Interesting Items 04/15

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

In this issue:

  1. Illegals
  2. Reparations
  3. Harris
  4. Beresheet
  5. Northam
  6. Resistance
  7. Neo Feudalism
  8. Sports
  9. Poacher

  1. Illegals. One of the things Scott Adams admires about President Trump is his flexibility, ability and willingness to shake the box, stir things up, rearrange the conversation and in turn outcomes when he meets with what used to be an intractable problem.  With a democrat majority in the House and O’Bama judges obstructing his every move, immigration is one such problem.  Last week, he shook up the box, stirred the contents a bit with the suggestion that he would be releasing illegals into sanctuary cities and states.  This triggered the expected outrage.  But it delighted everyone on his side of the argument, bringing the problem caused by democrats home to them.  It was presidential trolling at his best.  Tucker Carlson followed with a 9-minute long masterpiece suggesting democrat locations to release the illegals.  Whether or not this happens remains to be seen, but it most certainly smoked out both the democrats and their media cheerleaders. More importantly, it instantly changed the conversation.  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/04/13/tucker_carlson_nobody_hates_diversity_more_than_rich_liberals.html

 

  1. Reparations. One of the head scratching new positions out of democrat presidential candidates is the call for reparations for descendants of slaves.  Completely ignoring the quaint little fact that nobody in this nation other than recent Muslim immigrants ever owned or was a slave, you wonder why they are going there for this election cycle.  I have an answer.  It is because Trump is gaining significant support from the black community, something that used to go 95%+ for democrats and needs to continue if democrats have any hope of winning in 2020.  All reparations are a promise for free money based on race to wavering black democrat voters.  Follow the money.  Always follow the money.  https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/19/politics/reparations-democratic-party/index.html

 

  1. Harris. CA Junior US Senator Kamala Harris has already picked up her preferred constituent group, and it is not who you might expect a bi-racial woman to select.  In Harris’ corner, we have the Silicon Valley oligarchs, who have selected her as their path to world domination.  She is well positioned as a youngish (mid-50s) part Indian, part Afro-Caribbean and female.  The intersectionalists are all agog at her bonafides.  She is the favored candidate of all the important places in democrat-land – the Hamptons, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley – that financed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run.  While California’s Attorney General, she did little to obstruct Silicon Valley’s agglomeration of economic power, something they like a lot and reward even more.  Most current wave Silicon Valley firms are hard left, and Harris would be a convenient way to counter growing criticism while maintaining a tolerant woke façade.  Harris has fit in nicely with the desires of the oligarchs, though her actual record as Attorney General has been mixed.  She was not at all interested in individual rights, property rights or privacy records, but had a great time hammering marijuana users with hard time in jail.  All in all, a nasty piece of work.  http://www.newgeography.com/content/006271-candidate-big-tech

 

  1. Beresheet. Good news and bad news from Israel on their Beresheet private lunar robe last week.  The good news is that it took and returned images from the far side of the moon after successfully entering orbit on April 5.  The bad news is that the landing was not successful and an apparent engine failure during its landing attempt on April 11. Mission control lost contact when the probe was around 150 m above the surface.  The landing was supposed to be an autonomous event but did not complete the assigned mission.  Israeli politicians and scientists promised to give it yet another try.  Space continues to be hard.  And it is always gratifying to see people give it a try.  https://www.space.com/israeli-moon-lander-crash-space-is-hard.html

 

  1. Northam. Last week, embattled VA Governor Ralph Northam of either blackface or Klan hood fame, signed legislation last week that makes animal cruelty a Class 6 felony, punishable of a fine up to $2,500 and a prison sentence up to 5 years.  This is the same Ralph Northam who supports Virginia democrat attempts to pass post-birth abortions, where a healthy living baby will be kept comfortable while the doctor and mother have a conversation about whether or not to murder the otherwise living baby all in the name of a woman’s right to choose.  So, in Northam’s world, and in the world of Virginia democrats and media who support them, the life of an animal counts for more than the life of a human being.  Nice to see what democrat priorities are in Virginia these days.  If cruelty to animals is wrong, then how can cruelty to humans be right?  https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/04/northam-says-no-to-animal-cruelty-yes-to-infanticide.php

 

  1. Resistance. The totalitarian impulse runs strong among the political left these days as the so-called resistance is taking their anti-Trump jihad to every single Trump administration appointee or employee who has left the grind for somewhat greener pastures.  Latest example of this is an organized effort by resistance people to make sure departing Trump DHS Secretary Kristjen Nielsen does not get a job after leaving the Trump administration.  Their excuse is currently the “child separation” policy put into place by O’Bama.  These clowns are pressuring Fortune 500 companies to rip up resumes of Nielsen and other departing Trump administration officials and not even consider them for future employment.  Players in this conspiracy include SPLC, NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, and American Bridge.  Restore Public Trust put an ad into Sundays NYT.  Mere run of the mill activism is no longer in vogue.  Instead we are now into Global Thermonuclear War mode with the left.  And social media and the cable companies have made it much easier to organize and participate in these activities.  Given the rampant cowardice in board rooms these days, I fear they will be at least moderately successful.  We have seen recent success with the orchestrated assault on the Covington kids, the NC bathroom bill, Media Matters attacks on Fox News, and the LGBTQXYZ assault on Chik-fil-a.  In none of these were the conservatives the aggressor.  It was the political left that chose the fight, the venue, and the field of battle.  Perhaps it is time we started doing the same thing, for if it is the functional equivalent of Global Thermonuclear War, we haven’t a chance to prevail unless we are in the game as some (any) level.  https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/04/it-begins-democrats-media-promote-hiring-boycott-against-dhs-secretary-nielsen-other-trump-officials/

