Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Khashoggi
- Fishing
- Mutilation
- Fires
- Acosta
- Mines
- Nukes
- Khashoggi. Like most of us, other than believing that something awful, likely deadly happened to former Washington Post occasional columnist, Muslim Brotherhood devotee, and former friend of bin Laden, Jamal Khashoggi, I am short of details. With that in mind, perhaps it is useful to take a look at who is lined up on either side of the festivities.
- Media is demanding that President Trump sanction Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) for Khashoggi’s demise. Trump politely declines the honor. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/417646-trump-affirms-us-loyalty-to-saudi-arabia-in-striking-new-statement
- We saw the return of the CIA weasels with the leak of intelligence that claims MBS directed the murder of Khashoggi. Given the slow pace of Senate approval of Trump appointees over the last couple years and the participation of Brennan and O’Bama-friendly CIA employees in the preparation and dissemination of the Fusion GPS Trump Dossier, I think that the leak is simply the latest round of Deep State attacks on Trump. The leak did put the media in an interesting position, questioning administration officials if they believed the Saudis more than they believed their very own CIA. Trump spokesmen were noncommittal, but that answer should have been an unequivocal yes! https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-concludes-saudi-crown-prince-ordered-jamal-khashoggis-assassination/2018/11/16/98c89fe6-e9b2-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html?utm_term=.d5dafbb620dc
- Turkish Presidente Erdogan, also tied closely to the Muslim Brotherhood, has been in the center of this affair, using state-controlled media to push the story that the Saudis committed a murder in their embassy. They have refused to release claimed audio and other electronic surveillance products that would prove their claims, though they did release a couple videos. https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/assad-accuses-erdogan-of-close-ties-to-muslim-brotherhood/
- The Muslim Brotherhood is a particularly Bad Actor in the region. Bin Laden was Muslim Brotherhood. So is Erdogan and so was Khashoggi. They orchestrated the Egyptian government takeover following Mubarak stepping down as president in 2011 and instantly went about installing a hardline Islamist regime. The Egyptian military threw them out of office in 2013. https://mwi.usma.edu/winning-battles-losing-wars-muslim-brotherhood-egyptian-revolution/
Finally, Saudi Crown Prince MBS is a target of Islamists, as he put an end to over a half century of Royal Family funding of Wahhabis. Not only did he cut them off and halt their export of the Islamist virus worldwide, but he conducted a purge and removed a large number of Wahhabi friendly royal family members and government officials from office. The purge was quick, surgical, and nobody knew it was coming, indicating that he knows how to conduct an intelligence operation, something Khashoggi’s demise was not (quiet or surgical). It would not surprise me if Khashoggi’s demise was orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters as payback or return fire. The only surprise is the Trump hatred that appears to be driving media, CIA and other responses to the festivities. In my world, the more room temperature Islamists, Wahhabis and Muslim Brotherhood there are, the better, as I view them much the same way as I do cancer cells, deadly and to be dealt with as much mercy as they deal out to their targets among we Infidels.
- Fishing. This one is a happy story, one that demonstrates what can happen when you fight back against an overbearing, intrusive, self-congratulatory, self-righteous and self-important animal rights protester. This one took place in Pinellas County, FL (Tampa – St. Petersburg) July 2017. Animal rights activists went after a Pinellas Park Chick-fi-A store, claiming it was not food. Rather, it’s violence. Fresh off their successful protest, a family of them went to a local lake to discuss their next actions, life, the universe and everything (42, btw). They saw a guy and his son fishing for tilapia in the lake. They caught a fish and it was flopping on the hot concrete of the pier in the Florida summer sun awaiting a stringer. The animal rights activist claimed his son was upset about the flopping fish and he went to confront the fishermen (this is so like the typical leftist, hiding behind his kid). One thing led to another and the animal rights activist tossed the fish back into the lake. Someone grabbed a video of the festivities and posted it. The fisherman was sufficiently irritated that he pressed a complaint with state fish and game. That complaint was later upgraded by local prosecutors to petit theft. The protester was convicted in a non-jury trial and has to pay a $500 fine and court costs. Sometimes things work out, however stupidly. https://www.tampabay.com/news/breaking/activist-threw-a-fishermans-catch-back-into-the-lake-now-he-has-to-pay-20181116/
- Mutilation. A Reagan-appointed federal judge found a federal law banning female genital mutilation (FGM) unconstitutional. This prompted all the expected cries of outrage from those of us on the conservative side of the cultural wars. The anti-FGM legislation is a common-sense effort to stop imported barbarians from acting like barbarians. The judge said this needs to be done on a state by state basis, and I tend to agree with him. The good news is that this issue will have to be hashed out 50 more times at the state level. Think of it as federalism in action. This is part of the long, painful process of clawing back power from Washington DC, something we all should support and even celebrate. Sometimes opportunities don’t look like opportunities. I think this one is. https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2018/11/20/conservatives-slam-judge-for-blocking-genital-mutilation-charges/
