Interesting Items 01/21

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

  1. Plane
  2. Trap?
  3. Ohr
  4. King
  5. Damore
  6. Adoption
  7. Gillett

  1. Plane. This is what fighting back looks like.  Last week, President Trump cancelled a military 757 scheduled to take House Speaker Pelosi and a bunch of her fellow house democrats on a three-nation junket to the Middle East for a week.  The cancellation letter was sent as the group was boarding their bus to Joint Base Andrews.  This likely came in response to a letter earlier in the week from Pelosi suggesting Trump cancel next week’s State of the Union speech to a joint session of congress due to “security concerns.”  One thing this woman and her cronies haven’t learned is that when attacked, Trump ALWAYS returns fire, usually effectively, always fires for effect, and does it in the most painful manner for those that chose to initiate the firefight possible.  Trump’s letter mentioned the 800,000 federal workers out of work and suggested that Pelosi would be better off in town negotiating an end to the shutdown rather than galivanting halfway around the globe for a week.  Note that Pelosi has never visited troops in the field in the Middle East, so this wasn’t where she was going and who she was going to be seeing.  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-denies-pelosi-aircraft-for-foreign-trip-in-response-to-call-for-state-of-the-union-delay

 

  1. Trap? Interesting speculation last week about the extended shutdown is that if it extends longer than 30 days, it will allow the Office of Personnel Management to prep mass reduction in force (RIF) action on federal employees who are in furlough / nonessential status.  I first ran across the story in Berkeley Thomas’ American Thinker.  He followed it the next day with a post detailing actual federal workplace rules.  One of the things current civil service laws do is make it very difficult to conduct a thorough housecleaning between administrations.  That was all well and good right up until the point where the left managed to politicize that workforce a few decades ago.  And far too many of them have been in the fat middle of the resistance over the last three years.  The American Thinker article referenced a Daily Caller piece claiming a full 85% of the federal workforce in the writer’s agency actively worked against the President’s agenda, with most of them not under any pressure to produce meaningful results.  The trick is getting the time out of work past the 30-day mark.  There are a number of considerations for layoffs that must be followed, but outside a department reorganization, the classic way to bring a recalcitrant bureaucracy to heel, a RIF may be a great place to start, as a reorg normally requires an act of congress which will be difficult to get until the Republican minority peels off 30 – 40 newly elected democrats in the House like the Republican did following Reagan’s win in 1980.  Is this real?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  Either way, spending four solid weeks as non-essential does not look good on any resume.  It also doesn’t get the groceries or mortgage paid.  We will have to wait a while and see what happens.  Final variable is legislation Trump signed this week promising to pay furloughed workers.  Unknown whether or not that means they will be back.  In a larger scheme, the fewer people working for the feds, the better.  For example, 95% of EPA employees are not working.  That all by itself is a Great Victory for Mankind.  The TSA is also not funded, as it is part of Homeland Security, the agency at the center of the fight.  Airports were slowly replacing TSA agents with contract security.  I expect that trend to accelerate to the improvement of preflight inspections for all of us.  Finally, the longer this goes on without any direct impact on our daily lives, the easier it will be to get permanently downsize the government.  This is what Trump was elected to do.  It is what a disruptor does.  https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/trumps_shutdown_trap.html

 

  1. Ohr. Most recent bombshell out of the Mueller investigation is leaked testimony by former Deputy US Attorney General Bruce Ohr to a House committee that he told all FIB and (In)Justice officials that the Steele Dossier was an opposition research document prepared by the Hillary Clinton campaign.  Every single one of them knew it.  Three of the prosecutors on Mueller’s team including his attack dog Weissman were briefed and knew it had no veracity.  This means all the officially claimed public reasons for the FISA warrants were lies and the perpetrators not only committed a fraud upon the court, but did it three additional times, and have been doing it ever since the investigation began.  There are going to be a lot of very well-paid defense lawyers before this is over with.  https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/leaked_bruce_ohr_testimony_may_be_the_key_to_unraveling_the_biggest_political_scandal_in_american_history.html

 

  1. King. One of the ugliest tools of the left in the political wars is the use of race baiting as the preferred tactical nuke against their political opposition.  Sometimes we conservatives not only purchase the rope for the left, but we happily tie the noose and put our neck in it.  Congressman Steve King (R, IA) was the latest target.  He has been an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration, defender of American sovereignty, values and nationalism, positions that get him tarred as a racist, Nazi (Godwin’s Law), all the expected epithets, and as such a fat, poorly defended inviting target for the left.  The NYT went after him a week or so ago with a scathing hit piece tarring him as a racist.  He foolishly sat for a 56-minute unrecorded interview, something that is career suicide for any conservative (at a minimum ALWAYS record every single second of these sorts of interview with your own device as it makes it more difficult for them to lie about what you told them).  And suicide this one was, as the NYT found their nugget in the conversation, gleefully published, triggered the firestorm which got King’s own party to turn on King.  The nugget follows:

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

This gotcha journalism was sufficient to get him censured by the House, stripped of his committee assignments, with his Republican colleagues jumping on board.  President Trump even got himself involved tut-tutting about Republicans not being racist.  On its face, the Republican Party in the Beltway just committed suicide.  This is certainly Jack Wheeler’s conclusion.  OTOH, given the tidal wave of anti-Catholic, anti-white, anti-male, anti-Semitic bigotry now mainstream among elected democrats in the House and Senate, I wonder if this is not yet another setup by Trump to go after these bigots.  While I hope for the best in this, I have seen over a half century of Republicans refusing to fight back and worry.  Who knows?  I might be pleasantly surprised.  https://www.tothepointnews.com/2019/01/the-republican-party-has-just-committed-suicide/

 

  1. Damore. James Damore is a former Goolag engineer who wrote an internal memo criticizing the internal ideological echo chamber and describing his views how actual differences between the sexes affect females in STEM fields.  As with all messengers, he was instantly shot, removed, and professionally destroyed.  A Reddit user claiming to be a Goolag insider detailed how the company screwed him over and is happily in the process of destroying him, his career and his lawsuit by forcing it into arbitration.  The writer said that Goolag had to make an example of him.  They spied on his Android phone and his computer (a great ad for Apple, BTW).  He was one of 100 employees that knew about Dragonfly, the Goolag developed search engine for the ChiComs that allows the ChiCom government to censor search results and gather search data on the general citizenry.  They couldn’t fire him without an NDA, so they used corporate ER to destroy him.  This took a while as he was a top performer.  They planted stories about him in Goolag-friendly media.  This included finding a Goolag-friendly NLRB lawyer to write an opinion echoing Goolag’s view that his firing was legal, which forced him into arbitration.  Everything was done through an external PR firm, which allowed Goolag to destroy all internal e-mails.  So much for discovery.  When Goolag dropped its Don’t Be Evil slogan they simply admitted to what they had become and are today.  The anti-trust action by the next Attorney General can’t come soon enough.  Note that this company had a full time office in the O’Bama WH.  Not difficult to see how both interests and techniques were completely in synch.  https://pjmedia.com/trending/reddit-user-claiming-to-be-a-google-insider-describes-how-the-tech-giant-screwed-over-james-damore/

 

  1. Adoption. A federal judge in Texas struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act last week.  It is a federal law aimed at keeping Native American families together by making it difficult for non-native Americans to adopt children with any Native American blood (the Afrikaners would have been proud).  Texas argued that the 1978 law unlawfully elevated the race of a child above their best interest.  The federal law gives adoptive placement preference to biological family members of Native American children, members of the tribe, or other Native American families, an outright racial preference.  In this case a non-Native couple tried to adopt a foster child living with them for a year.  The judge went on to note that the Act permitted tribes to exercise federal authority or regulatory power over non-tribal persons on non-tribal lands.  This of course got the attention of the Alaska congressional delegation which reacted in unison decrying the opinion.  In this case, I believe the judge is right and the delegation is pandering to Alaska natives.  Expect some ill-conceived legislation to be proposed and very likely passed.  https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2019/01/18/alaska-young-and-murkowski-file-briefs-to-fight-ruling-that-struck-down-native-adoption-law/

 

  1. Gillette. Latest entrant into the Get Woke, Go Broke sweepstakes is the Gillette razor blade company which hired a young, enterprising feminist to produce a new ad series for them.  Problem is that ads don’t have anything to do with the product.  Rather they have everything to do with shaming Gillette users (99+% male) into casting aside their toxic masculinity and becoming feminists.  Nt only should they do that, but they should go out of their way to enforce the new woke feminism on all their friends.  That’ll sell a lot of razors, I’m sure.  The campaign entitled #TheBestMenCanBe claims to be always evolving, shaping men of tomorrow.  The technique seems to be ensuring that they claim to be bad behavior is corrected on the spot, the feminist version of Orwell’s boot stomping on your face forever.  Somehow, I don’t think this is going to work.  Schick quickly jumped on board with an ad featuring two guys in a ring.  At week’s end, Gillette sales had dropped 4%, a huge number in the recently competitive business landscape for shaving products.  I’ve used Gillette products for a long time, happily.  Too bad they’ve chosen to adopt the dark side of the force.  There are real costs with hiring millennial feminist ad executives.  And Gillette is about to get a blunt, brutal lesson in the foolishness of that business decision.

More later –

– AG

 

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