / CBS:     Steve’s post (“Did NH Democrats Encourage Erica Lafferty to Crash Kelly Ayotte’s NH Town Hall?“) has a fair number of comments and we acquired a new one calling herself Carlee87.  She keeps insisting that we are all wrong about … Read more

Reid: “Government is inherently good”. SSA goes after son after they overpay Mom (who is deceased).

Really?  Let’s put aside the continual slur laid upon the TEA Party by Reid as he continues to assault anyone or any group that poses a threat to limit the growth of Government (for if it is good, then more MUST be better, right)?  Problem is, how’s these apples, Harry?   This, is good governance?  That an agency as large as the Social Security Agency can take someone’s tax refund willy-nilly after deciding that person needs to pay for SSA’s mistake to another (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Imagine if your parent received an over-payment from the government but decades later, the government took the money out of your tax return.   Gilbert Stokes, 60, of Jacksonville, said it happened to him.   “I’m angry,” Stokes said Wednesday morning.  Stokes felt the same way when he received a letter from the Social Security Administration in January.   “[The letter] said [SSA] was going to withhold my taxes unless I contacted about this social security over-payment,” Stokes explained.

Forty-two years ago in 1971, Stokes’ mother Ruby Lee received an over-payment of $895 while he was in the Navy.

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Where Treehugger doesn’t add the 1 + 1

cost-of-solar-power-graph-1980-2012(H/T: Treehugger) As most readers know, I used to go over Treehugger a lot and bring back “stuff” as a Doodling – rather easy when they have a big slant for Progressivism, Urbanism, and UberEnvironmentalism all wrapped up into a single package.  However, since they’ve been purging of the likes of ‘Grok commenters Cris P Bacon and C. Dog, it’s been rather barren over there (and they got sold, so there’s a “bit” of a different focus there).  However, I did venture over and saw the graph – they’re all going ga-ga over this as they all seemingly hate any kind of energy source, it seems, that has anything to do with it coming from beneath dirt or water levels.  “Soon!” they believe, “we’ll be free of hurting Mommy GAIA with our noxious need of hydrocarbons”.

They’re believing that all of this taxpayer funding of solar and alternative energy start-ups has been the primary driver of the lessening cost to PV panels.  Well, in a way they are correct, but from my layman’s eyes, probably not the way they think.  I’ve seen this play before, and I think this has more to do with it than not:

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Jettiness – Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship Two’s powered test flight

Update and Bumped:  A much better video of the flight of Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship Two:

(and yeah, I know: I can’t turn off the “auto play”)

Been a while since I last put up a “Jettiness” type post – but this certainly fits the bill!  The private sector making another step towards commerical space flight!  Today was the first powered test flight:

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GrokTALK! – the downloadable podcast!

Well, I got a quick email from a loyal reader / listener with a complaint: Hey Skip, Ummm, I see embedded player and that is cool but where would a person go to download an mp3 to stick in a portable player? I’m not parking myself in front of the ‘puter for 2 hours 🙂 … Read more

THANK YOU, Senators Lee, Paul, and Cruz!

It’s about freaking time SOMEBODY forced other Republicans, you know, to have to rely on Principles! Once again, the political symptom is gun control and the filibuster but the Republican disease is   Heh!:

Texas senator Ted Cruz on Friday indicated that the battle among GOP Senators over gun control was so fierce that, at several points throughout the debate, some of his Republican colleagues yelled at him “at the top of their lungs.”

“I don’t know that there is an issue that has generated more heat internally in the Republican conference,” Cruz said at a Texas tea party rally. “We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand [Paul] and Mike [Lee] and me and yelling at us at the top of their lungs, I mean, really upset. And they said ‘Look, why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home, my constituents are yelling at me that I have to stand on principle.’ I’m really not making that up.

(H/T: The Corner)  Take away from that snippet – I betcha more of these Republican morons are more concerned with keeping their R-butts seats rather than defending the R-values they campaigned on.  Got that?  It comes down to saying one thing but doing another – and a lot of Rs don’t like hearing that and they don’t like the bony finger pointed at them or their friends.  Too bad – and with the rest New Media, we get the word out.

Oh you bet that I’ll hear about posting this – “there he goes again, bashing other Republicans” (just like when I “visited” the Merrimack County Republicans a coupla weeks ago and Mark Sanborn (according to someone sitting across from him who came up to me afterwards) yelled out “HE HELPS TO ELECT DEMOCRATS!”).  In response to that assflappery, I say this:

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Data Point: The Internet of Things

Or, as the post said: “What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet A home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone” And he found some disturbing stuff about security, too.  Larger picture if you click twice (and go to … Read more

Gee, this is old news at Liberty Harbor Academy: Teens Do Better When School Starts Later.

I’ve known about this for quite some time – teens developing brains are naturally off-cycle time-wise from the rest of us.  I remember, back when, when it was quite easy to sleep late – like all morning long on a weekend or holiday if nothing was scheduled.  So when the President and Dean of Liberty Harbor,  Dr. Julianne Cooper, was on GrokTALK! two weeks ago to talk about education in general, she mentioned that Liberty Harbor starts at 9am because of this specific reason:

The Science of Sleepy Teenagers

“Making teens start school in the morning is ‘cruel,’ brain doctor claims.” So declared a British newspaper headline in 2007 after a talk I gave at an academic conference. One disbelieving reader responded: “This man sounds brain-dead.”

That was a typical reaction to work I was reporting at the time on teenage sleep patterns and their effect on performance at school. Six years on, there is growing acceptance that the structure of the academic day needs to take account of adolescent sleep patterns. The latest school to adopt a later start time is the UCL Academy in London; others are considering following suit.

So what are the facts about teenage slumber, and how should society adjust to these needs?

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