Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Elections
2. Iowa
3. Fukushima
4. Sports
5. Judges
6. CDC
7. Mileage
1. Elections. A couple election related stories for your consideration this week.
- Real Clear Investigations last week ran a story about mail-in ballots in Missoula County, MT. You wouldn’t expect a county with around 120,000 people to be the location of industrial scale election fraud like we saw elsewhere last November. Sadly, it appears the rot runs deep these days. The democrat governor issued a directive last summer allowing counties to conduct the general election fully by mail. The excuse was COVID. Missoula is the second most populous county and one of its most heavily democratic. They opted for universal vote by mail. As there were election anomalies in the past, a group formed to make sure all worked well in 2020. It didn’t. The group did an audit of all ballot envelopes comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the Nov general election. 4,592 of the 72,491 ballots lacked envelopes, 6.33% of all votes. If ballots voted do not include an official envelope with registration info, voter’s signature, and a postmark, election officials cannot verify a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes. This result may be low as county employees claimed some enveloped may have been double counted. Auditors tested a random sub-sample of 15,455 mail-in envelopes for other irregularities. Extrapolating what they found from the second test, roughly 5,000 or 7% of Missoula County’s votes had unexplained irregularities. County officials did not allow photos of signatures and envelopes were not shared across different tabulation tables so auditors could not cross check ballot samples. There was no explanation by the county for more ballots cast than envelopes received. It is unclear to me from the article whether the total number of questionable ballots are either 9,500 (13%) or around 5,000 (6%). My guess is that it is the higher number. This is especially troubling given the history of close races in Montana. For example, two local House districts were won by 435 and 190 votes in Nov. The governor won in 2012 by 7,571 votes. State Superintendent of Public Instruction won that year by 2,231 votes. These elections were well within the margin of fraud. If we have similar voting problems in yet another democrat county as seen in Cobb and Maricopa counties, one can only guess how rampant election fraud actually is nationwide. And it always seems to show up in democrat-controlled states, counties and cities first.
- Mark Zuckerberg’s millions also went to Texas in an attempt to flip Texas blue. J Christian Adams in PJ Media reported that private foundations funded by Zuckerberg’s nearly half billion dollars spent $36 million to pay local election officials to maximize turnout in solid democrat strongholds to maximize turnout of democrats in Dallas, Houston, Austin and the Rio Grande Valley. Zuckerberg was not the only player in this funding, with another $100 million coming from other non-profits nationwide. The private dollars were focused on adopting procedures inconsistent with Texas law and practices like drive-through voting and voting by mail. The private dollars were used to pressure local election officials to alter existing Texas election procedures adopted by the legislature. In Tarrant County (Fort Worth), $1.6 million in cash increased Biden turnout 43% over Hilly’s. Trump was up 18% from 2016. The same result took place in urban areas in GA, PA, WI and MI. Democrat urban cores opened the floodgates for Biden votes. If the election in Texas was confined to counties that received Zuckerberg dollars, Biden would have won Texas by 270,000 votes. Consider this a trial run for actually flipping Texas in 2024 as the newly installed Zuckerberg turnout infrastructure will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
2. Iowa. After spending weeks in an attempt to steal a House seat in Iowa lost to a Republican candidate by 6 votes, democrat Rita Hart withdrew her challenge to the election. The election had been recounted and certified by the state. Not good enough for Nancy Pelosi and her democrat leadership team, who were conducting hearings to lay the groundwork for the theft. Their problem is that they paid no attention to and actively denigrated and belittled all claims of voting irregularities in November and afterwards, going so far as to refuse to even consider the possibility of any problem. Over time, the decision not to even consider challenges to the presidential vote undercut Pelosi’s attempt to steal the Iowa seat, leading to Hart withdrawing her challenge last week. Sometimes the Good Guys win. Not often in the House these days, but a win is still a win at least for a little while.
3. Fukushima. One of the things hardest to discuss are nuclear accidents, partly by the media-created hysteria, and partly due to the complete lack of any substantive reporting of actual facts these days. Thanks to the media and Harry Reid’s anti-nuke staffer appointed as Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) a decade ago, there are still people out there that believe radioisotopes released into the North Pacific by the Fukushima accident are poisoning sea life in the ocean and along the Pacific Rim. Note to everyone: We are really, really good at detection of miniscule samples of everything. The problem with radioactivity is that just because you can detect an atom decaying, this doesn’t mean that there are enough out there to cause any actual problem. With that in mind, on the 10-year anniversary of the M 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake, March 11 Dr Kelvin Kemm published We should learn what lessons from Fukushima? In WYUWT. The quake rocked 11 active reactors. All successfully shut down. The bad news was that a 40 m tsunami struck the Fukushjma Daiichi nuclear power station. Its neighbor, Fukushima Diana was hit by a 9 m wave and was in cold shutdown within two days. The wave that hit Daiichi shut down cooling pumps that would cool the shutdown reactors. This meant the hot fuel was not adequately cooled, so it melted over the next few days. There was a radiation release and over the course of the next week or so. 160,000 were evacuated from the neighborhood of Daiichi. Not a single person was injured by radiation. Even a decade later, there is no sign of any longer-term radiation harm to any person or animal. But there were multiple deaths due to the forced evacuation. The World Nuclear Association blames the forced evacuation of over 2,000 premature deaths of local residents, generally the sick, disabled, infirm and elderly. In this case, for local residents, it would have been far safer to remain in place than to evacuate.
