I just read that people are finding their deleted posts reinstated by admins. I spent a few hours yesterday modifying my posts to cut, and past, "fuck you " individually... But, I don't have the time to do this to all of them.
Does anyone have any ideas? Thoughts? Experience?
Trumps speech tonight ( post was made last year) started with this speech from the movie Patton. Many of you are constantly pointing out that Trump chooses his words very carefully. I am constantly pointing out steganography. Even when I only recognize that there's code, and I'm not quite sure what that code is.
I'm paying attention to this!
Movie Speech
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?view=detail&mid=EBDA74CBEEA1577804FBEBDA74CBEEA1577804FB&q=Patton speecb&shtp=GetUrl&shid=ce86964e-f9ae-4b5d-8175-83c936a8a925&form=VDSHOT&shth=OVP.VXZmDIbVF4d7fYoPjq8gFQEsDh
https://www.foxnews.com/story/conspiracy-theories-the-mysterious-death-of-general-patton
The man that made enemies because he got the job done. That was the opening message, and I thought you'd enjoy an oldy but goodie!
Spelling is magick. The words themselves have meaning. We've been told this in some form or another for a very long time.
[Bible verses on words] (https://snailpacetransformations.com/10-bible-verses-on-the-power-of-our-words/)
[words have power quotes] (https://www.insightstate.com/quotes/quotes-about-the-power-of-words/#:~:text=50%20Famous%20Quotes%20About%20The%20Power%20Of%20Words,10%20%2337%20Samuel%20Butler.%20...%20More%20items...%20)
“Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.”
~Yehuda Berg
In simple terms, all languages have two key parts: words and grammar. Words seem straightforward enough – all you need is a dictionary, and you can start to have a basic conversation. But grammar takes more time to learn, as different languages can have very different strategies.
They begin there because these are the aspects of language that are hardest to understand: how do we use these grammatical rules so effortlessly if we don’t know how they work!
https://grahamhancock.com/prentiss1/
My favorite quote about words:
Words have power. Words control thoughts, thoughts control feelings, by allowing your words to be censored you are literally allowing yourself to be controlled. ~unknown
We don't know how the words we use to communicate work. We do know that linguistics is constantly evolving. Who do we want to be in charge of our evolving linguistics? I certainly don't want our words to be chosen for us, by people with an agenda.
Remember this? I was wondering what happened to this conspiracy just earlier today!
On November 2, 2017, an international team of around thirty-three scientists from the ScanPyramids project published the results of their two-year-long Great Pyramid research project in the journal Nature. Using a technique known as muon tomography (or simply muography), the ScanPyramids team set up their muon detectors inside and outside the Great Pyramid. Similar to x-rays, which are used to show different densities of matter within the human body, muons (which are by-products of cosmic rays) can be used to detect different densities of matter within solid rock, thus revealing areas where there are cavities or possible hidden chambers within the structure. The technology was first successfully used in the 1970s and since then has been used to probe the interiors of structures as diverse as volcanoes, glaciers, and even nuclear reactors.
The ScanPyramids project team was split into three separate groups, with each group working independently of the others using a different muography technique. All three groups reported identical findings with a confidence level of 99.9999 percent that the Big Void within the Great Pyramid truly is a real structural anomaly within the monument and not simply a statistical anomaly. In short, the scientists detected a massive space almost as large as, and a short distance above, the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid (fig. 1.2), a space that could turn out to be a truly massive hidden chamber.
