Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Dragon
2. Warp Speed
3. Election
4. Deplatform
5. AK Airlines
1. Dragon. Given the awfulness of thrashing through the legal action and gaslighting of the ongoing election fraud, I would like to start the week with a couple pieces of good news, starting with the first operational commercial launch of a space station (ISS) crew by SpaceX. The Crew-1 capsule had four people onboard who are scheduled to spend the next 6 months onboard the station. The current scheduled return date for the current ISS crew is April 2021 on their Soyuz, meaning that things onboard are going to be crowded for a while with a total of seven people. The following video shows the preparation, launch and orbital insertion of the crew dragon Resilience. Launch takes place around 4+10 into the video. Orbital insertion and landing of the first stage of the booster on the drone ship takes place around 4+22. Enjoy.
2. Warp Speed. The second piece of good news over the weekend was AstraZeneca’s announcement of a third COVID-19 vaccine. This one is initially described as 70% effective as compared with the first two at 95%. Still, the difference between something and nothing is infinity, and we have more options than we did a month ago. Interesting part of this has been the dichotomy among democrats and their media cheerleaders. On the one hand, they have been trashing the vaccine at every turn with Al Sharpton over the weekend calling it racist, on the other, they are falling all over themselves taking credit for this success. Of course, President Trump took full credit for the successful creation of multiple vaccine options via Operation Warp Speed in a press conference ten days ago. As he should. What Trump and his team did with Warp Speed is groundbreaking. This is the fastest creation of a vaccine ever, by a factor of five (or 20% of the previous best depending on how you do your math). Scot Adams has long described what Trump does as systems over words. Democrats traffic in words. Republicans tend to traffic in systems. And other than getting themselves elected, democrats’ words tend not to do a whole lot else, which I suppose it the entire point. OTOH, Trump’s approach to vaccines via Warp Speed ends up creating a national security asset, one that can be swung into play the next time the ChiComs allow (or encourage) something to escape their biolabs. Based on genetic markers of who is more susceptible to the Wuhan Flu, there is no small amount of speculation that the virus was specifically engineered to attack non-Oriental genetics, which by definition turns it into a ChiCom bio-weapon which may or may not have been released into the wild before they wanted to. And there WILL be a next time so we must be ready. Final observation is that whatever system was created with Warp Speed will only be refined as the years go by, meaning that in the future, the response time to the next pandemic will get better, and better, and better. All in all, a nice outcome from Orange Man Bad, new defense techniques against the next biowar.
3. Election. Last week was both frustrating and exhilarating, with a breathtaking opening argument by the Trump legal team on what they have found so far followed by days upon days of little supporting evidence presented to the general public. From the perspective of persuasion, this was precisely the right approach. From a legal perspective, they are getting hammered in state court and the lower courts. The 1+30 video of the press conference (think of it as an opening statement) follows.
- The working theory is that the election was stolen via massive electronic fraud via the Dominion software and Smartmatic systems it runs on. Sidney Powell claimed that Trump was well on his way to an 80 million vote win with a huge Electoral College win when multiple blue states called their halt in counting. Apparently, the plan was to steal a close election via their electronic systems. When Trump roared past 72 million projected votes, that plan was jettisoned, leaving democrat fraudsters with one of two options: Allow a Trump landslide or conduct massive election fraud to steal it. They chose the latter. The software allowed votes to be removed from Trump and manufactured for Biden. Gateway Pundit has several detailed posts how this was done.
- But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, which so far has been sadly lacking outside what we are seeing from the numeric analysts. Whether or not that gets into court and is accepted is anyone’s guess at this point. Over the weekend, Powell separated her efforts from that of the rest of the campaign legal team. It may be that the opposition disinformation persuasion campaign was successful in removing Sidney Powell from the field of battle.
- Scott Adams has been generally supportive of the notion that there has been massive voting fraud but generally skeptical of the ability of Trump to prove it to the extent to remain in office. Over the weekend, he noted that the SCOTUS had assigned 4 Justices to oversee the multiple cases in the contested states, with one Justice appointed for each state to consolidate those lawsuits. The Justices were Kavanaugh, Barrett, Alito and Thomas. Good news, right? Perhaps not. An alternate viewpoint would be that the SCOTUS has determined that Trump simply does not have sufficient numbers of corrupted ballots to prove enough fraud to render the recorded vote in those states corrupted to the extent that a new election or tossing the state’s votes would be warranted, and those Justices were specifically appointed to mollify the 80 million that voted for Trump. Stranger things have happened.
