Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Kenai
- Clearance
- Diversity
- Straws
- Rubio
- FB / Twitter
- Signs
- EU
- Nelson
- Kenai. King and red salmon returns here in Alaska have been at best miserable statewide outside a few pleasant surprises. Kings have been worst. Reds, not much better. It appears to be a combination of horrible management along with selective enforcement favoring one user group (commercial fishermen – commfish) over all others. Last Friday, Governor Walker and ADF&G Commissioner Sam Cotten went to the Kenai to spend an hour with frustrated commfish operators. They did not deign to meet with any other user group, telling everyone which winners they were picking. Other than raw anger, the commfish demands were to cut salmon escapement into the Kenai (which is the problem), shut down the personal use (dipnet) fishery, and allow them to catch all the coho and chum they wanted to catch in turn decimating all fisheries in Upper Cook Inlet and Anchorage. It was quite the performance and Walker was most sympathetic. There is a way out of this, but it is not in increasingly bitter fights over pieces of a decreasing pie. Commfish holds perhaps 1,100 permits in Cook Inlet. Personal use is 26,000 and sport fish residents is nearly 170,000. Tourists purchase as many sport fish licenses as residents purchase. Given the numbers I wonder if the name Custer comes to mind to these guys or to the governor. In our gubernatorial race, the only candidate interested in any other user group than commfish is Mike Dunleavy. We will see if he manages to turn this into a slam dunk issue. https://www.facebook.com/akleg31/videos/2137450653134029/
- Clearance. Latest bit of return fire from President Trump against the deep state holdovers from the O’Bama regime is the notion of pulling their security clearances. At the mention of this, the cacophony of sniveling and whining was glorious to behold. Security clearances are generally only granted or retained on a need to know basis. A lot of people have held them. And when the time comes that those clearances are no longer required, there is an out brief with some paperwork that basically tells you if you divulge anything you used to be involved in without official permission, you will go to jail for a very long time. For the high rollers, some unknown number of them will be allowed to retain their clearances on a gratis basis. Problem is a lot of the O’Bama holdovers have been actively involved in the deep state coup attempt against President Trump. He has identified a bunch of the and is about to pull clearances from Clapper, Rice, Brennan, Comey, Hayden and McCabe. At least half of them have been leaking everything they know to the media for the last 18 months. Perhaps it is time to disengage them from the data flow. https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-weighs-ending-security-clearances-for-six-ex-national-security-officials-1532372938
- Diversity. Toronto got a diversity lesson last week, and in the words of HL Menken, got it good and hard. Faisal Hussain went on a killing spree, killing three including himself and injured 13 others. Authorities are mystified about the reason for the attack. Duh. Doh. His mother explained that he had a lifelong struggle with depression and psychosis, and that medication and therapy hadn’t helped him. Police proudly proclaimed there was no connection to terrorism, deftly ignoring his name and background. One of the dead was a recent HS grad. The other was a 10-year old girl. Instead, local constabulary is now concentrating on the chimera of gun violence. https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/toronto-discovers-the-joys-of-diversity/
- Straws. Santa Barbara passed a local ordinance that authorized fines not exceeding $1,000 and jail time for a term not exceeding six months for restaurant, bars and other food establishments who offer plastic straws to patrons. The excuse is environment. Apparently, there is a bidding war on the left coast to see is who is most environmentally sensitive or best at virtue signaling, as Seattle, which banned plastic straws in July only fines businesses $250/offense. The excuse for passing the ban is plastic dumped in the ocean, mostly from China. Somehow, this is supposed to help solve China’s environmental problem. OTOH, the anti-plastic straw is profoundly discriminatory, as no small segment of the handicapper population, including my son don’t drink without them. Supporters of the ban pointed out that people who liked plastic straws could always use paper straws which cost eight times as much apiece to manufacture and have the extra added benefit of not holding up under use as well as plastic. SF’s legislation also goes after napkins and plastic utensils and other to-go accessories. Perhaps they are worried patrons might pick up human feces around their entrances thus removing the lived-in ambiance (/sarc). http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/07/25/california-city-oks-jail-time-for-defying-plastic-straw-ban.html