In physics, aether theories (also known as ether theories) propose the existence of a medium, a space-filling substance or field as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. Since the development of special relativity, theories using a substantial aether fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models.[1]*
Sans Aether, the Universe Becomes “The Preposterous Universe”
[Aether Theory
Aether is the basic substratum of all space; aether is the raw essence of the Universe. Aether permeates the innermost recesses of all matter. Without it the universe is contrary to nature, contrary to reason and common sense. Without it the universe is utterly absurd.*
And what is worrying is that the scholars who have meticulously assembled our complex picture of the universe know it is absurd.*
Consider this: The cosmology that is studied in universities the world over, and practiced in the relevant research departments, is a cosmology devoid of the concept of aether. Assumed to be a dispensable relic of 19th-century voodoo science, the aether was discarded a long time ago. And the resulting universe model, missing a vital ingredient, has not worked properly since. In fact, as a depiction of reality the class of expanding universe models —of which the various big bang (BB) models are a subset— has been an utter and complete failure.*
Sean M. Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, sums up one of his extensively researched and densely-referenced papers on The Cosmological Constant[3] with the conclusion (which he bases on the no-aether interpretation of the evidence allegedly showing that the cosmological constant, Λ, dominates the universe, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that the majority of the matter content in the universe must be in an unknown non-baryonic form): “Nobody would have guessed that we live in such a universe. ... This scenario staggers under the burden of its unnaturalness, ...”*
Professor Sean Carroll (theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology) is a proponent of the General-Relativity expanding-universe —even though he finds it to be staggeringly unnatural. Image credit: Rachel Porter. (ca.2019) In fact, and in bold print, he calls it “the preposterous universe.”*
As I understand it, a universe that is “preposterous” is (and my Webster Dictionary will back me up) a universe that is "contrary to nature, reason, or common sense; utterly foolish; absurd." Undoubtedly this is the meaning that the professor intended.*
One must realize that Sean Carroll[4] is not some rebellious radical trying to overthrow the expanding universe paradigm, or trying to reinstate the aether. Not at all. As a practicing physicist/cosmologist and a recognized authority on the expanding universe, he is steadfastly committed to resolving the absurdity without venturing outside the BB box, so to speak. In Carroll’s view, "... a major challenge to cosmologists and physicists in the years to come will be to understand whether these apparently distasteful aspects of our universe are simply surprising coincidences, ...[whose] underlying structure we do not as yet comprehend."*
Unfortunately he is like many others who, for whatever the reason, are unwilling or unable to examine plausible solutions outside of BB cosmology.*
What one must realize is that BB cosmology as a plausible theory has two towering handicaps. First, it embraces the unscientific concept of the expansion-of-the-whole-universe. This is blatantly unscientific because it involves an unnecessary extrapolation of a perfectly valid regional phenomenon called space expansion (regardless of how space is defined). Second, it is based on an incomplete theory of gravity —that being Einstein’s general relativity, which implicitly denies the existence of aether-space.*
Aether is the ingredient without which these two handicaps cannot be overcome while maintaining the all-important connection with physical reality. Aether is the ingredient without which the picture of our Universe is quite unnatural and simply preposterous.*
http://www.cellularuniverse.org/AA3AetherHistory.htm
Laird Scranton is my favorite person to learn about Aether Theory from. He uses the Dogon Cosmology, and he breaks it down very well.
[Here's a great summary] (https://knittingittogetherblog.wordpress.com/tag/laird-scranton/)
Here's a great interview In two parts
This is a theory that even now has serious discovery, and disagreement even now.
This theory shows the evidence for the earth's song itself being the holy grail.
There are Knights Templar buildings all around Europe and the Middle East that contain enigmatic symbols. Some of these sites only seem to be known about by a few local people. Experts, some of whom live not that far away, are oblivious to their existence and completely unaware of the potential knowledge that deciphering these symbols might bring.
There are ancient sacred sites all around the world that are still unknown about today, with many containing discoveries still waiting to emerge. These too will possibly provide much needed information that could be very helpful to us during these current changing times.
Fortunately, as a result of recent research, we now have a new way of finding these long lost sacred sites but many more people are needed to help look for them because it is a huge task. What makes this research different from anything done before is my discovery of a way to differentiate between different frequencies of Earth sounds.
I never set out to look for the Grail. My interest was in Geobiology, the study of how the Earth affects life on this planet. What this led to, was a strategy that came from finding a connection between very low frequency sounds and ancient sacred sites.
My Geobiological research led to a new hypothesis for how the Earth’s inner core is causing spherical standing waves of powerful Earth vibrations.
These sounds appear on the surface as linear, high pressure concentration zones that go right round the world. In doing so, they cross over one another. Some of these crossings are very special intersections. These were ones that have much greater numbers of these linear zones crossing over each other in one place and also ones which have the lowest frequency vibrations.
