Interesting Items 01/30 –
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Dense Pack
- Mexico
- Media
- Investigation
- Gore Effect
- Winning
- Unions
- Fukushima
- Dense Pack. Dense pack was a nuclear war strategy that based multiple ICBMs close enough together so that it would maximize survivability in the event of a nuclear attack. The thinking was that the larger Soviet nuclear weapons would destroy one another should they be targeted on a small, densely populated area. This was never tested for real. Those of us on the right believed that O’Bama was executing a version of a dense pack strategy, otherwise known as flooding the zone with his multiple big government assaults on our daily lives for eight solid years. In this strategy, there was a daily outrage (or many of them) and it was impossible for opposition to O’Bama to stop anything. There was just too much stuff going on to focus on anything and counter it. Looks like President Trump and his WH have adopted the same strategy, do so much on a continuous basis so that it is impossible for opposition to respond or stop it. Look at the pace of what has been going on for the last 10 days. There are 2 – 3 Executive Orders every single day. This week there will be a SCOTUS nomination. There are Cabinet secretaries to approve. And every now and then, there will be some red meat thrown out for the media and democrats to focus on while the important stuff is going on elsewhere (the size of the Inauguration crowds is a good example). Trump is unlike anyone in the WH in my lifetime. He is an entrepreneur. He is loud, disruptive and messy. He does continuous A – B testing. He eats failure like candy. He and his people are going to make mistakes – lots of them. But they will correct those mistakes on the fly, also quickly. He is rolling out things so fast that the opposition is unable to focus on any single thing as there is always another outrage an hour or two down the road. And we are only 10 days into this. This is so different from anything in my political experience so as to almost be alien. And I am loving every single minute of it. Scott Adams continues to supply the best explanation of what is going, how and why it is working. Worth your time to read. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156628357041/is-president-trump-doing-management-wrong
- Mexico. One example of loud, messy, public negotiations took place last week with Mexican President Pena Nieto who cancelled a scheduled meeting with President Trump over the issue of Mexico having to pay for the wall on the southern border. Mexico has reacted poorly and expectedly to demands that they pay for a wall along their northern border much the same way as a vampire reacts to a cross. They have been loud, pointed, and more than a little profane (President Vicente Fox, for instance). Cancellation of the meeting was met with all the expected hang wringing from the usual suspects, especially after Trump suggested paying for the wall with a 20% tariff on products from Mexico. It was also met with a drop in the value of the peso. President Nieto reportedly had an hour long telcon with Trump the day the meeting was cancelled. I don’t think that phone call would have taken place if they were not on speaking terms any more. Trump has the upper hand in this as he has the legal authority right now to tax remittances paid by Mexican citizens working in the US back to family members. Getting the money is no problem. One of the richest men in the world is Carlos Slim. He gave a speech last week calling Trump a “great negotiator” and calling on Mexico not to fear him. Instead, he pointed out that Trump’s public negotiation with Nieto had united Mexico unlike anything he had seen in decades. I think we are going to see some progress. http://nypost.com/2017/01/28/carlos-slim-mexico-shouldnt-fear-great-negotiator-trump/
- Media. Trump is the first president in decades who is not putting up with the democrat support infrastructure that calls itself the media. Glenn Reynolds wrote in USA Today last week that Trump was gaslighting the media and that they fall for it every time. Reynolds believes that Trump is in the early stages of renegotiating the post-WWII institutional arrangements, this one between the media and the WH. Since WWII, the press has gotten special treatment at the WH, special status, and seen as powerful and institutionally responsible. The fact that it was closely allied with democrats didn’t hurt either. But the media is no longer powerful. It did not defeat Trump even though it was a full participant in the Hillary campaign, propping her up and blasting away at Trump every chance they got. Now that he is in office, the media continues to do everything possible to hurt him and his presidency. Knowing this, Trump is poking, prodding and gaslighting them on a regular basis, usually in an attempt to trigger an over the top response. And the media plays right along with continuous over the top responses to every single Trump provocation. A way to view this is the running gag in the Pixar movie “Up” where the dogs are distracted instantly when someone yells “squirrel!” Reynolds observes that Trump knows the media hates him and is not trusted. The less it is trusted, the less power it has to hurt him. Continuous over the top responses are a vehicle to make that happen. Trump is a media kind of guy and knows how to deal with them. The media’s only play to keep from being destroyed by Trump is to start reporting facts accurately and in a straightforward manner. This will also require them to stop being shills for democrats. They are incapable of doing this these days. Too bad for them. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/01/26/white-house-press-media-donald-trump-glenn-reynolds-column/97042872/
