Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Fauci
2. ANWR
3. Depp
4. Banksters
5. Ivermectin
6. Endangered
7. Tulsa
1. Fauci. Biggest news of last week was blowback aimed at Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIAID Director. At least 2,000 of his e-mails were released via FOIA a few weeks ago. They have been fascinating reading. From here, it appears that Fauci, the highest paid and one of the longest serving federal employees today is being set up as the fall guy for the COVID / Wuhan Flu festivities over the last 16 months. Not that he is the only one, but he did take point on most things COVID much to the detriment of us all.
- Time of service is important here, with Fauci being in the public health sector for over 50 years. When you are in the government that long for whatever reason (including you, Joe Biden), you end up becoming the swamp, furthering the interests of it exclusively over the interests of the citizens. The military mostly solved this via their up or out policy, where failure to get promoted up gets you eventually retired. People rarely stay 50 years, 35 of them in the same job. Admiral Rickover was the most recent example I can think of. Perhaps it is time to employ such a scheme in the GS / SES simply to move people on from their Peter Principle levels of learned incompetence and bring in new viewpoints. A lot happens in 50 years. Fauci is an example of how not to do it. Perhaps someone who has learned to successfully wage the budget wars above everything else over the last half century needs to find something better to do.
- Over the years, Fauci became the face of institutional decay. The most serious example was his demand for extended lockdowns, completely unsupported by any experimental science. The initial 14 days quickly extended to 30 and then the entire year. Even with massive use of vaccinations, he continues to hang on to those recommendations. Note that he no longer even considers the notion of herd immunity, the former Holy Grail of the epidemiology world, choosing instead to concentrate on extended masking and vaccinations as the ultimate solution. That solution does not even consider the possibility of immunity to the virus outside either approach. This immunity would come from those who have been exposed to the virus and survived it via natural antibodies or those naturally immune for whatever reason. It also comes from children who do not appear to be susceptible to the virus in large numbers, something which makes the current demand for vaccinations of children yet another exercise in government-ordered child abuse.
- Fauci was at the forefront of assaults on any and all alternative therapeutic approaches to dealing with the virus. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was destroyed by Fauci, the CDC, public health establishment, Big Tech and the media starting about three nanoseconds after Trump opined that he had heard good things about it. Other therapeutics like ivermectin were not publicly discussed as a result of the orchestrated blowback against HCQ. And dietary supplements like zinc and Vitamin D didn’t even make it that far into public discussions. When you stop all public discussion, you also stop all information flow. Fauci was at the heart of this. He supported it. He demanded it. Note that doctors today are still prescribing and using both HCQ and ivermectin for COVID patients.
- Finally, Fauci while discussing the possibility of a lab leak from the Wuhan lab early on, was very much an apologist for the lab for much of the following 16 months. Difficult to deal with anything if you refuse to acknowledge or even choose to investigate the possible source. From here, it appears that the CCP lied about everything associated with the virus; nothing unexpected from a communist regime. I have seen enough to convince me that they were doing gain of function research at the lab. For some reason, it escaped into the wild. The CCP saw an opportunity and locked down all internal travel to and from China from Wuhan while simultaneously allowing all international travel (there was a lot due to the Chinese New Year) to spread it worldwide. Somehow, I don’t think this was the first time they used this approach. While they may not have created the virus, they quickly figured out how to use it to wage biological and economic warfare on the rest of the world.
2. ANWR. To nobody’s surprise here in Alaska, the Harris – Xiden Interior Department cancelled all oil and natural gas leases in ANWR last Tuesday. This was not unexpected but a continuing reminder of their active hostility to oil and natural gas development. It is also a reminder of the fecklessness of our US Senators, who both voted for Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary based on her race and sex rather than her overall positions or competence. Congratulations once again to all involved in her confirmation (/sarc). This follows a Xiden EO on Jan 20 to place a temporary hold on any oil and gas related activities in the Refuge based on “… alleged legal deficiencies” aka, things we haven’t figured out how to kill outright just yet. When the lease sale took place, there were a disappointing number of bids, mostly by the State of Alaska, entirely due to the expected hostility of the incoming democrats to energy development and production. Interestingly, Interior refused to kill Conoco-Phillips Willow project in NPR-A a week or so earlier, prompting ire of greens.
