Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Stone
- Shadow
- QAnon
- Bloomie
- Antarctic
- Trans
- Stone. President Trump charged into the ambush laid for him by Mueller prosecutors last week, much to the distress of the Usual Suspects in the media and on the left.
At issue is a 7 – 9-year sentencing recommendation by the prosecutors to the judge, after the prosecutors lied about that recommendation to William Barr’s Justice Department. Looks like the sentencing recommendation was caught near simultaneously by both Barr and Trump. Trump unleashed a Tweet and Barr withdrew the sentencing recommendation, after which, the four prosecutors, two of whom worked on the Mueller probe, loudly and publicly announced their resignations. These resignations triggered the (likely planned) sackcloth and ashes routine out of media, congressional democrats over Trump interference in the Attorney General’s office. These were the same guys and gals that spent 8 long years looking the other way as O’Bama’s Wingman, Erik Holder pushed O’Bama’s agenda through what quickly became known as the (In)Justice Department. The final act in this Passion Play was comments by Barr that Trump Tweets made his job more difficult, a reasonable observation. For his part, Trump did not offer up another Tweet. Congress demanded Barr come before congress to ‘splain himself. That testimony is scheduled for March 21, likely an auspicious date, as it will give Barr and Stone’s lawyers a lot of time to unwrap the railroad job the Mueller team perpetrated on him. Things began unraveling quickly as information about the jury foreman, one Tomeka Hart, was unmasked as both a former democrat House candidate, and a loud and proud democrat partisan on social media, media she is busily scrubbing at this time. The significance of all this is that as a lawyer with expertise in legal matters, she would have been at some level able to sway deliberations of other jurors, and the judge should have known about it. The possibility exists that the juror lied on her information survey which will put her in a spot of actual legal trouble., though it remains to be seen what this particular judge will choose to do about that. The other significance is that despite her supposed legal brilliance, she was singularly unable to keep her mouth shut on social media during and immediately after the trial. This all led Stone’s lawyers to ask for a mistrial, something that will put the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who has been quite harsh with both Stone (gag order not also applied to the prosecution) and Paul Manafort (solitary confinement during his trial in 2017). Judicial Watch sued to remove her from the Manafort case in 2017. The longer this goes, the more embedded democrat partisan hacks in the legal system (I know, redundant) will uncover themselves. A trap indeed, but for whom? I have a mind picture of Muhammed Ali using his rope a dope strategy to get bigger, stronger opponents to punch themselves out. Trump might be doing the same thing.
- Shadow. The IowaReporterApp used to report early results in Iowa was remarkably rudimentary according to multiple Android app developers who decompiled a copy of it. Shadow is about 8 months old and bills itself as a technology company that specializes in building apps and products aimed at the progressive movement. It has since been acquired by a nonprofit named ACRONYM, which is furiously distancing itself from Shadow, now claiming that they are merely investors. Shadow has offices in Denver, NYC, Iowa City and Washington DC. Shadow’s CEO was director of product on the Hillary 2016 campaign. The same app is also being used in the upcoming Nevada caucus. The app was intended designed to rapidly report early results. It was not designed to tabulate final vote counts. It was built on an open source app development package, described as an off the shelf skeleton that you can add your own code to. The app appears to have been built by someone following a tutorial. They started with a starter package and added things to it. Apparently, it was not tested, as democrats refused DHS offers to test the app. The app had significant security issues, one of which required Android users to bypass security to simply allow installation. The app failed when it tried to move collected data push results to an online verification system controlled by the Iowa democrat party with a data formatting error. Data formatting is both a pervasive and basic error when moving data from one system to another. Programmers spend a LOT of time wringing this out. Not these guys, apparently. So, what do we make of all this? At the most obvious level it is little more than typical leftist incompetence, in this case by the Silicon Valley IT / data dinks. At a deeper level, this may be the new democrat approach to election fraud: Make the caucus rules so incomprehensible that nobody has a clue about what is going on. Throw in an untested app to report the results. Finally, spend a couple weeks sorting out the results, awarding more delegates to a candidate (Buttigieg) who did not win the caucus. Finally, blaming the entire mess on an app created by your own people. Think of this affair as a successful beta test for yet another way to steal elections.
