Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Misc
2. Education
3. Pipeline
4. Iran
5. MN
6. NFL
7. HCQ
1. Misc. These are a number of items that have been floating for bit, not long enough for an Item but too important to ignore.
- Gun sales. I wrote last week about the massive increase in firearms sales. Ran across something that quantifies the numbers a bit. The estimate on one of my firearms web sites is that 40% of the firearms sales this year are to new people. Do the math, and 1.56 million new gun owners purchased weapons in June and a whopping 7.6 million new gun owners have purchased firearms since the first of the year. As I said last week, these are a massive pool of new potential Trump voters in November. How many of them didn’t vote for him the first time around is completely unknown. But there ought to be a way to take advantage of those new numbers.
- Scott Adams has been adamant about banning TikTok from use here in the US. He went so far as to state that if it is not banned, Trump is not sufficiently competent to get reelected. TikTok has been banned in other nations for spying on users. Apple caught them at least twice spying on iPhone users, collecting data from other apps, personal data and sending it back to the servers in China for data analysis by their supercomputers. There may be a reason that it has not been banned here in the US as yet. I believe that there is a reverse exploit underway to see how far into the corporate ChiCom spy network we can get. The longer it is in operation, the farther that exploit can penetrate. Do you really think the only people doing cyberwar are Iranians and ChiComs?
- Over the weekend, Scott Adams mentioned an unofficial poll that had 64% of self-identified Trump supporters being quiet, hiding about supporting him. In some ways, this mirrors what happened in 2016 when a number of Trump supporters mostly went underground. He thinks it is happening again. The first of the month he opined that should Biden and the democrats win, Trump supporters will be hunted. This was done somewhat in jest, but with sufficient underlying connection to the current world of firings, cancel culture, banning and actual physical assaults that it becomes a very real possibility.
- Highway protests. One of the new tricks of the BLM and Antifa protests is to blockade highways. Alternately, they surround vehicles, forcing them to stop, break windows, disconnect seat belts and drag drivers out and beat them within an inch of their lives (Reginald Denny). Not everyone plays along, as there have been several incidents where the driver kept on going. A Seattle driver hit two protesters who attempted to stop his vehicle, seriously injuring both of them. He turned himself to police soon afterwards. The driver, black, has been charged with 3 felonies. Several states have laws on the books that hold attacking a vehicle, breaking windows, as a felony. And defending your life while an attacker committing a felony during the attack is not prosecuted. This points to a need for laws at the state level similar to the Castle Doctrine laws that allow drivers surrounded by mobs to keep on driving regardless how many members of the mob they run down. The law also needs to classify any sort of assault on a vehicle using any object or body part as a felony assault and prosecute these people to the extent of the law.
- Final story comes out of Martinez, CA where a couple, one of whom was wearing a MAGA hat, held their own protest and painted over a BLM sign on a local street. They were both charged with a hate crime. Apparently, hate is truly in the eye of the beholder. So are protests. Local prosecutors point out that the BLM protests had a permit and the couple didn’t, though granting them one would have been unlikely.
2. Education. The most recent point of conflict between the Trump administration and blue state and city governors and mayors over opening schools. The sides are predictable, with the democrats doing everything humanly possible to keep the schools closed right up until Nov 3. The Trump administration is doing everything they can to get them opened. The Sainted Dr Fauci has been playing along muttering darkly about how difficult it will be to open the public schools. Teachers unions are at the pointy end of the spear on this, demanding complete and utter safety and complaining about the lack of time afforded them to open in the next 4-6 weeks. The media is playing right along with current reporting about positive test numbers for the Wuhan Flu while ignoring both the recovery rate and the number of deaths, neither of which support continued closures. Last week, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity got themselves involved, blasting away at the blue governors and mayors for slow-rolling public school reopening. While great theater, they are fighting the tactical rather than the strategic war on this one. As conservatives, we should use this opportunity to do everything humanly possible to undermine and destroy academia, particularly in post-secondary education (colleges and universities), which has been singularly responsible for indoctrinating our children and grandchildren into hating America. The BLM riots have demonstrated quite clearly what an awful toxic indoctrination mill they have set up especially among young, white college educated women. Additionally, the public schools should likewise be targeted for destruction via vouchers, putting the education money directly into the hands of parents of those students. While I am a big fan of online / distance education and believe it is the future of education nationwide, it has not acquitted itself all that well this time around. While it is ready in many subjects, it is not ready everywhere and for everything as yet. Final point is that keeping the kiddos at home is a direct attack on working women, mothers with children. And they ought to be reminded of that early and often for the next 113 days.