- Fires. The California wildfires present an opportunity for Republicans and conservatives to start cracking the one-party state the democrats and unions have constructed for themselves. James Pinkerton writing in Breitbart notes that it is time to return to Sir Frances Bacon’s worldview, that of a lifelong struggle against the random caprice of nature, which won the last couple rounds in California. For the sake of our survival, we must adapt, and in this case, we must adapt our environment. The greens, democrats and unions managed to erect a regulatory and legal structure in California that leaves tens of millions of ordinary Californians defenseless against wildfires. Of course, for the greens, this is not a bug. Rather it is a feature of their worldview. Those on the left claim that there is no defense, the fires are simply too big. Too big to protect a town of 27,000, Paradise, which was completely destroyed in the fire? Where do those people go? Who pays for them to restart their lives? How do we fight the fires? What would be a conservative, Republican approach? Start talking about public safety, safety of homes and property. Start talking about massive desalination of seawater. Last year’s California wildfires cost $180 billion. This years’ will cost even more. Spending on large scale desalination is cheaper than spending on fire caused devastation. The greens will take a do-nothing stance because a large-scale approach to solving this problem will undercut their climate change excuse. California Republicans and conservatives, their own endangered species, can embrace large scale desalination, infrastructure construction, public safety, logging and brush clearing, perhaps even homesteading. Give Californians walled up in the leftist rabbit warrens the freedom to live independently and safely on their own homesteads far, far away from their Silicon Valley Masters and nannies. Let the democrats and greens in the cities live with their idiotic limits to growth, limits to future, limits to liberty if they want to. Give those that might not want to do so a way out. Do what Republicans used to do: sell liberty and freedom to choose your own path. Who knows, it might just work. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/17/pinkerton-of-course-the-california-wildfire-problem-can-be-solved-and-republicans-can-solve-it/
- Acosta. Grandstanding CNN reporter Jim Acosta won his court case and got his press credentials back, a win at least for a little while. During all the high-fiving and media grandstanding over the opinion of a Trump appointed federal judge, the Trump WH is doing its level best to ensure the victory is a pyrrhic one. The opinion was at its most basic was a due process argument. The rationale was that the WH did not have written conduct and discipline rules. Before The Acosta Show, there were unwritten rules of conduct that all reporters promised to uphold. That works only as long as they self-enforce those unwritten rules, something they decided they didn’t want to do anymore. The WH has written new rules and promulgated them. They are just itching to revoke Acosta’s press credentials after the next animal act. Wonder if there is a pool of dates and times for his next outburst and ejection. https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/11/acosta-got-his-press-pass-back-but-his-media-colleagues-will-pay-the-price/
- Mines. One of the low-level infrastructure concerns has to do with the reaction of the electrical grid to a massive solar flare and subsequent solar storm. The Carrington Event was a massive flare on Sept. 1, 1859. Generally, flares also trigger coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which hurls charged particles from the sun outward. The larger the flare, the larger the CME. When the earth intersects a CME, you end up with geomagnetic storms, bright active arouras, and significant electrical difficulties. It took only two days for the Carrington CME to intersect earth which really lit up the entire planet. It also took down the telegraph system due to current generated in the lines by the incoming flood of charged solar particles. These events happen irregularly, and if we are in the line of fire, the electrical grid may be at risk. A CME from a March 1989 flare knocked out power across much of Quebec. WUWT reported a recently declassified military report of a 1972 geomagnetic storm triggering and detonating military mines deployed to blockade North Vietnam ports during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. This particular CME damaged spacecraft and satellites and led to power issues across North America. There were as many as 4,000 mines detonated by the event, likely to changes in the earth’s magnetic field (the mines use magnetic fields to sense the presence of shipping nearby). https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/15/declassified-report-shows-solar-flares-set-off-land-mines/
- Nukes. Leave it to a San Francisco democrat congress critter to go full fascist when it comes to gun grabbing. Last week Rep. Eric Stalwell (D, CA) got into a twitter exchange with Joe Briggs over gun grabbing. Stalwell wrote an USA Today op-ed calling for an assault weapon band, buy-back, followed by going after resisters. Briggs tweeted that Stalwell would end up with a war. Stalwell happily responded that it would be a short war because the feds have nukes, and presumably would use them on the citizenry. So much for posse comitatus. Instructive here is the variation on Goodwin’s’ Law, the internet Murphy’s Law variation that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches1.” And its corollary is that whomever goes there first loses the argument. Now that we have a fascist democrat from California (how many redundancies do we have there?) threatening Americans who will not cooperate with a gun grab with nuclear weapons. Question for the boy: You gonna drop them all at once or onsies or twosies? https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/16/eric-swalwell-if-gun-owners-defy-assault-weapons-ban-the-government-has-nukes/
More later –
– AG