Two Flood stories The Kolbrin contains, not one, but two versions of the worldwide Flood story, one in the Egyptian Book of Gleanings and one in the Celtic Book of Origins. In a veritable ocean of flood myths, why do these two stand out?*
The Deluge story in the Egyptian Book of Gleanings The names in this Kolbrin versioniv suggest an ancient Sumerian source; it indicates when the Flood took place, where the Ark was built and where it came to rest, giving more circumstantial detail than the poetic Atrahasisv and Gilgameshvi epics or the clipped Genesisvii prose version. Above all, it says loud and clear what caused the Great Flood – something no other written account does – and explains why human beings have forgotten the more important aspects of an event which by rights should be standing firmly at the centre of world knowledge, not mouldering away on the dusty bookshelf of myth.*
*The Floodtale in the Celtic Book of Origins The second version of the Flood storyviii came to Britain as an oral retelling and was written down between the first and fifth centuries ADix. It was brought by a ‘far-ranging race from Krowkasis [the Caucasusx], the Motherland where Gatuma ruled, where sky-reaching mountains rise out of a wide, green, dark-soiled plain. They were horse-fighters, known among themselves as the Wildland Cultivators… It was the Wildland Cultivators who gave the flood-tale to our housebuilding forebears, but the generation of its happening is lost.’ What makes this story special is that it reveals there was not one Ark, but two. More on this later.
https://grahamhancock.com/whitemany11/
There's an excellent JRE with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson discussing exactly this!
Denisovan Origins Yet where and how did this shamanic civilisation begin? Where did modern humans first come to adopt pre-existing ideas that would ultimately lead to the spread of the shamanic civilisation, something that I am certain culminated with the foundation of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia around 9600 BCE? Certainly, we know that modern humans will have first encountered Neanderthals in Europe and southwestern Asia as much as 65,000 years ago, and arguably even earlier still. Yet what about the Denisovans, whom we suspect had an even greater impact on the development of the shamanic civilisation than their western neighbours, the Neanderthals? Where and how did we first encounter them? What exactly happened when this went down?
It is a matter that archaeologists are turning their attention to more and more. For instance, it was announced recently that archaeological excavations in the Transbiakal region of northern Mongolia suggest that early contact between Denisovans and modern humans occurred there as much as 45,000 years ago. What is more, those responsible for these excavations are now suggesting that it might well have been the Denisovans, and not modern humans alone, who introduced the stone tool technologies that would come to dominate the Upper Palaeolithic tool kit right down to the Neolithic age. It is a finding that backs up existing evidence presented in Denisovan Origins—that it was close to the shores of a huge inland sea straddling southern Siberia and central Mongolia called Lake Baikal—that our ancestors’ interaction with Denisovans and Denisovan hybrids kickstarted human civilisation some 45,000 years ago.
[Complete Article] (https://grahamhancock.com/collinslittle1/)
The Cathars—condemned as diabolical heretics by the Roman church—are often hailed as a manifestation of a separate, ‘primitive’ brand of Christianity. A brand that could be termed as Proto-Protestants or even enlightened harbingers of social and sexual equality.*
They’ve also been roped into the resurgence of southern French—or Occitanian—cultural identity. If you travel to towns like Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne today, you’ll see signs proclaiming the Pays Cathare, ‘Cathar country’ with prominent displays of the gold-and-red Cathar cross, which is misleading since they didn’t worship the cross.*
Like many other secret orders down through time, the Cathars have been spun, co-opted, and mythologized, which makes sorting out who exactly they were and what they believed almost impossible.*
Indeed, like many secret societies, the Cathars leave open doors at both ends. They appear and disappear with no definitive evidence of creation or destruction. Still, as a religious movement—one that must have had hundreds of thousands of followers—how can Catharism be called a secret society?*
As always, that comes down to inner doctrines as opposed to outward appearances. The name Cathar comes from the Greek term katharos, or ‘pure’. It’s the same root as our modern term ‘catharsis’, meaning cleansing or release. But the Cathars never called themselves such. Instead, they referred to themselves simply as Bons Chrétiens, ‘good Christians’; or Bons Hommes, ‘good men’.*
Despite the heretic label, Cathars regarded themselves as Christians—the true Christians. An alternative name was Albigensian, taken from one of their main strongholds, Albi. Cathars believed that a good god rules the world of spirit, whereas the material world is a spiritual prison ruled by the evil god.*
https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/cathars-the-medieval-progressives/
heretic [ˈherəˌtik] NOUN a person believing in or practicing religious heresy.
synonyms: dissident · dissenter · nonconformist · unorthodox thinker · [more] a person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted.
#That sounds so familiar!
