Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Pebble
2. Wuhan
3. Whitmer
4. Debate
5. Cuomo
6. Abdication
7. Toilets
1. Pebble. The democrat party candidate for US Senate here in AK, Dr Al Gross has made opposition to Pebble mine a centerpiece of his campaign to replace incumbent US Senator Dan Sullivan. I wrote about the status of the race a couple weeks ago in Items 09/28. There have been a few developments, specifically a declaration by President Trump of a National Emergency for critical minerals. The Executive Order (EO) orders the Department of the Interior to develop a program to expand minerals processing, specifically rare earth minerals, as a matter of national security. The EO invokes the Defense Production Act to fund domestic mineral processing. This puts our two leading candidates for US Senate from Alaska in a difficult spot, as the challenger, Dr Al the Kiddies Pal has been bashing the incumbent Col Dan Sullivan, USMC, about the head and shoulders about Pebble for months. Does Dr Al not believe being independent of the ChiComs for strategic minerals? Perhaps he can enlighten us on the actual ramifications of his position. A related story finds that Dr Al, who hails from Juneau, has been quiet (just like he has been accusing Sullivan of being) about two active mines in and around the Juneau area. Many people don’t know that Juneau is a mining district, with active mines stretching back to 1882. Part of the town is even built on tailings from Juneau’s mines. Today, Juneau is one of the most leftist parts of Alaska, but the mines continue to operate. And Dr Al has been silent about those mines all these years. But it gets worse. The reason De Al opposes Pebble is because he has bought into the notion that any mine will destroy all fishing in Bristol Bay for all time. How has that worked out in Juneau with active mining for the last 140 years? Juneau still has sport and commercial fishing. It still has guided sport fishing. It even has a dipnet fishery, located where Gross supposedly shot his bear. There are still salmon to be had in Juneau and no noticeable impact of mining on fish. Perhaps his concerns and those of the anti-Pebble crowd are somewhat overblown. But it sure is fun to run your mouth about the issue, knowing nobody will point out the little inconsistencies.
2. Wuhan. Quite the week for the Wuhan Flu last week as President Trump and the First Lady came up positive with infections. Trump went to Walter Reed a week ago last Friday and was pumped full of a cocktail of anti-virals, steroids, and antibodies. He was released from the hospital Monday night and virus free by midweek, much to the distress of the democrats. At his worst, he looked better than Biden, who started coughing over the weekend, does at his best. Funniest line of the whole episode is: “Great. Just what we need, Trump on steroids.” Some other observations for your consideration.
- Following the VP Debate Victor Davis Hanson on Tucker Carlson noted that the democrats are only running on COVID fear and race baiting (Charlottesville Fine People hoax). Bust either or both of those and the very foundation of their expected victory disappears. Over the weekend, Scott Adams spoke of a persuasion way to make the COVID issue disappear – simply to find ways to not make it as scary as it has been sold as being. And Trump by his actions at Walter Reed and afterwards have demonstrated he is neither in fear of the virus, but none of the rest of us ought to be either. He as a 74-year old with at least one co-morbidity not only beat the virus but came back stronger. He is a living example of how to conquer fear. Even Chris Christy who was hospitalized for 6 days has been released. He was also overweight. We have a cure. It works on those who are most at risk. Why should we still be afraid? We shouldn’t.
- Any super spreader event that grabs 34 people at the WH initially looks like some world class buffoonery or recklessness and opens the door for all sorts of conspiracy theories. As of today, nobody has a definitive explanation of how and when the event took place. One time is thought to be the Barrett nomination announcement in the Rose Garden a couple weeks ago. Zero Hedge posted a piece a week ago suggesting it was intentional. An event that seems to hit large numbers of Trump WH people and never touches any democrats is highly suspicious, though I expect the suspicion has a lot more to do with media refusal to report any cases for Biden or other congressional democrats than anything else. One thing I do know is that there were at least 3 members of the WH Press Corps who tested positive over the last couple weeks, though nobody knows their names. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
3. Whitmer. MI Governor Gretchen Whitmer had herself quite the week. It started early when the MI Supreme Court struck down the emergency powers she has been using to torture Michigan citizens for the last 8 months. The Court said she violated her constitutional authority by putting an emergency in place and keep them in place without legislative input. The law under which her orders were issued has a 28-day clock for action without legislative approval. It took a few days for Whitmer to respond, reinstituting her emergency order under different laws. This will either be ignored or remain in place until it works its way through the courts once again. The new normal is looking pretty authoritarian these days. As the week passed, the FIB busted a plot to kidnap Whitmer by AntiFa, anarchist and BLM supporters. Whitmer immediately started blaming Trump for the plot, blaming it on right wing extremists, Michigan Militia, and white supremacists. Trump, still feeling pretty good following his release, responded in kind with all the love and tenderness she earned and has richly deserved. The kidnappers (AntiFa, BLM and anarchists) are even dumber than I thought they were, for Whitmer is doing far more damage to Michigan than they would ever hope to do.
