Interesting Items 07/27

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

In this issue:

1.  Education
2.  HCQ
3.  Protests
4.  Portland
5.  McCloskeys
6.  DACA

1.  Education.  Looks like the current battlegrounds on the Wuhan Flu Wars are public education, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and mandated mask use.  This section will discuss education.

• Here in Anchorage, the Anchorage School District (ASD) decided not to reopen schools in August.  The excuse was roundly celebrated by Alaska and Anchorage Education Association union members, several of whom penned exquisitely crafted, incredibly whiney op-eds in the local fish wrapper justifying their refusal to hold live classes.  Instead, they are going to initially open with online classes.  A number of us view this as a direct assault on both working women and the disabled community here in Anchorage.  Why?  The teachers keep getting paid, but they aren’t delivering the education product / service they were hired to deliver.  If the kiddos don’t go back to school, who do you think will have to stay home teaching them?  Hint:  the vast majority of them will be mothers.  As to the disabled community here in town, it is funded with state and federal monies.  ASD plans on retaining control of that money without any attempt to deliver what they were obliged to deliver. 
• On the other hand, private schools seem to be doing just fine working their way around closures since March.  A Reason article from 10 days ago details how well they are doing.  It goes on to make the case that vouchers are in our very near future.  And the longer the public schools and the democrat leaders of the teachers unions barricade the schoolhouse doors (not unlike George Corley Wallace did in Alabama half a century ago), the better case the rest of us can make for vouchering the money directly to parents who are not politically motivated to abuse their own children as a vehicle by which to win an election.
• Education Secretary DeVoss has suggested that if the public schools don’t want to open, the feds may start vouchering their funding directly to students rather than laundering it through the local school districts.  She has backed off a bit since making that suggestion, but the marker is down.  There is a growing discussion here in Anchorage about vouchers.  Governor Dunleavy is a voucher fan, though has been stopped by a constitutional provision against using public dollars in religious schools.  The SCOTUS opinion last month invalidated that provision, though I do expect state courts to simply ignore it until some federal judge forces them to change their mind.
• Online / distance education did not go so well for ASD students.  Initial login rate was 88%.  Over the course of the next couple months, that fell to around 21% as the students simply blew everything off toward the end.  If we are going to migrate to an online model, we must do it better all the way around.
• Scott Adams has some very harsh words for the education establishment, describing it as the very face of systematic racism here in the US.  For example, multiple teachers’ unions, most notably in LA, are demanding an end to charter and private schools, and other forms of competition in return for them agreeing to return to class.  Basically, the unions, comprised mostly of liberal white women, are using their position to stifle competition, particularly in minority communities.  We have already demonstrated that the Universities are essentially indoctrination centers doing real damage to young white women and beta males.  We have met the source of systemic racism, and it is public education at all levels.  That will be a fun discussion to have.
• Teachers unions and the universities believe they have us over a barrel.  I believe it is they in the barrel, about to plunge over a waterfall.

2.  HCQ.  The war over the HCQ is heating up nicely, over last weekend leading to mass censorship of a viral video by a bunch of doctors pleading for widespread use of the HCQ cocktail.  The video had been seen by over 20 million before Goolag, YouTube and Twitter took it down and banned everyone who linked to it.  The censorship was systematic and took about 8 hours to complete.  Ramifications of this censorship will reverberate for a long time and may even give Attorney General Barr and the regulators the excuse they need to drop the regulatory hammer on Big Tech.  Last week had Yale epidemiology Prof Harvey Risch publish a piece believing widespread use of the HCQ cocktail could save 75,000 – 100,000 lives.  One of the doctors in the video claimed it was being used widely in the political world and even by Fauci himself.  Early use of HCQ is the key to use of the cocktail.  As I noted last week, use of this stuff will also mitigate the idiotic 14-day quarantine following a positive test.  The virus it removed from the body in 4-5 days.  How many lives are the democrats, public health employees and most importantly, the media responsible for taking due to their public opposition to widespread use of the HCQ cocktail?

3.  Protests.  The so-called protests have morphed nicely into widespread mayhem over the last two months.  As video coverage was damaging democrat chances in November, the media has all but stopped coverage of the fights.  But there have been some developments:

• AntiFa rioters attacking the US Courthouse in Portland have been using high power lasers on federal law enforcement.  At last count, at least three are thought to be permanently blinded.  If they are cranking up the mayhem to this point, perhaps it is time for the feds to start returning deadly fire when the mob pulls out the lasers.  Remember one of Murphy’s Laws of Combat:  Tracers work both ways and lasers are most certainly tracers.
• Rioters are starting to target Catholic and other churches for destruction, not unlike their predecessors are currently doing in Europe.  They are also showing up at church services and harassing the parishioners. 
• BLM street murals have become something of a flash point, some of them quite entertaining.  Not only are Trump supporters showing up and modifying the verbiage, but they have started applying for permission to post street protest art of their own.  Redwood City, CA removed a BLM mural after a local lawyer applied for a permit to paint “MAGA 2020” on the same street.  Fighting back while ridiculing local governments is always the best response. 