I can think of someone that knows all about this too!
Another Classic Conspiracy. Some of us are more familiar with the Smithsonian Conspiracy. I know it, and I still can't help myself. I love to go to the museum!
THE SMITHSONIAN FILES Most of the reports we have uncovered are from well-known newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, but we begin our analysis with this account from The Worthington Advance (November 18, 1897, pg.3) that describes the ethnological work of the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Eastern Mounds, and quotes the Director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the time, John Wesley Powell. The image below accompanies the news report,
“It is officially recorded that agents of the Bureau of Ethnology have explored more than 2,000 of these mounds. Among the objects found in them were pearls in great numbers and some of very large size… It is a matter of official record that in digging through a mound in Iowa the scientists found the skeleton of a giant, who, judging from actual measurement, must have stood seven feet six inches tall when alive. The bones crumbled to dust when exposed to the air. Around the neck was a collar of bear’s teeth and across the thighs were dozens of small copper beads, which may have once adorned a hunting skirt.”
As part of the Search for the Lost Giants show, Jim and fellow researcher James Clary investigated the following account that had this heading:
“An Ancient Ozark Giant Dug Up Near Steelville: Strange discovery made by a boy looking for arrowheads, gives this Missouri Town an absorbing mystery to ponder.”
Highlights of the lengthy report from The Steelville Ledger (June 11, 1933) are given:
“…he turned up the complete skeleton of an 8 foot giant. The grisly find was brought to Dr. R. C. Parker here and stretched out to its enormous length in a hallway of his office where it has since remained the most startling exhibit Steelville has ever had on public view… An appeal to Dr. Aleš Hrdlička, anthropologist of the National Museum in Washington and celebrated authority on primitive races is expected to help. Dr. Parker has written to him, offering to forward the skull or the whole skeleton, if necessary for scientific study.”
The expanding Earth Theory captures my imagination because our continents look like puzzle pieces! This is also called the Pangea Theory sometimes.
The expanding Earth or growing Earth hypothesis asserts that the position and relative movement of continents is at least partially due to the volume of Earth increasing. Conversely, geophysical global cooling was the hypothesis that various features could be explained by Earth contracting.
[Definition] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_Earth)
#We’ve Been Wrong Before: The Expanding Earth Theory
Before” is Popular Mechanics' encyclopedia of scientific ideas that sounded good at the time but didn't quite pan out. Today: The Expanding Earth Theory, which argues that the reason the continents have spread apart is that the Earth itself has been getting bigger over the years.
Five centuries ago, when Europeans saw their first world maps that included the Americas, they noticed something odd: The coastlines of Africa and South America would fit together like a Jigsaw puzzle if they weren’t separated by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
Thinkers of the era couldn’t get over this resemblance. In 1620, the English natural philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that the matching coasts were “more than a curiosity," but couldn’t figure any explanation. The interest in this curiosity would lead to one of geology’s most dubious ideas: the Expanding Earth theory.
THE MATCHING COASTS WERE “MORE THAN A CURIOSITY"
The theory claimed that millions of years ago, our planet was only about 60 percent of its current size and that the entire surface of this pint-sized globe was blanketed by land. There were no oceans. Then, as the dwarf Earth expanded, the continental shell broke apart. The seas formed in the gaps between the continents.
Today, following a 20th century golden age of marine science, scientists understand how shifting plates have shifted the continents over the course of Earth’s history. But up until the point plate tectonics became widely accepted, the Expanding Earth theory was a popular explanation for the processes that shaped the Earth. Even respected scientists like Charles Darwin and Nikola Tesla flirted with the idea.
The Hand of God The first scholarly attempts to explain the puzzle-piece configuration of the continents invoked the hand of God. In 1668, a French monk by the name of François Placet suggested that America and Africa separated when the lost island of Atlantis was destroyed by the biblical flood and sank into the depths, creating the Atlantic Ocean. In the 17th and 18th centuries, many Europeans thought the planet was shaped by a series of biblical catastrophes, and the wrath of God remained a trendy explanation for the position of the continents.
Before the 20th century, only two prominent scientists in the West even entertained the idea of mobile continents, and both credited a catastrophic event. The first was Abraham Ortelius, the Flemish cartographer credited with inventing the modern Atlas. In 1596, Ortelius suggested the continents may have traveled to their current positions when the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa.” The in 1858, the French geographer Antonio Snider-Pellegrini also suggested the continents moved apart laterally, again pointing to the biblical flood as the main instigator.