4. Debate. The VP Debate took place last Wednesday evening, with VP Pence and Senator Harris sitting behind Plexiglas screens for an hour and a half. Harris was just as smarmy, condescending, and haughty as we remember from the Kavanaugh hearings a couple years ago. For a group of people running on a return to normalcy, the Harris – Biden ticket is looking pretty nasty. Pence was armed and ready for the Fine People Hoax and just blew both Harris and the moderator away with his response, essentially an intentional media hoax, something that left Harris speechless. Like Trump, Pence had to endure a 2:1 debate with the moderator fully in the tank for Harris. While he did not fire up the verbal chainsaw like Trump did a week earlier, he was likewise effective. Over the course of the week, the next moderator, a CSPAN guy who worked for Biden as an intern tweeted to Anthony Scaramucci asking if he should respond to Trump. This was immediately picked up as yet another example of a biased moderator. The Commission on Presidential Debates claimed his Twitter account had been hacked, something he had claimed at least three times before. The same excuse used by Carolos Danger (Anthony Weiner) and Pierre Delecto (Mitt Romney). The final debate moderator quietly deleted her Twitter account shortly afterwards. All of these machinations put the Commission on Presidential Debates squarely in the crosshairs for orchestrating one-sided debates. Not only have they orchestrated one-sided debates, but they are pretty high-handed with setting the debate rules, dates, times and locations. Last week, the announced that the Oct 15 debate was going to be virtual due to Trump’s hospitalization, something that Trump rejected out of hand. After a couple back and forths, that debate was cancelled. Over the years, these guys have been getting pretty impressed with their power and authority, refusing to negotiate with the campaigns. Karl Rove is still angry at the debate commission for mucking around with a long-term previously scheduled presidential trip out of country by Bush 43 during the 2004 election cycle. Even Bob Dole got himself involved, noting that the supposedly bipartisan commission was populated by never-Trump Republicans on the Republican side. My prediction is that this commission is going to shortly be out of business as yet something else that the political left has managed to infest and destroy.
5. Cuomo. NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, fresh off killing over 10,000 elderly in NY nursing homes and long term care facilities is tapping into his inner fascist by picking a fight with the local orthodox Jewish community by threatening to close the synagogues for continuing to hold services with over 10 people in attendance. Cuomo, high on the list for Attorney General in a putative Harris – Biden administration, went so far as to use a 14-year old photo of a large orthodox gathering as an example of lawbreaking during the ongoing zombie apocalypse. This is clearly a man who lives a life at odds with the truth, any truth. He’ll make a great democrat Attorney General, just like Janet Reno or Eric Holder. Cuomo is rolling out new, far more intrusive enforcement actions against gatherings larger than state guidelines involve. He was particularly upset that NYC took just 26 enforcement actions on more than 1,000 reported violations, which he used as an excuse for the state to take over enforcement from NYC. Apparently, the new enforcement is going swimmingly as they issued 60 violation notices and $172,000 in fines over three days following the announcement. It is Good to be King.
6. Abdication. Interesting Liberty & Law Research Paper by David Bernstein, George Mason University, Antonin Scalia Law School Faculty entitled The Right to Armed Self-Defense in the Light of Law Enforcement Abdication. The paper was written in light of state and local governments looking the other way during the continuing riots starting last May, telling law enforcement to stand down while businesses and homes were looted, burned and otherwise pillaged by the mob. Where does the right to keep and bear arms – a right to resist tyrannical government and to provide a means for citizens to defend themselves, loved ones and property from criminal aggression – go when law enforcement refuses to exercise their responsibilities? An analysis in The Captains Journal is pretty fun, as it excoriates the weakness of the Heller decision. Should Harris – Biden be elected, expect blue state and local governments allow the mobs to range farther and wider, arresting and prosecuting those who defend themselves, families, others and property from those mobs. The end result of all this will be more violence rather than less.
7. Toilets. Why is it that every single environmental demand for changes in construction and operation of common household devices make them worse? The list is long and failures rampant, from reduction in phosphate levels in dishwashing soap, to low water use washing machines and dryers, to compact fluorescent bulbs, we keep purchasing new shinys what do whatever they do worse. High on that list are dual flush toilets, designed to conserve water use by controlling water used in each flush. As usual, the cure ends up making the disease (water use) worse. The UK Daily Mail ran a piece a week or so ago picked up in a number of other places that reported a report out of an outfit that calls itself the Waterwise Project that concluded the dual flush toilets mandated in the UK end up using more water than they are saving. What a surprise (/sarc). My personal experience with the low flow toilets has been multiple flushes to get rid of the same amount of stuff. The UK study goes farther and notes that the dual flush toilets flow water continuously, many of them leaking because the internal plumbing is more complex. The study concludes that 5 – 8% of all UK dual flow toilets are leaking, wasting 88 million gallons of water/day nationally. This amount of leakage is greater than the amount of water the mandate should be saving nationally. Great. We get a new mandated environmentally friendly device that works worse and wastes more, a typical environmental solution. Perhaps it is time to roll back the mandate.
More later –
- AG