Interesting Items 06/29

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

In this issue:

1.  Wuhan
2.  Forrest
3.  BLM
4.  Gaslighting

1.  Wuhan.  As the BLM riots tailed off, the anti-Trump media spun on a dime and started beating the drums on the Wuhan Flu.  The game this time around is to focus on the massive increase in number of cases while (mostly) ignoring the number of deaths.  A few observations follow.

  • Here in Anchorage, our Berkeley Boy Mayor Ethan Berkowitz issued a masking order that goes into effect this morning.  He is “concerned” about the increase in the number of cases here in Alaska and aims to save us from ourselves.  He lost a 6-5 vote twice in the Anchorage Assembly which has a veto-proof democrat, union backed majority that has backed him with lockstep 9-2 majority votes during his entire time in office.  There was an attempt to put a masking mandate in front of the Assembly at its meeting last Tuesday that was pulled when he determined he could issue the order under existing emergency powers.  As far as I can tell, the mandate does not have any enforcement mechanism.  Appears the game is to put local merchants in the middle and come down on the merchants.  He owns a piece of several local restaurants, and one of the ownership group (a woman) wrote an op-ed last week calling for the masking mandate.  Hiding behind a woman to do his dirty work for him wasn’t the best look for Ethan.  It will be interesting to see how many people ignore this. 
  • A thought by Craig Medred, our best outdoors writer up here.  He is of the opinion that the current spike in new cases in FL / TX / AZ (and elsewhere in the S & SW is being driven by people being indoors.  Rationale?  It is hot in that part of the country this time of year.  People stay indoors in the air conditioning.  Given the past tightening of structures to maximize energy efficiency, little fresh outdoors air gets in and little cool air gets out.  This means that any airborne pathogen will tend to circulate.  Solution?  Open the doors and windows, which won’t happen this time of year.  OTOH, perhaps it is time to start exploring the possibilities inherent in UVC lights to sanitize circulating air, something the hysteria has studiously ignored over the last 4 months.
  • The lockdowns crushed small businesses, which is probably why most of the blue state governors and mayors are foot-dragging lifting restrictions.  But these businesses were not crushed all the same, with black owned and operated small businesses suffering the most damage.  Worse, corporations received massive windfalls thanks to government relief efforts and because most lockdown governments allowed their storefronts to remain open while ordering everything else locked down.  The number of active business owners in the US plummeted by 3.3 million (22%) over the Feb – Apr period.  This was the largest decrease on record and losses were felt across nearly all industries and included incorporated businesses.  Black owned businesses experienced a 41% loss, Latino down 32%, Asian businesses down by 26%, and white-owned businesses down 17%.  Immigrant business owners experienced losses of 26%.  Female-owned businesses experienced losses of 25%.  Bottom line of this is that when governments launch massive interventions into the economy via 300+ page bills, benefits will skew toward the politically well-connected, which are NEVER small businessmen and women.  These results reiterate the observation that crony capitalism (aka fascism) is the economic problem of the age as Americans will not bear the consequences of big government equally.
  • Jazz Shaw writing in Hot Air wrote about Hawaii’s Army of Karens, snitches working for the state whose job is to identify and report those violating lockdown orders.  These are typically at-home reporters scouring social media, public webcams, and image libraries.  They are reporting violators to police who in turn arrest them.  The article describes a TV reporter who tracks down tourists violating the state’s mandatory 14-day quarantine order focusing on tracking license plate numbers.  Her little group of bored reporters calls itself Hawaii Quarantine Kapu Breakers (kapu = rules).  I can’t think of a better way to turn off tourism in Hawaii permanently. 
  • Final story comes out of Canada, blasting the one size fits all use of lockdowns to address the spread of the Wuhan Flu.  As of June 7, a full 81% of 7,773 deaths were linked to long term health care facilities.  Of the remaining 1,482 deaths, most were people over 70.  Of the 229 total deaths under 60 years old, all had some sort of pre-existing health condition.  This article concluded that the shutdown exacerbated Canada’s extended waiting lists for healthcare.  Worse, the neighboring shutdowns in the US removed that option for those in need of medical treatment.  Canada went into the crisis with essentially zero unused health care capacity and the longest waiting lists. 