Expanding earth In 1858, Snider-Pellegrini made these two maps. They depict his interpretation of how the American and African continents may once have fit together before becoming separated. PUBLIC DOMAIN The first scientific theory suggesting that continents could drift on their own finally came in 1912, from the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. He proposed the Earth’s disparate lands once fit together as a single ancient supercontinent he called Pangea, a Greek word meaning “all lands.” He believed Pangea was surrounded by a single body of water—the Panthalassa—and the continents maneuvered to their current positions by floating through the sea like icebergs. As evidence, he found fossils of identical plants and animals on continents now separated by oceans.
Wegener’s theory of continental drift represented a new way of thinking about our world, and today we know he was basically on the right track. But like many novel scientific ideas, his theory was met with ridicule. (It didn’t help that Wegener was a meteorologist and not a geologist, allowing others to dismiss him through snobbery.) At the time, scientists were more inclined to believe the Earth’s crust was moving up and down than side to side. In fact, through much of the 1800s, the prevailing idea was that the Earth was shrinking slightly as the molten center cooled. Geologists thought the contraction caused wrinkles to form on the surface, like a grape drying into a raisin. These wrinkles were mountains.
Pangea Fragmentation of the supercontinent Pangea. S. BRUNE, GPLATES They were wrong, of course, but Wegener’s ideas would never be vindicated in his lifetime. It would take another four decades, a world at war, and a windfall of scientific discoveries for his theory to be plucked out of obscurity and given a new name: plate tectonics.
In the meantime, though, his questioning of the dogma of static continents started to catch on. And his unorthodox thinking raised some big questions—for starters, what force could cause continents to glide through the ocean? These factors would provoke a flurry of new theories that Pangea broke apart because the Earth was getting bigger.
The Shrunken Globe The first arguments for the Expanding Earth theory arose from the simple exercise of sliding cut-out continents around model globes. Scientists were irked to discover it was impossible to piece Pangea back together on a full-size Earth without getting inexplicable yawning gaps and overlaps along the edges of the continents. But, if you modeled the continents on a sphere about 60 percent smaller than the Earth, they fit together seamlessly.
Submission Statement :
For those of us that learned how important States Rightsb, and Checks and Balances are to this Union, here's some good news!
The Nebraska Legislature overcame the filibuster in approving a push for a convention of states to amend the U.S. Constitution, becoming the 17th state to do so.
State lawmakers passed a legislative resolution, LR14, in a 32-11 vote Friday, according to the Unicameral Update.
A convention of states is outlined in Article V of the Constitution, according to The National Consitution Center. It is used to bypass Congress to amend the Constitution, but has never been used. A state's call for amendments can only be considered after approval by two-thirds of its Legislature. With Nebraska's call, the U.S. is halfway to getting the 34 states required for a convention, the Associated Press reported.
In the resolution, the Nebraska Legislature, like other states, proposes amendments that will "impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress."
The resolution will be withdrawn February 1, 2027, according to the document.
Nebraska state Senator Steve Halloran, the resolution's sponsor, said he pushed it due to concern for the rising national debt under presidents from both parties, according to AP.
"Functionally, the Founding Fathers intended for the states to have equal footing with Congress," Halloran, of Hastings, said. "To me, that's important. I think it's a state sovereignty issue."
Convention of States, Halfway, Nebraska, Resolution The Nebraska Legislature becomes the 17th state calling for a convention of states to amend the U.S. Constitution. Above, the first printing of the final text of the U.S. Constitution is displayed at a press preview at Sotheby's on September 17, 2021, in New York City.
Opponents of the resolution in the Nebraska Legislature argued there would be no way to impose limits on the convention, according to the Omaha World-Herald. They also said there is nothing that details how the convention would be structured, such as if every state would have one vote or if votes would be proportional to population.
"The motivation for the convention is real and valid," said state Senator John McCollister, of Omaha, the World-Herald reported. "But there are simply too many questions outstanding."
Earlier this week, Wisconsin had become the 16th state to call for a convention, AP reported. It had been the first state to do so since Mississippi in 2019.
Other states approving a call for the convention are: Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas and Utah, according to the Convention of States Action. There are also 19 other states considering the resolution.