- Rubio. Little Marco teamed up with Senator Tim Scott (R, SC) to ambush a conservative Trump nominee to the Ninth Circus. The nominee was Ryan Bounds, an assistant US attorney from Oregon. He served in the DoJ and the WH. He had extensive appellate court experience and clerked in the Ninth Circus. His offence? He wasn’t as over the top positive about multiculturalism as he should have been, having written some snarky things while in college noting that multiculturalism was conceived by “some of the more strident racial factions of the student body.” For this Scott was “unsure about his nomination. Little Marco chimed right in, apparently looking for an opportunity to return fire at Trump wiping the floor with him in 2016. But nothing is so important to these never Trump wanna bees than kicking him in the nuts occasionally. Little Marco’s problem is that Trump will remember this slight. As this point in the process, it was too late to supply Scott with the information that he claimed he needed. And Marco pushed the entire mess over the crap or get off the pot time limit. Nicely done guys. Even better, setting the precedent that a judicial nominee can be held accountable for his writings as an undergraduate as if they are in any way relevant will be the gift that will keep on giving in the hands of the democrats. Apparently, you are no longer allowed to push back against multiculturalism in college, at least in the eyes of Little Marco and Tim Scott. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/tim-scott-and-marco-rubio-sink-stellar-judicial-nominee.php
- FB / Twitter. FakeBook and Twitter started getting official pushback in the form of a major market correction to their Pogrom aimed at conservatives. Stock price for FB dropped more than 20% following a 2% revenue shortfall from its last analyst estimate. User numbers in the US are static and those in Europe actually fell. FB grew based on the ability to freely use user data. When you are no longer able to do that, while executing Jihad or a Pogrom against conservative, growth estimates get a bit harder to meet. For its part, Twitter’s shadow-banning ways are about to catch up with them as Twitter users are down by a million between March and April this year, a mere 0.3% of its user base, but it does set a direction. Like FB, this is the first downward movement of its growth rate over time. For its part, Twitter’s stock prices dropped 12%. Going to be difficult to continue to be Masters of the Universe when you actively work to irritate and chase off half your user base. The free and open market works in wonderous ways. https://www.cnet.com/news/twitters-user-count-drops-as-it-steps-up-its-fight-against-bad-behavior/
- Signs. Here in Alaska, where there is a lot of square miles and not a lot of people, the basic structure of political campaigns lends itself to the notion that political signs for candidates and campaigns are primary carriers of the message, primarily getting the names of candidates out to citizens who do not participate regularly in the political wars. In 1998, Alaskans passed a limitation on all signage within rights of way. Historically, this has been enforced in the off season, with political signage ignored during the campaign season (mid-July – November). This year, after getting buried in signs for his opposition for the gubernatorial election, the democrats infesting Governor Walker’s office decided to start enforcing this law out of the blue. A few days before the notice was sent to the campaigns, Walker – Mallott signs started disappearing. Pretty neat thing here, use the power of the State of Alaska to ensure that nobody posts anything that can compete with what you are wanting to do. http://mustreadalaska.com/signgate-gov-walker-takes-down-signs/
- EU. One of the reasons that President Trump picked a fight over trade is that the trade agreements do not install a free trade regime between the US and its trading partners. Rather, they allow our trading partners to impose whatever tariffs, taxes, subsidies, and limitations to the import of US goods and services while demanding that the US meekly comply and never impose similar limits to trade with other nations. And over the years, we have complied, all of which gave rise to Donald Trump. President Trump is the first President in my memory to use the tools he has (tariffs) to force other nations to remove their limits on imports of US goods. As a Freidman free trader, this initially bothered me a lot until I understood what he was doing. What we have today is not free trade. Rather, it is an exercise in crony capitalism, where those nations with carve outs in the various treaties get to run wild while American companies have to do it the old-fashioned way, nose to the grindstone. And it looks like President Trump is getting the attention of our trading partners. Latest participant is the European Union (EU), which has been using subsidies, tariffs, taxes and other limitations of import of US goods since it was formed. Some would opine that Airbus was one of the reasons the EU was formed, but I am not that cynical. Last week, he hosted an EU high muckety-muck who promised to open EU markets to US goods. Whatever President Trump is doing appears to be working. https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/07/25/trade-deal-a-major-win-for-president-trump-major-concession-by-european-union/
- Nelson. It is always Good to be King. One example is Senator Bill Nelson (D, FL), who got a shuttle ride because he was the congress critter representing the Cape. He is in a pretty good fight with Governor Rick Scott for reelection to the US Senate. Nelson’s latest filing covering activity from April – June shows the campaign has been using independent contractors rather than full time employees. Reason? If the Nelson for Senate campaign hires full time people, they have to pay payroll tax, employee health insurance, or other federally mandated taxes and fees. Don’t hire these people and the campaign doesn’t incur the costs. Interesting that Nelson bypasses a structure that by his very own votes over the last 32 years he has put into place, which probably explains why he has structured his campaign the way he has. https://freebeacon.com/politics/bill-nelson-campaign-still-dodging-taxes-by-employing-no-full-time-staffers/
More later –
– AG