Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Riots
2. Masking
3. Conversion
4. NBA
5. Sandia
6. AI
7. Green
1. Riots. The democrat AntiFa / BLM riots cranked up the threat level a couple notches last week when firearms started showing up on a regular basis in the riots in Milwaukee, Kenosha and Portland. Although they were being carried by the CHAZ / CHOP warlord and his minions a month ago, I have not seen a significant number of reports until last week. A reporter got a handgun waved in his face in Kenosha. A 17-year old armed with an AR-15 who was part of a small team defending private property in Kenosha from being sacked and looted was chased down by the mob. He defended himself by killing two of the mob and shooting a third in the arm who was in the process of pulling a gun on him. Afterwards, he was called a white supremacist by the media and the guy who stayed alive opined about being sad he didn’t kill the kid on the spot. As the local DA had him charged with First Degree murder, those words will likely figure prominently in his self-defense case. All three of the attackers shot had criminal records. GoFundMe almost immediately pulled down a page for the 17-year old, though they left the page for one of the shot rioters up. Lin Wood, who has won substantial settlements from CNN among others in the Nicholas Sandman libel case volunteered to represent the 17-year old. He is going to make some more money. Final case was in Portland where a Trump supporter was shot and killed in downtown Portland Saturday night. The rioters held a little Snoopy Dance after figuring out one of theirs wasn’t dead. All this being said, things are getting much more serious, as both sides are now armed, believe that their lives are now in danger, and will respond accordingly. This will go no other direction than to get worse as long as democrats believe they will gain some sort of political advantage from it continuing. Response from the Biden campaign was binary, as internal polling was sufficiently bad that Biden finally decided to come out of his basement, where he and his media propaganda arm pivoted on a dime and started blaming Trump for the violence. For her part, Kamala Harris last week promised this would continue forever. Don’t expect this will be the last time they are not on the same page. Two other riot stories come out of DC. The first was a BLM mob attacked diners at an outdoor restaurant, surrounding a woman, getting in her face, and demanding she raise her fist in support. The final riot story had the mob going after attendees leaving the Republican Convention Thursday night following the end of Trump’s speech. Rand Paul and his wife believed their lives were at risk. Expect to see video of this in Republican ads for the next two solid months. Tom Cotton was out with the first one over the weekend.
2. Masking. It appears that democrats decided that their 2020 campaign strategy was to allow the mob to run wild and promise to shut it down if Trump was defeated. As we saw, Kamala Harris herself promised that the riots would never end. The other prong of their campaign is to use the Wuhan Flu as an excuse to muck around as much as humanly possible with the lives of individual Americans. Biden promised as much last week when in an interview he promised a national mask mandate – inside and out, and to lock down the nation again if the “science” demanded it. Of course, he didn’t tell anyone which scientists he would be listening to. Airlines have been particularly foolish with their rigid masking mandates. Delta banned UBL killer Rob O’Neill for not masking while eating cheese puffs onboard. The official statement had some claptrap about “not sacrificing” by the former Navy SEAL. Southwest banned a 3-year old and his family from a flight after the autistic boy refused to wear the mask and got upset. This one is going to be costly to Southwest, as every single guideline for masking has exceptions for disability, exceptions they chose not to extend to either the child or the family. The family had to drive home. The American Mind had an extended piece Free the Face – Attack the Mask last week. The piece was a clarion call for Republicans to attack the arbitrary and capricious restrictions on our daily lives imposed by state and local governments, particularly shutdowns and masking mandates. Masking is described as little more than “… less a show of obeisance to any medical facts, it is increasingly a “virtue signal” – an outward sign of inward submission to mass media hysteria and draconian edict.” Masking as a form of totalitarian control is not new. The Taliban and Islamists demand burkas as a political act rather than a religious requirement. Here in the US, the medical mask now serves the same purpose. There is no actual medical data nor studies that support the notion that masking does anything, yet the political left pushes it for everything they are worth. Time to push back against the left, the media and their reign of fear.