4.  Portland.  A piece out of Conservative HQ describes the ongoing festivities in Portland as the functional equivalent of the battle of Khe Sanh Jan – Jul 1968.  While I missed the festivities in that part of the world by 6 months or so, there are multiple members of the II mail list who didn’t, so I will try to get this one right.  Khe Sanh was a Marine combat base near the DMZ between North and South Vietnam.  The North Vietnamese had been conducting a series of probing raids for at least 6 months before the battle began, promising a “liberation government” in the northern part of South Vietnam and the Marine Base was the biggest thing in town.  The writer of the piece is of the opinion that defense of Khe Sanh was planned to create a magnet to draw North Vietnamese Army and allied forces into the battle.  And it worked pretty well, with some estimates of up to 15,000 NVA dead during the course of the battle.  He believes this was intentional by Gen William Westmoreland.  Note to always be careful of estimated enemy dead in Vietnam, as the numbers were funky at best and wildly misreported both directions at worst.  Given the strategy of using defense of a piece of ground as a magnet, a vehicle to draw in large numbers of enemy combatants, how is defense of the Portland Federal Courthouse working?  Like Nam, both well and poorly.  It is working well pulling in lots of AntiFa and fellow travelers from Portland and that part of the country which has become an AntiFa hotbed.  It is not working all that well because nobody can see any of these clowns retired from the battlefield.  The author thumps on the Trump administration for fighting this simply to hold ground rather than treating it like a military action.  That is self-serving criticism, as Trump cannot trust his generals at this time.  We will hope federal law enforcement has enough oldsters with Vietnam experience left around to draw the parallels and take appropriate action.

5.  McCloskeys.  Soros-backed St Louis prosecutor Kimberly Gardner filed single felony charges last week against the couple who defended their home from sacking and pillaging with firearms earlier this month.  The charge was threatening those participating in nonviolent protest.  Gardner’s statement went on to cluck a bit about protecting “… right to peacefully protest, and any attempt to chill it through intimidation will not be tolerated.”   The problem Gardner has is that this sort of charge requires the use of an operable firearm for the charge to stick.  At least one of the firearms, the AR-14, was not operable with the firing pin and spring reversed.  It was a weapon he used in court cases.  The handgun may or may not have been operable, though it was likely inoperable also.  Gardner apparently ordered the crime lab to “inspect” the AR.  They tore it down and reassembled it into working condition, a process that would best be described as tampering with evidence.  The crime lab was in full CYA mode and made a video of the teardown, reassembly and testing.  So, at this point, it looks like Gardner is fabricating a case against the McCloskys.  The MO Attorney General is looking into the charges with the goal of overturning them.  Ran across one writer who strongly suggests that neither the Governor or Attorney General intervene and allow the McCloskys take Gardner to court.  From their standpoint as a pair of aggressive, nasty, prickly lawyers with evidence in hand that her office directed evidence tampering, they stand to make a LOT of money in a civil judgement against the city / county of St Louis.  The Governor / Attorney General can always weigh in later if things go south on the criminal side.  Gardner is one of Soros’ municipal prosecutors, a project he has been involved in for over a decade.  It is these prosecutors in blue cities who are releasing rioters and looters back into the general public without prosecuting them for their mayhem.  From a Soros perspective, the $190,000+ he donated to the Gardner campaign the last time around has been well spent.  She is up for reelection in November. 

6.  DACA.  President Trump is getting out ahead of democrat campaign promises to legalize all illegals if elected.  Of course, this promise only works on legalized citizens unless the illegals are already voting, but that is another discussion for another time.  With this in mind, he promised mid-July to sign an Executive Order to take care of O’Bama’s DACA population setting up a merit-based immigration action, just in time for the election.  In doing this, he is taking advantage of the opening Chief Justice John Roberts gave him sending DACA back down for additional litigation.  And this promise is a classic Trump persuasion technique, pacing, where he throws a marker some distance from where he wants to go, gets his supporters in an uproar and ends up somewhere in the sensible, conservative middle.  He has done this every single time over the last 42 months in office.  Properly done (and I have no doubt that it will not be), he will give embattled Republicans running for reelection to the senate some large caliber weapons to use against their democrat challengers, as democrats in the senate refused to take care of the DACA people, demanding complete legalization of ALL illegals.  It will also give Republican challengers to incumbent democrats the same large caliber tool to use in their campaigns.  The irony of all this is that one of the things we all ridiculed O’Bama for doing was his “I’ve got a phone and a pen” legislative routine.  Trump has not done a lot of this while in office, but he gets put in this position by a Bush 43 SCOTUS appointee (Chief Justice Roberts) being too cute by half. 

More later –

– AG