Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Lisa
- Sheriffs
- Censored
- Dragon
- Berkeley
- Swamp
- Goolag
- Lisa. Alaska’s senior US Senator Lisa Murkowski had herself quite a week last week, tapping into her inner Orange Man Bad, managing to be out of town on “family matters” for the senate vote on Sasse and Toomey’s Born Alive bill, and finding time to work with the reprehensible Kamala Harris on workplace harassment legislation. The Orange Man Bad piece is most troubling, as Murkowski claims to be “troubled” by the unconstitutionality of President Trump’s National Emergency declaration on the border wall. Of course, she has been in the senate since December 2002, over which time 3 presidents have declared 20 other national emergencies that she hasn’t said squat about. Neither has she seen fit to propose legislation to wrest that power back from the executive. Other than an on and off dalliance with the amnesty caucus in the senate, she hasn’t done much to solve the immigration problem either. Her personal animus against Trump started in 2016 during the campaign with the release of the NBC Billy Bush video that was supposed to kill his campaign. She rescinded her support for Trump and managed to drag Alaska’s junior US Senator Dan Sullivan along with her. Both of them got a lot of flak back in Alaska for that grandstanding. Lisa voted against repeal of O’BamaCare two years ago. President Trump, always the counterpuncher, never the original attacker, remembers that vote and mentioned it during his CPAC speech last weekend, as a vote that made him almost refuse to sign legislation opening ANWR. Sooner or later, Lisa’s personal problem with Trump is going to hurt Alaska. It wouldn’t surprise me if she weren’t a vote to impeach him when that trial is held after 2020. And that vote will be among the last she ever makes in the US Senate. Sooner or later her focus on what she calls women’s issues, support of Planned Parenthood, and infanticide is going to hurt the State of Alaska and eventually stop her political career. http://mustreadalaska.com/murkowski-teams-up-with-kamala-harris-on-workplace-harassment-bill/
- Sheriffs. I am somewhat conflicted about the notion of state and local disobedience of federal, state and local law. On the one hand, it does serve to undermine the power and scope of the colossus the Beltway Party has built. On the other hand, it also undermines the Rule of Law, for if the law doesn’t apply equally to all of us, why should we play? The most obvious example of this is the sanctuary movement for illegals, something I despise. Federal response ought to be to simply cut off federal funds to offending communities and states. O’Bama and Clinton federal judges have a problem with that, but it should be the obvious approach. When democrats regain power, they always pass legislation they have been sitting on for years. Topics include but are not limited to voting legislation intended to bring California vote fraud as far and as wide as possible, gun control legislation so that the populace can’t do anything about the politicians fraudulently elected, and infanticide legislation because women. Democrats took control of seven governorships last year and they are busily passing as many gun confiscation laws as humanly possible. The problem is that local law enforcement, typically locally elected sheriffs, are refusing to enforce those new laws. The Sheriffs are declaring local sanctuaries using identical language to the sanctuary city movement for illegals. Some of these laws are “red flag” laws. Some raised the ownership age from 18 to 21 years. Both laws require confiscation of legally purchased firearms from their owners. Organized resistance from local sheriffs is taking place in WA, OR, NM and IL. They are talking to like-minded activists in CA, NY, IA and ID. 25 of 33 counties in NM passed resolutions to support local sheriffs who refuse to enforce firearms laws they don’t agree with. Voters in 8 OR counties passed “sanctuary ordinance” measures last year. There are many more defiant measures in process for the 2020 ballot. Of course, democrats and media are questioning the legality of this movement, but legality didn’t matter a lot when democrat attorney generals in CA and DC refused to enforce state and federal laws. The rule of law. What a concept. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-sanctuary/defiant-us-sheriffs-push-gun-sanctuaries-imitating-liberals-on-immigration-idUSKCN1QL0ZC
- Censored. A Virgil article in Breitbart last week discussed workarounds to omnipresent censorship by FakeBook content monitors. As with any workaround, these only work as long as the censors haven’t figured out what is going on, but if we can flood the zone with techniques, they will have a lot more to do, a lot more trash to sift through before dropping the hammer, and fewer people harassed until they can bring their AI to bear on the problem (trust me, they are working furiously on censorship AI). Techniques to fight this at the word level include (but are not limited to):
- Change a few letters in the word
- Replace random letters with symbols
- Slide a letter over. For example, HAL in 2001 was really based on IBM
- Assign a random word in lieu of the censored word
- Repurpose whole phrases. For example, “grass mud horse” has been used by ChiCom dissidents in a way to make a dig at the government
- Replace words with pictured. Also being done in China by dissidents with Xi Pooh
