Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Fraud
2. Oregon
3. Porkulus
4. Climate
5. Ammo
6. Race
7. Cancel
1. Fraud. The next big date is congressional certification of the Electoral votes Jan 6. As of today, it appears that the Trump team is concentrating on election fraud in Georgia and Pennsylvania, hoping to get the EVs decertified. Trump believes he won GA by over 300,000 votes, losing it by just over 11,000 after the NAA(L)CP-orchestrated election fraud. PA ended up with 200,000 more votes than registered voters, another clear demonstration of fraud. A raucous hearing in front of the GA Senate demonstrated the ease of hacking a live Dominion voting machine connected to the internet. Sidney Powell released a 270-page report detailing election fraud in both states. The Trump campaign is also challenging 50,000 votes in Wisconsin. The AZ Attorney General is requesting an forensic audit of election equipment in the state. John Lott analyzed election results from AZ, MI, NV, PA and WI and estimated 11,350 absentee votes lost to Trump in GA, and another 289,000 excess votes across the 6 states were fraudulent. As of this writing, it remains to be seen what happens in congress and what VP Pence will choose to do. We will hope everyone chooses wisely.
2. Oregon. When you have a state that dabbles in medically assisted suicide, it is a short jump from that to withholding necessary medical care from another group of inconvenient people, the disabled community in that state. Oregon hospitals have been busily traveling that path since March, when the first hospital denied a ventilator for a developmentally disabled woman. The wrote do-not-resuscitate and do-not-intubate orders for the woman and demanded she sign them. She was alone in the hospital and did not know what they wanted her to sign. No visitors in hospitals was one of the first things locked into place during Wuhan Flu response nationwide for hospitals, emergency rooms, and rest homes. Most of them are still in effect. The hospital staff went farther and sent DNR and DNI forms to the woman’s group home demanding signatures from the rest of the residents. People in the outside support team for the disabled got wind of the demands and tracked down lawyers who got involved. This was a time-sensitive thing, as once the Wuhan Flu gets sufficiently serious, progression through the later stages is fast. When you get to the point of needing ventilation, you need it NOW. Happily, she recovered and was returned to her group home. The disability law people also went after the Oregon Health Authority which claimed they don’t have jurisdiction over individual health care providers. Lots of finger pointing in the public health bureaucracy these days. Although the details of the case are kept private under HIPPA, it appears that nothing happened either to the hospital or the employees and doctors involved. The March case was the first of many, most hiding behind the excuse that hospitals and medical teams were clearing the decks for an expected onslaught of Wuhan Flu cases that never showed up. When you start dealing in government approved death (assisted suicide and abortion), it becomes much easier to expand that worldview to other Americans deemed somehow inconvenient like the disabled and elderly, which is what is going on in Oregon.
3. Porkulus. When you pass something nearly 5,600 pages long after reading it for mere hours, there are a lot creepy crawlers hiding snug under the rocks just waiting to be lifted. Here are a couple examples:
- The legislation specifically prohibits the use of $2.75 billion Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funds for vouchers, tuition tax credit programs, education savings accounts, scholarships, scholarship programs or tuition assistance programs for elementary or secondary education. This is a blatant payoff to the teacher’s unions by democrats. Happily, money is fungible at the state level, and every penny any state can get from this fund that goes into the government schools is a penny that can be swung into the list of alternative education vehicles listed earlier.
- The legislation also contains a democrat payoff to banksters at the expense of small businesses. The vehicle for this is a rewrite of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to shift agent fees from the banks who were previously obligated to pay those fees to the small businesses themselves. Seemingly insignificant, the change will load another $3.7 billion in fees onto a small business sector whose revenue in Nov was 32% lower than Jan 2020. The PPP was one of the more successful parts of the original CARES Act and was replenished with $300 billion in additional funds. Looks like congress is going to dink around with rules for this for a while as they make up their collective minds.
4. Climate. Looks like congress managed to include Lisa Murkowski’s failed energy legislation from last session in the COVID Relief porkulus bill signed a week ago. Greens seem to be quite happy about it with glowing articles from all the Usual Suspects, AP, Wash Post, USA Today, etc. Conservative media sites like Breitbart were not quite so charitable. I haven’t gone thru the legislation line by line again, but will compile what the left has been doing their Snoopy Dance about:
- An 85% phaseout of HFCs by 2036 (expect air condition to get more expensive and work worse
- Expansion and deployment of carbon capture technology
- Extension and expansion of tax credits for solar and wind.