The only way amendments have been made in the past is through Congress proposing them to the states under Article V of the Constitution, The National Constitution Center reported.
I have no idea what the hell is going on, but the sex trafficking isn't getting the attention it deserves because of manufactured drama, and being downplayed as a Qanon / Trump conspiracy.
There's tweets, there's lawsuits, even someone getting run over with a car. This conspiracy has gotten the attention of people across the country, but there doesn't seem to be any documented evidence to the claims of sex trafficking.
The women identified themselves as Kimberly Lowe, who is running for Congress in Virginia, and a person whom Kimberly referred to as “Michelle,” and identified herself as a Secret Service agent in an audio recording, but whose identity BuzzFeed News could not verify. According to an affidavit that he later prepared for police, Treviño-Wright's son, Nicholas, told the women that they needed to pay an admission fee to enter the property. Michelle, he wrote, told him that she was with the Secret Service and that both women had big sway in Washington, DC, and they wanted to see “the immigrants crossing on the rafts.”
Treviño-Wright said her son came to get her and that she googled Lowe before approaching the women. She provided BuzzFeed News with an audio recording of her interaction with Lowe and Michelle, as well as a recording of a Facebook Live video Lowe posted of the incident as it took place, which has since been deleted.
Kimberly Lowe does appear to be running for Congress in Virginia, and her fb live does seem to have been deleted. Could she have involved herself in an open case? Or did she allow herself to get pulled into manufactured drama?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahmimms/texas-butterfly-sanctuary-trump-conspiracy
Here's another completely different perspective on this drama.
“The only butterflies we saw were swarming a decomposing body surrounded by tons of rotting trash left behind by illegals,” campaign leader Brian Kolfage said on Twitter that year.
Mr Kolfage also smeared the centre’s employees as “butterfly freaks” running a “sham” sanctuary, which was flooded with harassing messages on its social media pages.
He also lashed out at a local Catholic priest he baselessly accused of “promoting human trafficking and abuse of women and children.”
In December 2019, a Texas judge ordered that the project halt construction, which would cause “imminent and irreparable harm” to the 100-acre preserve.
From the many articles that I've read the sex trafficking claim is made up by the media. Here's exactly what was said more than two years ago. If you read the link, the man that said these things pretty much says he's shit talking in response to shit talk. Yet here we are focusing on the drama rather than the serious issues such how the wall needs to be designed properly for water management safety.
In an interview with right-wing news outlet The Rundown, Kolfage smeared Snipes, a beloved figure in the border town of Mission known for his love of Lone Star beer and vocal defense of a historic chapel threatened by Trump’s wall. “[Snipes] is promoting human trafficking and abuse of women and children,” Kolfage said, referring to the priest’s criticism of border fences. “Instead of driving around in expensive boats with media he should be helping … to combat the rampant pedophilia in the church.” Since Friday, Kolfage has also tagged the butterfly center in about 30 tweets, accusing the refuge of assisting the cartels, implying it has ties to insect smuggling, and labeling the center “left wing thugs with a sham butterfly agenda.” (The center, for its part, has been lambasting Kolfage as well, sometimes including the hashtag “#LiarLiarPantsOnFire.”)
https://www.texasobserver.org/we-build-the-wall-south-texas-vilifies-priest-butterfly-refuge/
Submission Statement :
This may look like politics, but it's also part of our government's Checks and Balances system. Gerrymandering is a tool used to manipulate the voices of the people into silence. When you see these remember ; they know the demographics, they know how the demographics vote. If you don't pay attention to this when it shows up in the politics sections, you've overlooked a conspiracy to cheat voters.
It is the state that put the hyper in partisan politics, setting the blunt-force standard for battles over voting rights and gerrymanders that are now fracturing states nationwide.
So it is unsurprising that North Carolina’s latest battle, over new political maps that decisively favor Republicans, is unfolding in what has become an increasingly contested and influential battlefield in American governance: the State Supreme Court.
The court meets on Wednesday to consider whether a map drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature that gives as many as 11 of 14 seats in the next Congress to Republicans — in a state almost evenly divided politically — violates the State Constitution. Similarly lopsided state legislative maps are also being contested.