 

  1. Neo-Feudalism. One of the things the democrat majority has adopted in California has been the return of feudalism, where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a relative few, with the majority being unable due to high taxes, high costs, a massive regulatory burden to create any wealth of their own.  And like many bad ideas out of California, this is coming east for the rest of us.  Essentially, people remain renters for life, as they can no longer afford homes in California.  Over the last century and a half, home ownership was among the best way to accumulate and grow wealth.  Take that away and the young are unable to create wealth of their own.  It also forces children to stay with their parents for years (decades?) after they would have entered the world to make their way.  Among the very young, aged 18 – 22, over 60% see inheritance as their primary source of wealth as they age.  Instead of spreading the wealth, the Silicon Valley oligarch’s solution is to provide housing subsidies, unconditional cash stipends to keep the serfs from rising against their betters.  They most certainly do not want a populist revolt among the peasants whom they believe they have purchased obeisance, at least at the ballot box.  It is one of the reasons they are backing Kamala Harris.  Like the Middle Ages, taxes will only be paid by the remaining middle- and working-class residents, while the leftist clerisy in government, at the universities, and among the regulatory elites enjoy other protections unavailable to the masses.  This sort of thing destroys the American Dream.  It also threatens the Republic, as a strong land-owning middle class has been essential to every single known western republic.  https://quillette.com/2019/04/10/the-end-of-aspiration/

 

  1. Sports. I am a sports fan, particularly football and basketball.  I have long been troubled by the use of Title IX as a bludgeon to destroy non-major sports for men in colleges and public schools.  The excuse is that equal resources are not being spent on women’s sports, so the feds and their feminist cheerleaders have forced equal resources to be spent on sports between men and women.  But there is a problem, as women’s sports typically don’t make the money that men’s college football and basketball make and are therefore unable to support themselves financially.  OTOH, they have supported feminist lawsuits and the lawyers to bring them quite handsomely.  But men’s tennis, swimming, diving, volleyball, gymnastics and other minor sports have been disappearing from campuses nationwide as administrators and judges do their level best to ensure equal numbers of men and women are participating at any given time.  I neither appreciate nor support the method or the outcome and have for years thought it to be an awful approach to ensuring equality.  But a funny thing has been happening on the way to gender equality in college and public-school sports, the transgender movement, another celebration of mental illness, is well on its way to destroying women’s sports completely and for a long time to come.  Men and boys who now “identify” as women are entering women’s sports competitions and blowing the girls away, which only makes sense, as men are usually superior athletes in a given sport.  This is why there are two different record books kept.  The women and girls who have been busting their back sides figuring out how to win against other women and girls are now having to figure out how to compete and win against men who are calling themselves women.  And it is destroying women’s sports.  Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority of democrats is moving legislation to allow (require?) it on a nationwide basis.  Part of me smiles as the people who claim to love equality are busily destroying it, especially as it undermines the artificial feminist construct that is women’ sports. The rest of me is appalled as sports are a great learning and teaching vehicle for everyone and should be celebrated.  But this is yet another example of what the left does, destroying every single thing they get their grimy little paws on.  Like Venezuela, it is a lesson we ought not to forget.  https://www.dailywire.com/news/45862/house-dems-introduce-bill-force-schools-allow-emily-zanotti

 

  1. Poacher. We forget from time to time that hunting in general and big game hunting in particular is a dangerous lifestyle choice.  Regardless how good the hunter is with his (or her) weapon, every now and then the hunter becomes the prey.  For some, this is part of the allure to obtaining your own sustenance in and from the wild.  Things get even more dangerous when you choose to operate outside the accepted rules for local hunting, say poaching.  Successful poachers must get in quietly, do whatever they are going to do quietly, and get out with their target before law enforcement can find and stop them.  The second great schadenfreude story of the week after Trump’s threat to send illegals to sanctuary cities and states is the reported death of a poacher in a South Africa wildlife preserve.  The guy was a rhino poacher, likely going after the horns, who had a deadly encounter with one or more elephants after which he was eaten by a pride of lions.  The poacher was part of a 3-man team, who gave field rangers the location where they left him.  Rangers found a pride of lions, remains of a skill and some trousers at the location.  Seems he went the way of Timothy Treadwell founder of Grizzly People, who became one with a starving brown bear near Katmai in 2003.  Unfortunately, Treadwell took his girlfriend with him.  https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-south-africa-rhino-poacher-trampled-elephants-lions-20190408-story.html

More later –

– AG

 

2 thoughts on “Interesting Items 04/15”

  1. Illegals – thank you for the link to the text of Tucker Carlson’s monologue on Trump’s ‘threat’ of sending illegals to ‘sanctuary cities’. I e-mailed the plain text to several people with one word in the subject line of each e-mail – “PRICELESS !!” It is always wonderful when liberals have their hypocrisy shoved back in their faces.

    Frank, the Aggie in OK

  2. Obviously, this little fact of history is never mentioned. Back in the days of slavery, before ‘democrats’ stripped them of their ‘rights’, free blacks owned slaves, mostly black. True enough, these were not the big plantation owners; but a black slave was, at one point, more likely to have been owned by another black, than a white. So who owns whom what? I say no one owes anyone anything. That debt was paid in blood from 1861 through 1865; and from time to time over a century more.

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