2.  Forrest.  The Anchorage Assembly has a member named Forrest Dunbar.  He is young, photogenic, liberal as the day is long, and a member of the Alaska Army National Guard Judge Advocate office.  He is running for Mayor in April to replace our current boy mayor.  Of course, he a democrat, the party that fought to retain slavery in the Recent Unpleasantness 160 years ago.  He ran his mouth last week at the end of the Assembly meeting, describing the US Constitution as laced with all things race and racial from end to end.  This is somewhat of an interesting position for someone who is both a lawyer and holds the rank of Army Captain.  Dunbar has taken at least two and most likely four Oaths of Office swearing to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.  How can one, especially an enlightened democrat, swear an oath to support and defend what he now publicly claims to believe is a racist document?  Three possibilities come to mind.  First, he might simply be pandering to the crowd.  Second, he might be lying, and has no intention of executing his Oath of Office.  Third, he might simply be a racist, gleefully supporting and defending a document that empowers his racial views.  Any of these three possibilities require his immediate resignation from both the Army and the Assembly, which I don’t expect to see any time soon.  In his little talk, Dunbar calls the 3/5 Compromise essentially racist.  This highlights his complete lack of education, not unexpected from an Ivy Leaguer, as that compromise allowed the southern states, the slave holding states not to dominate the newly formed union.  Had that compromise not been made, secession would have most certainly taken place, but it would have been New England to go first likely around 1830.  There would have been no Civil War and the remaining states would have held slaves for decades afterwards.  He then waxed poetic about the racist evils of the Electoral College, forgetting that the Constitution is a pact between the many states and that the states are the basic unit of government of this union.  The Constitution and its amendments were ratified on a state by state basis.  The Electoral College simply does the same sort of thing when we elect democrats.  If this is the best local democrats can do, perhaps they ought to disband.  Final snarky cheap shot observation:  Interesting first name he has.  Was he named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, another famous Confederate general, democrat and founder of the KKK?

3.  BLM.  Now that they’ve become a big part of our political and unfortunately sports lives, perhaps it is time to delve into Black Lives Matter a bit.  It was founded in 2013 in the aftermath of the Treyvon Martin – George Zimmerman affair.  The three founders are all women.  And the organization is profoundly Marxist.  The photo below comes via a Breitbart piece showing one of the founders yucking it up with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas MaduroThe OAN Newsroom on June 26 discussed co-founder Opal Tometi ‘s connection with the Maduro regime, which in turn connects her to Cuba, Iran and China.  Nice group of friends you have there.  They would bring that sort of governance here into the US.  If you take a look at their web site, they stand for a lot of “interesting” things that won’t benefit black lives at all, but most certainly will benefit them should they get themselves installed into the Chavez / Castro / Maduro jump seat.  Perusing their web site, you can find a What We Believe page with the following reading material:

  • We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.
  • We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.
  • We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
  • We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
  • We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Most of this is about women, trans, LGBTQWTF.  They specifically promise to annihilate the nuclear family.  And worst of all, they hardly ever mention men whom they plan on using as cannon fodder in their race war.  They are not a non-profit, instead laundering donations through a democrat-connected central fundraising structure, ActBlue.  While ActBlue Charities claim to be a registered charitable organization, the ActBlue Terms & Conditions link takes you to a page that talks about Campaign Finance Laws, which are hardly charitable.  These guys are remarkably toxic to all Americans and should be halted.

4.  Gaslighting.  Brian Cates posted a piece in UndercoverDC entitled The Summer of Our Gaslighting Discontent on June 19.  This is a pretty good echo of what Kurt Schlichter has described as an infowar in this portion of the 2020 campaign (and make no mistake the protests are ALL about the 2020 campaign).  As a reminder, gaslighting is defined as a tactic which manipulates a person or entity so as to question their own sanity.  The goal is to gain power over them by making them into a victim.  And it works better than you might think.  In this case, a massive amount of time, effort and money will be spent by the political left, all amplified by their propaganda arm the media, in order to hide the real cultural shift in the US rightward.  Instead their narrative will be an attempt to make you believe it is clanging hard left.  The only good news out of all of this is that we are getting a real lesson in what happens when we elect actual ideological lunatics to political office.  These would be the democrat governors, mayors, city councils and legislatures.  And not only are they ideologues, but they are totally and completely incompetent.  Cates believes this campaign has been planned for the last 3.5 years with the goal of winning the 2020 election.  While I won’t go that far, I will point out that it is their usual playbook, seen since the mid-1960s, so what level of detailed planning is necessary to pull this off is problematic at best.  Perhaps the basic decision in November will not be between Trump or Biden, but rather a return to sanity or further descent into insanity.  For if Biden’s backers are successful, this will continue and get worse, a lot worse.

More later –

– AG

One thought on “Interesting Items 06/29”

  1. Democrats, the party of slavery and death since their 1820s founding. Oh, the gaslighting has been going on a *lot* longer than the 1960s. They did it to Herbert Hoover in 1932. Never mind that the Roosevelt that followed him took what he did and doubled down on it, prolonging the Depression until the war effort took over. Said Roosevelt implemented a lot of fascist stuff, too (cough, marketing boards, cough).

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