But for weeks, both sides of a lawsuit have been waging an extraordinary battle over whether three of the court’s seven justices should even hear the case. Atop that, an influential former chairman of the state Republican Party has suggested that the legislature could impeach some Democratic justices, a move that could remove them from the bench until their fates were decided.
The central issue — whether familial, political or personal relationships have rendered the justices unfit to decide the case — is hardly frivolous. But the subtext is hard to ignore: The Supreme Court has a one-justice Democratic majority that could well invalidate the Republican-drawn maps. Knocking justices off the case could change that calculus.
“I think we’re at the brass-knuckles level of political fighting in this state,” said Michael Bitzer, a scholar of North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “It is a microcosm of the partisan polarization that I think we’re all experiencing. It’s just that here, it’s on steroids.”
It also is a reminder that for all the attention on the U.S. Supreme Court this week after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, it is in Supreme Courts in states like North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio that many of the most explosive questions about the condition of American democracy are playing out.
State Supreme Courts have become especially critical forums since the U.S. Supreme Court said in 2019 that partisan gerrymanders were political matters outside its reach.
In North Carolina, the justices seem likely to reject calls for their recusal. The court said last month that individual justices would evaluate charges against themselves unless those justices asked the full court to rule.
But the high stakes reflect what may happen elsewhere — and in some cases, already has. In Ohio, Justice Pat DeWine of the State Supreme Court rebuffed calls last fall to recuse himself from redistricting lawsuits in which his father — Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican — was a defendant. Days later, the state Republican Party urged a Democratic justice, Jennifer Brenner, to recuse herself because she had made redistricting an issue when running for office.
Nationwide, 38 of 50 states elect justices for their highest court rather than appoint them. For decades, those races got scant attention. But a growing partisan split is turning what once were sleepy races for judicial sinecures into frontline battles for ideological dominance of courts with enormous sway over peoples’ lives.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued 68 opinions in its last term. State Supreme Courts decide more than 10,000 cases every year. Increasingly, businesses and advocacy groups turn to them for rulings on crucial issues — gerrymandering is one, abortion another — where federal courts have been hostile or unavailing.
Campaign spending underscores the trend. A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University, concluded that a record $97 million was spent on 76 State Supreme Court races in the most recent election cycle. Well over four in 10 dollars came from political parties and interest groups, including the conservative nonprofit Judicial Crisis Network, which has financed national campaigns backing recent Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Most interest group spending has involved so-called dark money, in which donors’ identities are hidden. Conservative groups spent $18.9 million in the 2019-20 cycle, the report stated, but liberal groups, which spent $14.9 million, are fast catching up.
The money has brought results. In 2019, a $1.3 million barrage of last-minute advertising by the Republican State Leadership Committee was credited with giving the G.O.P.-backed candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brian Hagedorn, a 6,000-vote victory out of 1.2 million cast.
Liberal groups have not matched that success. But they have outspent conservatives in recent races in Michigan and North Carolina.
“Two things are happening,” said Douglas Keith, a co-author of the Brennan Center report. “There are in-state financial interests that know these courts are really important for their bottom lines, so they’re putting money toward defeating or supporting justices to that end. And there are also national partisan infrastructures that know how important these courts are to any number of high-profile issues, and probably to issues around democracy and elections.”
How important is easy to overlook. It is well known, for example, that President Donald J. Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were rejected by every court where he filed suit, save one minor ruling. But when Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar and president of the nonpartisan Governance Institute, analyzed individual judges’ votes, he found a different pattern: 27 of the 123 state court judges who heard the cases actually supported Mr. Trump’s arguments.
Twenty-one of the 27 held elected posts on State Supreme Courts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Both Michigan and Wisconsin are among the top five states in spending for Supreme Court races, the Brennan Center study found.
Mr. Keith called that a red flag, signaling the rising influence of money in determining which judges define the rules for political behavior.
North Carolina is another top-five state. Of $10.5 million spent on the state’s Supreme Court races in 2020, $6.2 million was devoted to a single race, for chief justice. Both figures are state records.
The court has become increasingly partisan, largely at the Republican legislature’s behest. Legislators ended public financing for Supreme Court races in 2013, and made elections partisan contests in 2016.
But Dallas Woodhouse, a former state Republican Party chair and columnist for the conservative Carolina Journal, said blame for the current tempest lay not with Republicans, but their critics. They kicked off the recusal battle last summer, he said, when the state N.A.A.C.P. sought to force two Republican justices to withdraw from a case challenging two referendums for constitutional amendments.