4. Sports. Outkick the Coverage has been a welcome break from the woke, wildly leftist sports media that somehow can’t wean itself from race-baiting and virtue signaling. Over the last few years, this has really damaged all the leagues, as fans and viewers react poorly at having their escape from the political world turned into a hot political mess. Sports media and the newly woke Social Justice Warriors have claimed since the Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the National Anthem protest that this sort of thing had no impact on attendance or viewership. Despite President Trump’s intervention in 2017 that may have saved the NFL from itself, the whole mess started again last year with the BLM / AntiFa riots that had players and entire leagues (NBA most notably) forgetting they were entertainment and somehow had been transmogrified into respected political commenters, happily lecturing their fans and supporters on the error of their ways. A YouGov / Yahoo News poll release last week found that nearly half of American changed its viewing habits due to the SJW in your face politicking. 11% of those polled claimed to watch more. 34.5% watch less. And 56.3% claim not to have changed their viewing habits. Interestingly, 19% of democrats view less while a whopping 53% of Republicans watch less. Even indys get into the act, with their viewership down nearly 39%. Will this matter? Eventually, though it is going to take a while.
5. Judges. There is good news and bad news associated with Biden judicial nominees. The bad news is not unexpected with the new crop remarkably partisan and ideological. They also fill as many racial squares as humanly possible, not unlike his cabinet and his VP. Nobody expected anything less. The three appeals court nominees are all black women, including the one nominated to replace Merrick Garland. Each of these three ladies is expected to be a potential future SCOTUS nominee should Stephen Breyer retire following the end of the current SCOTUS term. The other thing to look at is the ages of these ladies, all of them around 50, something Trump was very good at doing. Appears that the democrats were paying attention. Our only hope is that as fundamentally affirmative action hires, excellence is not high on the list of qualifications. Looks like Justice Sotomayor, the Wise Latina, may no longer occupy the bottom of the SCOUTUS intellectual food chain.
6. CDC. If the Harris – Xiden administration is going to push for vaccination passports, I propose giving them what they want. Good and hard. The same people who are busily railing against any and all attempts to tie IDs to voting are demanding what is essentially a form of ID based on taking what is an experimental medical treatment, the COVID vaccines. The CDC fact sheets for the four vaccines demonstrate this nicely. The following language comes from the CDC Pfizer-BioNTech handout:
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine that may prevent COVID-19. There is no FDA-approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19. The FDA has authorized the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16 years of age and older under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
One of the limitations of an unapproved vaccine is you are unable to sue anyone for bad effects of taking that vaccine. Yet both the CDC and Harris – Xiden are on the precipice of taking your civil liberties away if the full course of vaccines aren’t taken. Solution? Pretty simple, actually. I predict (but do not formally call for) a black market in fake CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Cards. Reproduction is on 3×4” card stock, printed front and back, with a name and birthdate written in ink with date stamps for the vaccinations on the front. That’s all it will take. And should Harris – Xiden insist on papers for travel (just like the good old days in Europe, the USSR and today in China), I will expect an appropriate response from the citizenry. When the inevitable bust of the forgery ring(s) happens and the very public trial take place, I will never vote to convict the perp. Think of it a bit like Irish democracy, massive, passive resistance to governmental dictates and rules.
7. Mileage. When you appoint a failed mayor of a small, liberal heartland city as a cabinet secretary and you do it entirely based on affirmative action grounds (gay guy), don’t be surprised when you get some really odd pronouncements from upon high. Take Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who last week proposed a milage tax for all motorists in the US. Such a tax would fall almost entirely on working Americans who have to drive for a living. It will also really hammer the distribution of goods via over the road trucking. So, we have a proposed invasive tax which will disproportionately hit the working poor and middle class, leaving most of the coastal elites in the blue cities unscathed other than higher prices for delivered goods. For me, the worst thing about the proposed tax is not the actual tax. Rather, it is the fundamental nature of being tracked everywhere you go in a vehicle. Eventually, they won’t just track mileage. They will keep records of every single inch you drive and where that driving took place. Expect these devices to first start showing up in commercial vehicles, sort of like aviation crash recorders, closely followed by similar boxes in Uber / Lyft vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and eventually private vehicles fresh off the factory floor (all by government mandate). There is at least one insurance company already selling this sort of tracking as a service in return for a cut in your auto insurance premium. By week’s end, Mayor Pete backed off and opined it was simply a trial balloon. Unfortunately, liberty crushing trial balloons like this will end up becoming reality about 20 minutes after the political class can figure out how to sell it.
More later –
- AG