3. Conversion. The Anchorage Assembly continued its rampant assault on liberty here last week when they passed AO 2022-65, a ban on “conversion therapy” for minors. The vote was 9-2 and the Mayor is expected sign it into law. Essentially, Anchorage Assembly is getting itself into the medical business, determining which sorts of treatment minors can and cannot undergo. On its face, this is a direct assault on the rights of parents to care for their minor children as they see fit. Below the surface, it is much more pernicious than that. Couple this with the sex education curriculum being foisted in the public schools starting in elementary school (and kindergarten, if they can get away with it), you end up with the LGBTQWTF agenda being introduced to children year after year after year. By the time the kiddos hit puberty, they start experience sexual confusion. So, who do they end up talking to? Better yet, what is the medical establishment allowed to tell them? The ordinance only allows one sort of response, transitioning into the LGBTQWTF lifestyle or sexual identification transition. ALL OTHER RESPONSES are now illegal, according to the Anchorage Assembly. In other locales (California and England), a kiddo has questions and goes to the school counselor with those questions. The school counselor then lines the kiddos up with medical professionals – therapists and doctors who affirm the confusion, and say the new direction is indeed THE new direction and set the kiddo on the path toward hormonal therapy (chemical castration) and gender reassignment (surgical mutilation), all without ANY parental involvement. The abortion crowd already set the precedent on keeping parents out of the abortion loop and have court opinions supporting it. Expect this to be applied to transitioning of all sorts. Those who claim to be in the know believe the combination of the sexual education curriculum and transition friendly counselors, therapists and medical professionals increase the number of sexually confused kiddos by a factor of 10. This is not going to end well, and to what end? Final point. The Anchorage Assembly has at least 4 LGBTQWTF practitioners among its membership. When they were elected, their particular persuasion was not supposed to make any difference. With their lockstep support of AO 2020-65 (3 of them sponsored it), they have just told everyone in town that it does matter. And it will in future elections, which is not progress.
4. NBA. I am a basketball fan. Started playing the sport in college after we couldn’t get enough people together for a touch football game. Over the years, watched the NBA, particularly the San Antonio Spurs, who seemed to be a hard-working set of guys who mostly stayed out of the headlines and out of jail. The problem is that the NBA has become increasingly woke over the last couple years, kowtowing to China, and dabbling in all things racial and political. Following resumption of league play the firs of August, they went full hog in support of BLM, complete with actually painting the name of a Marxist political front group donating to democrats on the court. Jerseys had an approved slogan on top and name under the player’s number. Following the most recent death in Kenosha and the subsequent riots, they refused to play their playoff games for a few days, citing being tired of seeing the same thing time after time after time. Having enough, I cancelled NBA League Pass and sent a note to the league telling them why. The other pro sports leagues are for some reason traveling this same path as both MLB and the NHL cancelled games for a while. I view this all as intentional corporate suicide. While I expect the 20-somethings who haven’t done anything their entire lives but play ball to be completely clueless about the business ramifications of their actions, I do expect the Smart Guys in the individual teams and the front offices to guide them toward appropriate action. For instance, the biggest and best thing they can all do doesn’t have anything to do with either police or registering to vote. Rather, it is to tell everyone who can listen DO NOT RESIST ARREST. Every single one of these tragic (and stupid) events took place when some idiot resisted arrest. Stop doing that and everything changes and it has absolutely nothing to do with race. Don’t stop doing that and you will give race-bating democrats ammunition for another half century of race baiting campaigns.
5. Sandia. One of the awful leftovers from the O’Bama – Biden infestation of the WH was installation of a management team that implemented O’Bama’s race-baiting worldview. One way this was done was regular reeducation sessions which told blacks they were victims and whites that they were the oppressors. The formal name of this foolishness is something called Critical Race Theory. And it is not only the US government doing this, but corporate America also. An electrical engineer, Casey Peterson started pushing back last week with a viral video pushing back against Sandia Lab management and their narrative of white privilege and systemic racism. As a reminder, Sandia Labs is the premier nuclear weapons and research lab in the US. He sent the video to every employee with a mass email. The video hit over 10,000 internal views and generated significant support from his co-workers. It took management a couple hours to lock him out of the system and scrub the content from the system, which in turn triggered the Streisand Effect, making the video that much more popular. They placed him on administrative leave and set up a security review board to evaluate whether his actions posed a threat to Sandia Lab internal security. Expect him to get fired for doing this. Expect Sandia to make an example of him. OTOH, should Trump successfully get though the election, expect the Trump administration to start addressing this little festering problem.
6. AI. A DARPA-sponsored artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm was quite successful in a simulated air combat test a couple weeks ago. The winning AI had worked its way past several other AI’s and was then pitted against a human pilot in a simulator. The AI ended up winning all engagements racking up a 5-0 score over the human. At one level, this is not unexpected, as the smart systems are getting smarter, and the only reason that we have humans in the machines is because we haven’t yet figured out how to do it without a human body present. The difference in this test was that the rules scored any possible gunshot as a kill. So, while the human was maneuvering so as to get something he knew would work airborne, the AI simply took a shot and blasted through the fight with a scored kill. Regardless of how this ends up, if nothing else, this test opened fighter world to other possibilities, something that is a positive outcome. The day will come when what we know as the fighter business will be done a lot differently than it has for the last century. Perhaps it is about time.
7. Green. A last observation for your consideration. The Green New Deal has been tried in three places over the last decade or so – Germany, Australia and California. What do all three locales have in common? Skyrocketing electricity costs. Unstable electrical grids. Rolling blackouts. And finally, lots and lots of finger pointing. If we test something and it doesn’t work, why keep doing it?
More later –
– AG