Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Census
- Nike
- Antifa
- AOC
- Kamala
- Drone
- July 4
- NASA / NOAA
- Census. Trump administration head fakes on the census question continued throughout the week, complete with a fake news story that claimed they had dropped the matter entirely. I did come across at a better explanation of the Roberts SCOTUS opinion in Legal Insurrection. Basically, the Commerce Secretary lied to the court, with the claim that the question was necessary for compliance with the Voting Rights Act. None of the evidence presented to the courts supported this position, so the majority told them to go back and come up with a better rationale. And as luck would have it, such rationale exists, surprisingly enough in the Constitution itself. The second section of the 14th Amendment states the following:
Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.
This section was included to keep the states from diddling population numbers to change their enumeration after the emancipation of the slaves. Note also that the enumerated are citizens only, as women (at the time) and Indians were not included. If is on this basis in my opinion that the citizenship question can and should be asked. And if that delays the census a bit, so be it. We will see if the libs on the SCOTUS are up to rewriting the 14th.
- Nike. Nike pulled a special design of their sneakers early last week, supposedly after former NFL quarterback and current highly paid race hustler Colin Kaepernick called the Betsy Ross flag design on the rear of the shoe racist. Product had already been produced and shipped. Nike recalled all shoes. I expect there will be a nice black market for the shoe in the near future. Kaepernick claimed at the time of his protests, that it was aimed at anti-black brutality by police. With this complaint, it is very clear that he was and is still protesting the American flag itself, wrapping himself tightly in the mantle of anti-Americanism. Reaction was predictable out of both sides of the political fence. There were a couple interesting observations. First is that Nike makes a conscious decision to side with the anti-American millennial left. If is the demographic they are pandering to, targeting in their ads, and the rest of us can go hang. The other is the possibility that this entire event may have been preplanned by Nike, not unlike the rollout of the New Coke decades ago, something that would fit in nicely with their decision to target the anti-American left as their preferred customer base. The first is quite likely. The second, less so.
- Antifa. I have started listening to the Scott Adams periscope features during the day, mostly to continue my education in persuasion skills. He spent parts of several episodes last week talking about Antifa and the assault on Quillette reporter Andy Ngo in Portland a week ago. Adams ran across a video of an Antifa insider that described the group as basically a fight club that uses politics as a cover for rolling out in the streets, hunting people down and beating them up. This would at some level explain the cops standing by while they fight with other fight clubs. It in no way explains local politicians allowing them to take over the streets of their communities beating up anything and anyone that moves. Adams takes particular offense at their use of weapons and fists to hit people in the head. Adams lost a son to the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury and is extremely hostile to anyone who would intentionally cause that sort of injury, calling for the death penalty for any such an attack. Rationale is that once you suffer TBI, you are never the same afterwards, something he has seen up close and personal. His point is that politics is being used as an excuse for planned Antifa violence. None of this in any way explains or condones what is going on. Rather, it is presented as a data point to help know what we are dealing with. And society should collectively come down on these clowns like a ton of bricks to ensure this particular fight club operates in private rather than on the public streets.
- AOC. AOC made a pilgrimage to Texas where she picked a fight with Border Patrol over care and feeding of illegals. Among her wilder claims was that the facilities amounted to modern day concentration camps and that women were being forced to drink out of toilets. This led to the expected pre-Independence Day fireworks and ridicule, as it looks like she has never seen an actual prison cell combo sink – toilet unit. For that matter, neither have most of the rest of us. So, what are we to do with this? Ridicule of AOC while fun, will not be particularly successful, as every time she does something like this, she and those backing her learn something and get a little bit better at their persuasion. Remember that she was selected by NY democrats to run for the House because she was best at her tryout. And this best means best persuader. Scott Adams suggests that Trump can defuse this a bit by agreeing with her, in that the Border Patrol may not be the best agency to deal with the problem, as they are treating it like a jail. OTOH, FEMA might, providing we can solve the law enforcement – human crisis responsibility and control handoff properly.