Mr. Woodhouse crusaded against the demands in his columns, and the Supreme Court left the decision up to the justices, both of whom said this month that they would hear the case.
What is redistricting? It’s the redrawing of the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. It happens every 10 years, after the census, to reflect changes in population.
Why is it important this year? With an extremely slim Democratic margin in the House of Representatives, simply redrawing maps in a few key states could determine control of Congress in 2022.
How does it work? The census dictates how many seats in Congress each state will get. Mapmakers then work to ensure that a state’s districts all have roughly the same number of residents, to ensure equal representation in the House.
Who draws the new maps? Each state has its own process. Eleven states leave the mapmaking to an outside panel. But most — 39 states — have state lawmakers draw the new maps for Congress.
If state legislators can draw their own districts, won’t they be biased? Yes. Partisan mapmakers often move district lines — subtly or egregiously — to cluster voters in a way that advances a political goal. This is called gerrymandering.
What is gerrymandering? It refers to the intentional distortion of district maps to give one party an advantage. While all districts must have roughly the same population, mapmakers can make subjective decisions to create a partisan tilt.
Is gerrymandering legal? Yes and no. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts have no role to play in blocking partisan gerrymanders. However, the court left intact parts of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit racial or ethnic gerrymandering.
Part 2
“The battle is bigger than redistricting,” he said. “The real battle is between a Democratic governor and a pretty durable majority in the General Assembly.” The calls for recusal, he said, “raised this to an unprecedented level.”
Like North Carolina, some 34 other states allow Supreme Court justices to rule on recusal motions aimed at them. Most other states require independent reviews that even then may not be binding. Justices do disqualify themselves, but how frequently is unclear.
In the North Carolina case, one of the plaintiffs in the redistricting suit, a group of North Carolina Democrats, acted first on Dec. 6, asking that a Republican justice, Phil Berger Jr., withdraw from the case. They were later joined by lawyers for Common Cause. Justice Berger is the son of Phil Berger, the president of the State Senate and a defendant in the case whose own Senate district, the plaintiffs said, was among those that had been gerrymandered.
A month later, the defendants — Republican legislators who drew and oversaw the political maps — urged Justice Samuel J. Ervin IV, a Democrat, to recuse himself because he is seeking re-election in November. (Justice Ervin is the grandson of former Senator Sam Ervin, the longtime North Carolina Democrat and steward of Senate hearings on the Watergate scandal.) They argued that Justice Ervin should not hear election-law cases until his race is decided.
The Republican legislators then asked another Democratic justice, Anita Earls, to recuse herself. Justice Earls, the founder and former executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, had battled Republican gerrymanders in North Carolina for years before winning election to the court in 2018. Republicans noted that lawyers from the coalition represent Common Cause in the gerrymander case.
Additionally, they said, Justice Earls’s 2018 campaign received a $199,000 donation that apparently had been channeled through the state Democratic Party from the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an arm of the national party. The National Redistricting Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of the redistricting committee, is underwriting the legal expenses of one plaintiff in the case.
The recusal motions were later met by responses arguing that Justices Berger, Earls and Ervin should remain on the case.
The state Code of Judicial Conduct suggests that some of the complaints could carry weight. It says judges should disqualify themselves from matters affecting anyone “within the third degree of relationship,” which would include Justice Berger’s father.
Similarly, the code calls for recusal when judges have “a personal bias” toward a party or previously worked with a lawyer while that lawyer was involved in a case before the court. The current gerrymander suit was filed long after Justice Earls left the social justice coalition, but while there, she worked on challenges to the state’s gerrymanders with a lawyer in the current case, Allison Riggs.
How the recusal demands and the impending hearing play out will be closely watched by Republican lawmakers who would have to redraw the maps should the court invalidate them. Mr. Woodhouse’s reference to impeachment in a recent column led some to wonder whether, given the state’s slash-and-burn partisanship, that could be a fallback tactic to erase the court’s Democratic majority should redrawn maps wind up there again.
Mr. Woodhouse said that was not his intent. But he did not rule out drastic action should the court go further and dictate how the maps should be drawn.
“I think that impeaching judges would be the worst thing for North Carolina,” he said, “other than judicial tyranny.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/us/north-carolina-voting-gerrymandering.html