- New mandates for more efficient, cleaner generation
- Requirements for natural gas to prevent, detect and mitigate natural gas leaks
- $4 billion for solar, wind, hydro and geothermal R&D. $1.7 billion for low income renewable home generation. $2.6 billion for DoE sustainable transportation. $500 million for reducing industrial emissions. $2.9 billion for ARPA Energy, a fund the Trump has tried to eliminate multiple times.
The only good news out of this entire mess is $11 billion for nuclear energy, something starting to see positive coverage in the NYT. This is potentially a BIG deal and may render the rest of the idiotic provisions in this legislation moot. We can only hope.
5. Ammo. One of the ongoing stories of the pandemic has been rolling shortages of various items normally available in the marketplace. Here in Anchorage, we’ve seen shortages in nitrile gloves, cleaning supplies (Clorox wipes), hand sanitizer over the last year. Even Christmas trees were short up here, as several vendors simply didn’t show up in town this year. Chief among the shortages has been ammunition, particular handgun and carbine ammo, with 9 mm, .223 and 5.56 being the hottest. .45 cal and .40 are pretty short and have been for months. OTOH, if you are a shotgun fan, there is plenty of that around, though as usual slug and buckshot are generally in short supply. So, what is going on? Better yet, when will it end? Frontier Justice ran a pretty decent explanation last month. Factors causing the shortage include but are not limited to:
- COVID-19 panic
- Once lockdowns started being discussed, people nationwide started stocking up. This instantly caused a shortage similar to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo when drivers instantly swapped from an average gas level in their tanks from a third to two thirds full. Add to that the Nixon price controls and you guarantee long lines. At least we didn’t run out of gas in 1973, though we did have to wait a while and pay more.
- COVID-19 restrictions in factories drastically reduced the number of employees supplying materials to manufacture bullets.
- COVID-19 restrictions at ports slowed supplies of gun powder. Primer shortages showed up around the same time.
- With DMVs closed, commercial drivers could not get certified or licensed creating a shortage in freight company employees. This further slowed the supply chain.
- Rioting created millions of new gun owners, with over 10 million new NCIS transactions in the first half of 2020. Retailers reported that firearm sales were up 96% and ammo sales up 139% in 2020. This blew up any product backlog.
- Defund the police created an increase in first-time gun buyers.
- Historically, there is a spike in gun sales every four years, generally worse in years where democrats are elected president.
There are articles out there on both sides of any prediction that this shortage will continue, with local media generally attempting to calm the waters with promises that the shortage will be over soon, while most firearms-related sites of the opinion we will be in the brown stuff for some time. I tend to agree with the firearms guys and believe the media is trafficking once again (when do they ever do anything else these days?) in disinformation and brainwashing.
6. Race. Remember this summer when systemic racism was a bad thing? Apparently, it’s not all that bad if you are the system and using it to discriminate against whites. Here in Anchorage, we have a Muni-backed and sponsored outfit called the 49th State Angel Fund. It is supposed to be an entrepreneurship fund, a source of capital to high-growth businesses, strengthen Alaska’s risk capital system, and (here’s the rub) assist early stage and disadvantaged businesses. Over the course of last year, the Anchorage Assembly adamantly demanded CARES Act funds be made available to small businesses on a racial basis, with “equity” being the magic word of choice over the last six months. The Fund, which controls $13.5 million in federal tax dollars announced something they call “Building Equity Co-investment Fund” that will match investments made in Alaska minority owned companies. The new fund has a stated preference for applications from businesses owned by black, indigenous and people of color; whites and Asians need not apply. To the union-backed and elected liberals on the Anchorage Assembly, the solution to systemic racism appears to be to demand and practice more of it.
7. Cancel. Cancel culture came for a 19-year old white teen a week or two ago, removing her from the University of Tennessee and its cheerleading squad. It also removed her from Tennessee. Her transgression? Four years ago, she just got her learner’s permit and sent a friend a Snapchat video happily tell the friend “I can drive n—–”, echoing the rap so popular among the teens these days. An acquaintance, a black kid with a white father, saved the message, stewing about what happened to him at the same high school for 4 solid years. When the girl announced via Snapchat once again that she had been accepted into Tennessee and made the cheerleading squad, he had his opening and publicly shot her. Cancel culture came down on her like a ton of bricks and she learned a very ugly lesson about Stalinism. By the way, she was a public supporter of BLM since June. Didn’t matter, as she had used the magic word and must be publicly destroyed. Apparently, kids at their high school said and did mean things to one another. I am shocked, simply shocked that sort of thing could have gone on at any high school in the US (/sarc). The NYT picked up on the story with a 2,300-word story railing against the girl and documenting the dripping hatred by the guy who went after her. The boy, Galligan will be attending Vanderbilt University this fall. I’m sure he will be a model student and a credit to his new university (/sarc).
More later –
- AG