Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Meme
- Caravan
- Warren
- Haley
- Energy
- Michael
- Mallott
- Meme. An internet meme is normally an image, text, or something else that is copied and spreads quickly by Internet users. Latest meme is the connection of the democrat mob with the gaming non-player character (NPC). In the gaming world, a non-player is a character programmed into the game with a set of constant, invariable responses. Someone got the bright idea to start comparing members of the democrat mob with gaming NPCs. Better yet, if you take the letters in the word ‘mob’ and select the next letter in the alphabet, you end up with NPC. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke did a similar thing naming their onboard computer HAL, which is the neighboring letters to IBM in the alphabet. The NPC meme started some 5 months at the 4Chan messaging board. This led quickly to a proliferation of photo shopped images of democrat protesters with their faces replaced with some version of the NPC drawing. These have spread like wildfire throughout the online tech world much to the dismay of the lefties running Big Tech who are doing their level best to suppress it, making the fun all the more enjoyable. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-16/4chan-sparks-mass-triggering-npc-meme-twitter-responds-ban-hammer
- Caravan. Just in time for the November election, Soros and like-minded NGOs have funded a 3,000 – 4,000-person caravan of illegals out of Honduras. The travelers come from Honduras, neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador. It looks like the intention of the backers of this attack on our borders is to demonstrate that the Trump administration is completely ineffective in his promise to control the border. And they intend to reprise the media-created firestorm over separating children from their families. Additionally, they hope to dispirit Trump and Republican voters into not showing up at the polls in a few weeks. They would like either and would be very pleased with both, ecstatic with all three. Now these sorts of events are not inexpensive, with the total cost of making the trip in the neighborhood of $7,000 apiece. Laura Ingraham noted that the per capita income in Honduras is $2,300. Previous caravans have Soros fingerprints all over them, mostly due to grants from Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which funded three of the four groups that organized and backed the last round of caravans. The hands of the Honduran government are not clean on this, giving their Ambassador in Mexico orders to help escort the caravan on its way north. Why would the government of Honduras do this? Money. Always follow the money. Remittances sent back to Honduras in 2017 totaled $4.33 billion and made up a full 17% of its GDP in 2011. Reaction this time by the Trump administration has been different. First, he made threats to the participating nations that if they do not control their citizens in the caravan, that if this doesn’t stop instantly, all foreign aid to the Central American nations participating and Mexico will be stopped completely. The 2019 foreign aid budget totals $260 million for those four nations. He also sent Secretary of State Pompeo to Mexico to demand they shore up their southern border and not allow passage of the caravan through Mexico. Mexico appears to be listening at least a little bit, based on the new relationship between the US and Mexico dusted off during negotiations to replace NAFTA. Final Trump threat is to send the military to the border and close it completely. I expect the timing of this caravan was well orchestrated and planned for maximum media impact just before the election. We will see how successful they are. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/illegal_caravans_encouraged_by_honduras_and_soros.html
- Warren. For some reason, Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) decided to dust off her artificial Cherokee heritage last week just in time for the November elections with announcement of a blood test that verified she indeed did have Native American blood. Of course, the guy running the test didn’t have any Native American blood to make the comparison with, and it turned out that Warren may have had a relative 6 – 10 generations back in Mexico who gave her high cheekbones. What the test did prove was that Warren is whiter than Ivory Soap, which is only 99.44% pure. Of course, Trump took the opening and just laid into Warren in tweets, to the media, and during his rallies, turning her into a laughing stock. Democrats were not very pleased at Warren’s timing, as it sucked a bit of life out of their planned last few weeks of their campaign to grab control of congress. Michael Walsh writing in the Daily Wire describes Warren destroying identity politics for the democrats claiming she might have had a relative born in Mexico 300 years ago. The problem is that if we accept the notion that a single drop of ethnic blood makes us that ethnic, then everyone can claim that sort of victim status. And if everyone is a victim, nobody is a victim, ie) the end of identity politics for the democrats. Final fun thought is that this REALLY irritated the Cherokee Nation who maintains strong control of its membership rolls, none of which show Warren or her ancestors as former tribal members. I expect they are not the only ones irritated. https://www.dailywire.com/news/37131/walsh-elizabeth-warren-just-destroyed-identity-matt-walsh
- Haley. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley announced her resignation last week. She will work through the end of the year before stepping down. She had reportedly told President Trump she wanted to step down several months ago. Nobody knew or leaked those plans until early last week. There was immediate speculation that she would run against Trump in 2020. I have another thought. What if Haley replaces Mike Pence to run with Trump for election in 2020? That would set her up nicely to run for President in 2024. While she doesn’t have the skill set that Trump has, she was a decent governor. And while her parents were immigrants, she was born here in the US, making her eligible to run. Stranger things have happened. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/410546-haley-resigns-as-us-ambassador-to-un