- Qanon. I ran across an AP piece on something called QAnon, something they describe as the latest right-wing conspiracy theory / hoax. QAnon is thought to be pushback against the Deep State targeting President Trump. For his part, some believe Trump has embraced ‘Q’. ‘Q’ came to my attention perhaps 6 – 8 months ago, with the occasional hint in something I read. It is best described as a group of military intel people systematically identifying the Deep Staters worldwide and forcing them out of positions of power. As much as I like conspiracy theories (had a lot of fun reading DW Ulsterman’s inside baseball posts during the O’Bama years) I am generally skeptical of this one. OTOH, it may be worth watching. Why? Take a look a LtGen Michael Flynn and how the politicized FIB, (In)Justice Department, Mueller team, and judges came down on him like a ton of bricks. His original legal team allowed all of this to proceed unopposed. When Flynn was appointed as National Security Advisor by Trump, the Deep Staters in the FIB and intel community immediately went after him to not only remove him from power but to crush and impoverish him and his family. Why? Flynn was head of the DIA and has been at war with the greater intel community for years. He doesn’t trust them, thinks they are incompetent, corrupt and most importantly, knows where a lot of their bodies are buried. I believe he isn’t the only one with this sort of knowledge. Wishful thinking? Likely. Worth watching as yet another predictive data point? Most certainly. Final observation: the media isn’t going to start coming after you in print if you are simply the latest hoax.
- Bloomie. As much as it pains me to do so, I need to at least defend former NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at least on his inartful comments in support of stop and frisk and the mortgage / banking involvement that led to the 2008 financial crash. Bloomberg was essentially a caretaker mayor in NYC, carrying forward policies that former mayor Rudy Giuliani had in place. One of these was stop and frisk, aimed at young, minority men. This form of law enforcement is generally called profiling, and at some level it is. Problem is that most crime comes out of the minority communities, and most of those criminals are young minority men. Instead of making a case that doing this form of law enforcement is the best way to take care of the greater minority neighborhoods in NYC, Bloomie instead went on an apology tour in a black church, groveling for forgiveness. $2 billion is going to purchase a lot of votes, but you give back a lot of those votes by groveling. The second thing he is being lambasted for is the expanded mortgage program that helped trigger the 2008 housing bubble and crash. His opposition and media instantly went after him accusing him of supporting redlining, a banking practice that denied mortgages to entire (generally minority) neighborhoods. His response should have been to deal with this on purely financial grounds, as it is never a wise investment to demand banks lend money to people unable to pay it back. At least he hasn’t been groveling about this piece yet.
- Antarctic. Last week’s manmade global warming due to CI2 emissions horror story was breathless reporting of unprecedented warming on the Antarctic Peninsula. WUWT last week wrote a nice description of the hoax and what was really going on. The NYT and the Guardian both published pieces calling Antarctica “… one of the fastest warming places on earth, heating by 3 C over the last 50 years.” The problem is that there has been a cooling trend on the continent for the last 20 years. From 1979 – 1997, Antarctic temps had increased 3.2 C per century. From 1999 – 2014, it had cooled -4.7 C per century. This strong cooling trend is never reported by either the media or the climatistas. There has been no discernable warming trend at the South Pole in the middle of the ice cap since 1958. The other thing that the media picked up on was a dramatic warming recorded on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula in March 2015. This recorded a record high temperature of 17.5 C. This event is described as a Foehn Event, essentially a river of warm, wet air from the mid-tropic Pacific Ocean, southward across the Southern Ocean and onto the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. When these warm winds downslope, they drop their moisture on the leeward sides of the mountains, and warm air descends on the leeward side of the mountains. This sort of event is not uncommon. Here in Anchorage, we have what is locally referred to as the Pineapple Express, where warm, wet air from the tropical Pacific hits the local mountains generally in October, sometimes in late Dec and Jan, heating up nicely as it drops its moisture on the mountains surrounding town. In California, they get downslope chinook winds from east to west, which drive wildfires in various places across the state.
- Trans. Spiked last week ran an extended story entitled The Making of Trans Children. It is a horror story about how campaigners, doctors, teachers, and the legal system are turning a fringe idea into a terrible reality. Children are a useful moral shield for transgender activists, as their very existence deflects questions and criticism, adding weight to the notion that being transgender is an innate characteristic. A recent book Inventing Transgender Children shows that transgenderism is an entirely invented concept with no basis in neuroscience, psychology or psychiatry. There is little evidence that brains are sexed, no evidence to suggest that some fetuses develop with mismatched brains and bodies.
“The idea that transgenderism is an internal, pre-social phenomenon that has existed throughout history is not an evidenced fact, but a proposition.”
Worse, it was only around 5 years ago that the existence of the transgender child became widely accepted. In some ways, the availability of the treatment (changing the bodies of those born with indeterminate genitals and assign them to a sex) appears to have created the demand. Hiding behind children has devastating consequences on the children, these consequences being perpetrated by activists, teachers, doctors, social workers and psychiatrists, the very people who are supposed to be in the business of protecting them from harm. The current approach, positive unquestioning affirmation, is promoted as “best practice” by schools and social workers. This unquestioning support of whatever the children say they are is used to marginalize and exclude parents from having any input into intervention and care for their own children. Children engage in all sorts of fantasies. But to freeze and consolidate the sorts of fantasies, sexual confusion is little more than child abuse.
More later –
– AG