- For their part, Dominion closed their Toronto and Denver offices. Employees started scrubbing their LinkedIn profiles. They backed out of a scheduled oversight hearing before a PA legislative committee and lawyered up. Despite cheerleading by a FNC host calling for them to file defamation lawsuits against Sidney Powell, they have made themselves very scarce over the course of the last week. If your company has done a good job in a defensible, righteous manner, you defend it rather than running for your life. I tend to believe that the so-called Venezuelan whistle blower is either fraudulent or intentional disinformation, designed as a counter to the Trump legal team’s use of laundry list persuasion. You defeat a laundry list by targeting its most significant claim and refuting or ridiculing it. This also means that the democrats have hired the very best persuaders to push their election theft. It remains to be seen if the reported German raid of Scytl is real or not. Scytl is the server back end to Dominion and would have recorded all transactions, so if it is real, and was all done out of a central location, that information would exist in the server logs.
- The fraud does answer a question I had about the 5 – 10 million new gun owners in 2020. There was an American Thinker column last week stating the writer was wrong about that supposition. If we’ve seen as much election fraud as Powell and the data analysts believe, the AT writer might not be nearly as wrong as he thinks. The fraud also answers
- Wayne Allyn Root who is well-connected with high stakes Vegas gambling and wrote a piece last week detailing the move in gambling odds during election returns on Nov 3. They originally started out a 2:1 Biden, quickly swapped to 2:1 Trump, increasing to as much as 8:1 Trump before the wildly premature FNC call of Arizona to Biden Tuesday night. Figure out who bet against the 8:1 Trump win and you have a clue as to the insiders. Worst part of this seems to be that FNC was part of the festivities, with either real time or prior knowledge of what was about to happen, yet another reason to jettison FNC as your news source.
- There were about 20 so-called bellwether counties which have been really good at predicting presidential elections for over a half century. Guess what? Almost all of them went to Trump by significant margins. The only thing that can adequately explains this sort of global failure is intentional fraud.
4. Deplatform. With all this going on, Big Tech’s deplatform push continues, with last week both the WordPress platform and MailChimp getting themselves involved. WordPress is a pair of businesses. One is an open source set of tools for building and running web sites. The other is a commercial website hosting platform. The Interesting Items blog is running on WordPress tools but hosted by another company. The Conservative Treehouse is hosted on the WordPress platform. They were notified by WordPress
“Given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.”
No details were given by WordPress to The Conservative Treehouse. None are expected. In a related story, Mailchimp, a popular service for mass e-mail transmission announced they were going to refuse services to the Northern Virginia Tea Party. Reason given was that the messages contained “potentially harmful misinformation.” There are a lot of conservatives, Trump supporters making their moves to alternative hosting, e-mail, Twitter, Fakebook and search engine options. I do expect this move to continue as we bifurcate what the left uses, and the political right uses. That separation is going to go a lot quicker than anyone believes.
5. AK Airlines. One of the problems with any corporation with their corporate offices in any location is that they pick up corporate values based on that location. One such company is Alaska Airlines, the major serving Alaska. Its corporate headquarters are in Seattle. And they have adopted Seattle values, going whole hog fascist in their masking mandates onboard flights. The stated policy is a face covering at all times. If you don’t you will be given what they describe as a yellow card, removed from the aircraft upon landing, and have the rest of your trip cancelled. There are no exceptions to this policy, not even for the disabled or elderly with breathing difficulties. So far, they have gotten away with it. They operate out of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, from the C Concourse. While I don’t yet know the details of their lease of that concourse, apparently their flight crews think they can yellow card people drinking coffee at Starbucks in the concourse, as they have done at least once. A couple weeks ago, one of our state senators was accosted by flight attendants after another passenger decided she didn’t replace her mask quickly enough between bites and sips during her inflight meal. Hilarity ensued and the story was widely reported, both by the state senator and local media. To the best of my knowledge, she wasn’t yellow carded She posted the story on her Fakebook page and just got the living stuffing beat out of her by commenters, most of which were using some variation of the any business can refuse service to any customer point of view. The problem with this is that Alaska Airlines, like every single other US airline is a heavily regulated, and recently heavily subsidized via CARES Act funds by the US taxpayer. Perhaps they are going to learn a lesson in basic humility, and customer service rather than customer bashing. Perhaps not. Either way, there is a significant portion of the Alaskan flying public that will be taking their business elsewhere as the years go by. This is not the first time that Alaska Airlines demonstrated their wokeness. About a decade ago, they hopped onto the tobacco Nazi bandwagon, prohibiting their flight crews from smoking anywhere. Once you start traveling this path, every step gets a little bit easier.
More later –
- AG