- Energy. I have a couple stories about wind energy that have been sitting the hopper for a couple weeks. The first story documents wind energy measurably warming the planet, at least in the locale they have been built and are operating. The second is an analysis of a global move to renewable energy. Hint: It hasn’t happened at all. Easiest to explain is the fact that electrical generation by wind heats the environment in its vicinity. What wind electrical generation does is extract energy from the boundary layer of wind blowing along and immediately above the ground. When you extract that energy, you slow the wind down, you keep it from keeping the ground in the vicinity of the wind farms warmer than it would otherwise be. https://futurism.com/wind-farms-heat-planet-climate The second story showed up in WUWT a month ago by David Middleton, who does some of the better technical analysis on the site. Middleton makes the point that new energy sources do not replace whatever was there first. Rather, the new energy sources add to the total energy output. For example, coal added to wood and biomass burning for energy. Oil added to the total of coal and wood. Nuclear added to that total. So did natural gas. And this is what solar and wind are doing. They aren’t replacing anything. Rather they are increasing the total energy generation capability worldwide. They aren’t replacing squat. And never will. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/20/there-has-never-been-an-energy-transition/
- Michael. A major hurricane hit the Florida panhandle last week. Hurricane Michael spun up near the Yucatan and made a bee-line straight for Florida. It was a smaller storm over warm water and spun up nicely, hitting with 155 kt sustained winds and pushing a 9 – 13’ storm surge ahead of it. This part of Florida is referred to as the Redneck Rivera. It also has a significant military presence with the Navy at Pensacola, the Special Operations Command at Hurlburt, the USAF at Eglin near Destin – Fort Walton Beach, and then east to Tyndall at Panama City. The storm scored a direct hit at Tyndall. Tyndall was the former lead base for the old Air Defense Command, the interceptor business. That was shut down, engulfed and devoured into Tactical Air Command around 1980. Tyndall itself remains as a major air to air weapons and tactics base, now with F-22 Raptors based there. And therein lies the problem. When you evacuate airframes from a base before a storm hits, you never get all the jets out. There are always a few left due to maintenance. Those left are unflyable. Initial reports out of Tyndall following the storm was that the hurricane destroyed up to $8 billion worth of F-22s, which would have been 16 jets, perhaps 8% of the total production run of F-22s. This was thrown around the media for a while with all the requisite tongue clicking. As it turns out, the damage was not so bad, with a rumored to have seriously damaged perhaps four jets. The hangars at Tyndall are (or were) rated at 140 kts, and they reportedly held up pretty well. Base housing was unfortunately lawn-mowed, not unlike what Hurricane Andrew did to Homestead south of Miami in 1982. One of the bad things about this storm is that it grew fast and moved fast. It didn’t linger at any part of its track. https://www.stripes.com/news/us/access-to-tyndall-afb-for-servicemembers-to-assess-hurricane-damage-ends-1.552946
- Mallott. Alaska LtGov Byron Mallott resigned from office Tuesday after making unspecified “inappropriate comments” or “unwelcome advance” to a 16-year old at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention here in Anchorage last week. Three days later, Walker told the convention that he was suspending his campaign and threw his support behind democrat candidate for Governor Mark Begich. The Walker administration is doing its level best to not allow details of the “conversation” to be made public. Rumor is that he hit on a 16-year old, her mother an Alaskan native who is well connected with state law enforcement in the Fairbanks area, found out and went ballistic. The story hit the convention and he was asked to leave immediately, which he did. This is where things get interesting, as Mallott is 75, and a 75-year old (unless quickly going senile or inebriated, and as much as I dislike Mallott, do not know him to be either of those), doesn’t start doing this sort of thing out of the blue, so the local thinking is that he has been doing it for a while, probably a long while. We know that the unions backing Walker’s reelection and Begich have been getting increasingly worried as neither polls above 25%, leaving Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Dunleavy polling somewhere in the upper 40%s. We also know that the Begich and Walker campaigns have been in talks for at least a couple weeks about what to do. All this leads to speculation that this may very well have been a setup orchestrated by Begich to clear the field for his run for Alaska governor. He’s done this before, taking advantage of the fraudulent prosecution and conviction of Ted Stevens to win his one (and hopefully only) term in the US Senate. Begich’s problem is that the ballots have already been printed and distributed with all three names on them. Over 3,000 absentees have been reportedly voted already. Money-wise, Begich had no money. I am guessing that all Walker’s union-funded independent expenditure groups will now tweak their campaign from bashing Dunleavy and supporting Walker to simply bashing Dunleavy. We are expecting some of the filthiest campaign dirty tricks up here since the last time Mark Begich ran for US Senate and lost in 2014. In that campaign he ran an ad against eventual winner Dan Sullivan that was so ugly that it had to be withdrawn. Hang on, this one’s going to be ugly. https://craigmedred.news/2018/10/19/hidden-story/
More later –
– AG