- Kamala. Kamala Harris (D, CA) executed a kill shot in the second democrat debate that took out Joe Biden. She chose to go after Biden’s claim that he used to work with segregationists in the senate, senior democrat US Senators, when he arrived in the senate 40 years ago. Biden, still attempting to reprise his last two failed presidential runs, has it in his head that telling the electorate that he can work with everyone is something they want to hear. Too bad he is not in front of a national electorate. Rather he is in front of a rabid democrat electorate no longer interested in working with anyone. Harris knows this and rolled out her preplanned attack on Biden, using the fact that she was bussed while a schoolkid in Berkeley. Harris painted the suitably sad sob story about a little girl who had to be bussed so that she could get a better education, something that was an out and out lie. Berkeley’s public schools were integrated long before Harris showed up. She was bussed not to receive a better education but because the usual suspects – liberal judges and liberals in various levels of government – decided that there were not enough white people in black schools and not enough black people in white schools. So, they rolled the busses to make the numbers work out. Bussing was hated by all parents everywhere because it took away their school choice. Quality of the public schools is just one of many reasons people move somewhere and government mandated bussing takes that choice away. Bussing was most despised by black parents as it was rightfully viewed at the time as telling them their kid’s schools weren’t good enough. In making the preplanned attack, Harris demonstrated the nastiness she showed parents while a prosecutor in SF, as California Attorney General and during the Kavanaugh hearings as a US Senator. She is a nasty piece of work who may very well get the democrat presidential nomination.
- Drone. Fun story out of Soldier of Fortune magazine on the Iranian shootdown of the Navy drone a couple weeks ago. This story has the shootdown as a preplanned operation where the drone was sacrificed in order to get detailed operational and signals intel on Iranian air defenses, their command, control and communications. The article reminds the reader that the drone was at the end of its service life and about to be decommissioned. The drone was a RQ-4N BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance – Demonstrator), flown into the area of operations days earlier. It was the proof of concept demonstrator for a new surveillance drone and that program had ended. There was not an operational unit set up to operate it. So, the Navy flies it right into the teeth of Iranian air defense and collects data on emissions, communications, response times, and how many missiles, radar, and other equipment needed to shoot it down. Iran successfully shoots it down. And all the data gets collected and relayed home. Trump calls off an organized strike at the last minute, promising there is a strike on the way, keeping the Iranians on high alert for an extended period of time. Concurrent with the strike called off was a cyber-attack that knocked out Iranian missile control systems. The good news about a cyber-attack? No pictures of dead kids or women, a game the Iranians have been playing well for decades. Real? Who knows? But it does make for a nice story on a Monday morning.
- July 4. President Trump got his Fourth of July parade and multiple flyovers in the rain Thursday. The hour-long speech was patriotic, a quick review of American history, and completely apolitical. Rain mostly ended by the time the speech was made, though the teleprompters got wet and weren’t behaving all that well. This apparently caused him to vamp a bit and mention airports during the Revolutionary War, much to the disgust of the left and never-Trumpers. As an aside, memes of this were hilarious. But during the workup to this, it put both the media and democrats smartly in the very public position of being anti-America, anti-military, and anti-Fourth of July. Well played, all around. One of the things the left and anti-Trumpers never have figured out about Trump is that he truly loves this nation, and in their cynical post-national worldview, they don’t know what to do about that. So they attack the notion of America itself.
- NASA / NOAA. PowerLine ran a piece entitled The “Magic Wand of Fudging” Produces Global Warming. It reprises a post in No Tricks Zone that describes how NASA GISS and in turn NOAA has been adjusting historical temperature data archives and erasing original temperature measurements. The new datasets are called adjusted data. The problem used to be that the older datasets were still available and held by other parties than NASA GISS. NASA took its already adjusted “V3 unadjusted” dataset, applied the adjustments, typically making older years cooler and more recent years warmer, and remained it as “V4 unadjusted.” These adjustments typically show temperatures rising in recent years. One example is Marquette, MI which turned a slight cooling trend 1880 – 2018 into a robust warming trend. The surface temperature datasets have been hopelessly corrupted by government-paid climatistas and can no longer be trusted. Hopefully there are actual archives of the original data kept offline before this all began some 25 years ago under algore and James Hansen. Until then, the only temperature data remotely free from tampering is satellite data but that only goes back to 1979. And we are supposed to make policy decisions on this garbage?
More later –
– AG