Just like the feminist assault on the proverbial Angry White Male, the harder we can make the other side work, the less successful we can ensure they are, the more fun we are having and the less fun they are having. All of which makes me smile. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/02/virgil-a-guide-for-the-censored-how-dissidents-have-flourished-then-and-now/
- Dragon. SpaceX successfully flew a resupply mission to ISS last week with their man-rated Dragon capsule. This is the commercial response to the retirement of the shuttle. Since 2011, all American astronauts have flown to ISS on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX is one of several companies working on the ability to fly manned crew to and from space. It looks like they will be the first to do it with a possible flight this summer. Another thing being discussed is a commercial flight around the moon. I would expect the first of these to be unmanned if for no other reason than to test out communications, control, navigation, and reentry. The Dragon was loaded with 400 pounds of supplied, a mannequin in a space suit and a free-floating plush toy. Dragon is designed to perform a fully automated rendezvous and docking sequence, something the Russian Progress and Soyuz have been doing for decades. For its part, the NASA bureaucracy, currently mired in the economic disaster that is the SLS (Senate Launch System) and Orion (capsule), is currently pushing the Pentagon to pull SpaceX head Elon Musk security clearance after he released a YouTube video of him smoking pot last September. SpaceX threatens the Pentagon – NASA – contractor stranglehold on space launch, as it is doing it better, cheaper, and more reliably. Unfortunately, they also carry military payloads, giving the rice bowl protection racket a hook into his operation and behavior. Nothing like bureaucratic payback. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/spacex-nasa-docking-international-space-station/584020/
- Berkeley. A video of a guy sucker-punching a conservative on the Berkeley campus hit the airwaves a couple weeks ago. The attacker walked away from the filmed assault and was free for a couple weeks before the local police issued an arrest warrant finally arrested him. It turns out he was an employee of several California university system schools, had a history of fighting with roommates, and was a fan of using and abusing the courts system, a Sue You kind of guy. The victim made the rounds of conservative talk shows. Trump even got him on stage at the CPAC speech a week ago to speak for a time. He faces three felony and one misdemeanor counts for the attack. The attacker was released on bail a few hours after being arrested, went home, and deleted his LinkedIn profile. Berkeley is no stranger to anti-conservative violence that is bother tolerated and, in many ways, celebrated and encouraged by the university. That tolerance and celebration is about to cost it a boatload of money. And it should. https://wwwt2.campusreform.org/?ID=11919
- Swamp. It didn’t take the newly elected House freshmen long to get fully comfortable wallowing in the DC swamp. Even if you ignore the anti-Semitic rants of Islamist Somali Ilhan Omar (D, MN), you have Rashida Tlaib running her mouth at House committee hearings, paying herself campaign money, and rock star AOC taking nearly $900,000 in campaign money and giving it to her top aide’s companies. Tlaib called Mark Meadows a racist for inviting Lynne Patton to the House Oversight Committee hearing with Cohen last week. Meadows knew Cohen was going to call Trump a racist, which he did, and brought in a very nice black lady who happily worked for Trump. To Tlaib, this is racist. Tlaib paid herself $45,500 in campaign funds before and after her election. FEC spokesmen allow candidates to pay themselves with campaign funds as long as they are a candidate. Those payments must stop after the general election or only be related to activity that occurred up to the date of the election. Tlaib took $17,500 after the election, which should be illegal. For her part, two PACs founded by AOC’s top aide funneled over $1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies. The companies appear to have been set up to obscure how the political donations were used. The arrangement worked around the $5,000 limit on contributions from federal PACs to candidates. There were FEC complaints filed on the transfer. AOC’s Chief of staff is a Harvard grad, technology entrepreneur, and organizer for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 campaign. His PACs raised $3.3 million for the project mainly from small donors. They transferred over $1 million to two shell companies. There are several writers speculating that AOC is in big, big trouble. If so, this is the revenge of the Swamp at her insolence in screwing the Amazon to Queens deal. The new democrats are just like the old democrats. They are smart and learn very, very quickly. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/ocasio-cortezs-chief-of-staff-ran-1m-slush-fund-by-diverting-campaign-cash-to-his-own-companies
- Goolag. Here’s a fun story. At the behest of aggrieved women working for them, Goolag conducted a study to determine how badly it was underpaying women and other minority groups. Surprisingly it found that it was underpaying men for doing the same work. The study was done in response to a potential class action lawsuit by 8,300 women who are or used to work for Goolag claiming it pays women less than men for the same work. I guess that lawsuit won’t be going forward. The weirdness is that the NYT chose to report the story rather than bury it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-pay-gap.html
More later –
– AG