- Investigation. A yet another example for your consideration of Trump gaming the media, and along with it putting the democrats in the position of being screaming lunatics. The trigger was his comments last week that he would have won the popular vote had not so many illegals voted in November. The usual hysteria broke out and ran wild for a couple days. In fishing terms, he baited the hook. A few days later, he set the hook with an announcement that his administration will be doing an investigation into voting fraud. This triggered a different sort of hysteria and along with it cognitive dissonance on the left as voting fraud is a long practiced strategy. The NAA(L)CP promised to fight the investigation. Apparently the only way black liberals can win elections is via election fraud. Sad! http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/25/trump-promises-major-investigation-into-alleged-voter-fraud.html
- Gore Effect. The last two winters here in AK have been pretty warm. Cause was the back to back La Nina’s in the central Pacific. Now that the last one died away, we are having an old fashioned Alaskan winter when the cold Siberian air finally made its way back into the state. A week ago the Anchorage Bowl saw a couple days with lows between -15 – -20F and highs below zero. It was the coldest here in town since 2012. The interior saw temperatures in the -60 – -70F range. At the same time, the new democrat-led majority in the State House had a committee chairman announce hearings on manmade global warming due to CO2 (climate change) and a carbon tax to fend it off. This is called the Gore Effect and we don’t often see it here in AK. https://www.adn.com/politics/2017/01/14/the-alaska-legislature-returns-with-a-new-house-majority-but-it-faces-the-same-old-budget-problem/
- Winning. One of the things I have started doing in the comment sections of local media is use Trump’s phrase “so much winning” in response to written outrage by the left. It infuriates them which makes me smile. I used to like to go after fire ant hills in Texas as a youngster. Some things are too fun not to keep doing. The new Trump administration is moving quickly to reverse obnoxious things the O’Bama administration has done. A few examples follow. First comes a last minute transfer of $221 million from the State Department to the PLO. The money was held up due to congressional concern. Former SECSTATE Kerry ordered it released Friday morning before Trump was sworn in. Unfortunately things move pretty slowly on Inauguration Day and the incoming WH was able to freeze the transfer early last week. Trump also signed an EO that ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite approval of permits for the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline. There was a last minute reclassification out of the Department of Energy that rendered the 3-way incandescent bulb illegal. This has not yet been rolled back. The final bit of good news is that it appears that the crony capitalist anti-vaping rules out of the FDA are on the radar for the incoming Trump administration to repeal. The rule was written in such a way as to bury all the entrepreneurial vaping businesses under a dumptruck of paperwork taking millions of dollars to complete. Small businesses are unable to meet the new regulatory burden. Current tobacco companies have the financial resources to do the new paperwork. The crony capitalism comes with the participation of those companies in the preparation of the new rule, as they are using the regulatory process to eliminate competition from small businesses. And the pocket fascists infesting the federal regulatory agencies are more than happy to go along with them. Rolling back this rule will appeal to the coastal Millennials who have taken up vaping in a big way. http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/01/trump-may-breathe-new-life-into-us-e-cigarette-industry/
- Unions. One of the things that happens when you don’t want the votes of people is that they go elsewhere. This is part of what happened last election cycle with the white working class who were actively tossed aside after the O’Bama WH and democrats decided they could win elections by cobbling together a coalition of racial, ethnic and an array of aggrieved special interest groups. Worked for them in 2012. Not so much in 2016. Last week President Trump had a meeting with leaders of trade unions in the WH ostensibly to discuss the infrastructure legislation he is pushing. None of the public sector unions like SEIU were invited. This ought to terrify democrats as Trump is making a direct play for the support of trade unions that have been in near continuous lockstep in support of democrats for half a century. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/24/populist-revolution-trump-meets-with-union-leaders-on-day-one/
- Fukushima. Article out of Science Magazine last week documents that actual ground level radiation in the area around the Fukushima reactors was lower than estimated based on helicopter sampling by a factor of at least four and perhaps as much as seven. Actual data comes courtesy from a village within the evacuation zone that was never evacuated. The city council wanted to make sure that they were not being exposed to harmful levels of radiation and purchased a billion Yen worth of detectors for its citizens. At least 52,000 residents participated in the data collection for at least one year. During that time, the Japanese government conducted at least four airborne sampling surveys looking for ground levels of radioactive cesium isotope. The actual radiation doses from the detectors were roughly 15% of what the helos were measuring. To be fair, the radiation levels measured by the helos was fed into a model that spit out what they thought to be the actual ground level dosage. For local residents, this is good news / bad news. The good news is that the residents were exposed to lower levels than predicted. The bad news is that the evacuation of others and widespread expensive decontamination efforts were not necessary. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/fukushima-residents-exposed-far-less-radiation-thought
More later –
– AG