3. Pipeline. A pair of opinions from a pair of O’Bama judges gave a small preview of our energy future when a federal court ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down and drained until the feds conduct a full-fledged analysis examining the risk it poses to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. As expected, the greens and their Sioux mascots are ecstatic. A normal environmental review generally takes several years. This case has been in court since 2016. EarthJustice hopes to punt the pipeline into their anticipated (hoped for?) Biden administration.
4. Iran. Someone may be attacking Iran and they don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. There have been at least three mysterious explosions in a week. Two of them have been at nuclear and weapons facilities. The first one was near Tehran, burning a missile complex. The second one took place 5 days later at a medical facility in Tehran, killing at least 18. The third one took place on July 2, at a uranium enrichment facility. Not unexpectedly, the Iranians have been close lipped about the blasts. Rumors of an Israeli cyber-attack abound following an earlier Iranian cyber-attack on Israel. Iran is under no small amount of pressure as US sanctions continue to hurt the Mullahs and internal unrest spreads. Last year, they killed 1,500 people and shut down the internet. Protesters have demanded shutting down the nuclear program and spend on social programs instead. There is no clear answer as to how the three sites were linked. The only question is why Iran is not hiding these incidents as they normally do.
5. MN. A few fun stories out of Minnesota over the last couple weeks. The first is the Minneapolis City Council voted a couple weeks ago to abolish the city’s police force. The vote was 12-0 and will replace police with what they call a “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention.” They intend to replace some soon to be determined number of active police officers with social workers who will be sent into private homes to determine why you are racist. And these social workers will remove children from homes whose parents do not go along to get along. The MN City Council celebrated their action with a $4,500/day contract to a private security firm for guards to protect City Council members who received threats. For the rest of the residents of Minneapolis, not so much. Final Minnesota story is a request from MN Governor Tim Walz who requested a disaster declaration following the Floyd riots that would have put MN in line for half a billion dollars in federal disaster aid. The Trump administration turned the request down cold. Walz has 30 days to appeal the decision. Pretty cheeky, stand aside and allow the mob to run rampant for weeks and then become shocked, simply shocked at the damage and demand federal help to clean up the mess that he made.
6. NFL. Looks like the woke mob is coming even for sports, and the team owners are acting just as badly as craven business executives, rolling belly up to the mob while ignoring everything and everyone (the fans) that made them multi-billionaires. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder finally capitulated and is changing the name of the team after 83 years, thoroughly insulting the surviving family of the logo designer. As usual, the name change hasn’t seemed to make the mob happy. Nothing ever will. The NFL also announced that they would be playing something called the Black National Anthem before the first week’s season games in September. Funny me, I didn’t think there was anything called the Black National Anthem, much less a racially separate one from the Star-Spangled Banner. As usual, the sports media are universally ecstatic about the proposal. Fans, not so much. Scott Adams points out that it is an example of the very worst of corporate mentality, an incredibly stupid action with absolutely no positive return. Jason Whitlock goes even farther, blasting the entire idea as a stunning failure of leadership among the owners and league management. He promises that this will chase away a huge chunk of their fans never to return. These are the fans who watch sports as an escape from the lunacy swirling around them on a daily basis. Nothing like inviting the insanity into the room with you week after week for months on end. Trump did a Very Good Thing blasting the Kaepernick take a knee anti-National Anthem protests in 2017. Some believe he saved the league from himself with that action. Appears the lesson only stuck for 3 years. He may not be around to save them from themselves this time around. Then again, he might, as it would further demonstrate the difference between Biden and him.
7. HCQ. There was a great deal of activity focusing on the war on hydroxychloroquine and the three-drug cocktail it is used with – azithromycin and zinc – last week. Most of it focused on the number of lives that could have been saved had it been in widespread use from the beginning. That number approaches half of everyone lost since the virus arrived. I’ll write about that next week. Instead, I want to focus on the quarantine protocol for the restart of the NBA, NFL and MLB seasons, all of which are cranking up toward the end of July. Players and staff will be tested on as regular basis. Should they come up positive, they will go into isolation until two tests in a row come up negative. The period of quarantine can last weeks to months, hardly something that is conducive to superior team performance. One of the things we know about the HCQ drug cocktail is that it will flush the virus from the system in a matter of 4-5 days. Why are those leagues not instantly putting their players and staff on the HCQ cocktail immediately after testing positive? They should be testing negative less than a week later. Better yet why not start offering HCQ prophylactically to everyone participating in order to make sure they don’t come up positive? Failure of vision. Failure of nerve. And a stunning success for the media that has been trashing the use of the drug since Trump first suggested that it works months ago.
More later –
– AG