3. Depp. One of the sadder stories out there is fallout from the divorce of Johnny Depp from Amber Heard. Heard alleged sexual violence, abuse from Depp in a 2018 op-ed. In the end it turns out that the abuse went both directions with both parties participating early and often. Depp filed a lawsuit against the ACLU last week demanding to know what Heard donated to the ACLU following the divorce. Heard had promised to donate half of her share of the final settlement, $3.5 million, to the ACLU following finalization of the divorce. Depp is also suing the ACLU in a $50 million defamation suit based on charges made in the piece. The Daily Mail claims to have e-mails between Heard and the ACLU detailing who wrote what. It turns out that the ACLU did most of the hatchet job, with cleanup by Heard’s lawyers, before it was published under her name. A British court threw out another Depp lawsuit against The Sun last year determining the charges against Depp were substantially true, proven to their civil standard.
4. Banksters. One of the ongoing tools by the political left is the use of banking and financial services against their opponents. The most recent example of this is Harris – Xiden Climate Envoy John Kerry’s call for banks to stop lending to or investing in coal, oil and natural gas companies. In this, the states are fighting back, with 15 state treasurers writing Kerry that the states will drop any bank that goes along with the scheme. Kerry has been pushing Wall Street to make the commitment. This story demonstrates quite nicely that the states are going to be at the forefront of fighting this garbage. And if pressure can be put on banks and corporations by the political left, the states will most certainly return fire in kind.
5. Ivermectin. I mentioned therapeutics used against the Wuhan Flu earlier. A couple weeks ago Zero Hedge ran a story on medical doctor attempts worldwide to get ivermectin approved as a COVID-19 therapeutic treatment. The story also described concerted opposition by public health officials, Big Tech and media to make sure it never happened. Once again, there was a total news blackout on the efficacy of the treatment. Once again, Big Tech actively censored all public discussion. Once again, the doctors kept pushing for its therapeutic use. Does it work? Unknown. However, like HCQ, there is enough information out there suggesting it might be best to keep looking. What seems to happen with the therapeutics is that they are best used early in an infection, with early being the operative term. Earlier is always better than later. Once you are short of breath, treatments become very serious, invasive and therapeutics mostly to completely ineffective. COVID presents with so many symptoms that when one or two or a few of them disappear, which always seems to happen, what happens afterwards is concluded as a successful treatment by whatever drug is in play. Once again, money appears to be a serious player. Like HCQ, ivermectin is a generic, and can be provided at pennies per dose. It will make a lot less money for both the Public Health establishment and the corporate world they move in and out of than a new treatment, drug or vaccine developed specifically for COVID.
6. Endangered. Now that we have another democrat administration in office, the greens are back to their old tricks of using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to shut down oil, natural gas development and mining. Tool used against fracking in the Permian Basin will be the lesser prairie chicken. Tool used against a lithium mine in Nevada will be Tiehm’s buckwheat. Note that lithium is central to batteries powering electric vehicles demanded by the Green Nude Eel. Greens proposed a veritable landslide of ESA listings during the O’Bama years, something that the Trump administration managed to mostly stop and reverse. Now that we have democrats back infesting Interior, expect that landslide to start rumbling down the hills once again. In the case of the prairie chicken, the reversal by Deb Haaland is one of nearly 25 “conservation initiatives” mostly in areas that need no conservation, all of which target Trump energy and environmental policies. The current population is about 5,000 birds, mostly along the TX – NM border. USF&WS claims that voluntary efforts to protect the birds have fallen short. No word from the Xiden-ites and the greens whether the population is growing or stable. The O’Bama USF&WS listed the chickens as threatened in 2014. That designation was overturned in court. Trump administration did not take any additional action and was sued in federal court by the Usual Suspects. A 2019 settlement required USF&WS to make a new listing decision by May 2021. The Wash Post claims that population of the birds have fallen from millions to 27,000. I have no idea how to reconcile claims of millions, 27,000, or 5,000 birds other than to observe they are all completely made-up BS numbers by the greens. The lithium mine in Nevada is even worse, as a botanist hired by a mining company believes a rare desert wildflower should be protected by the ESA. This fell out of six months of e-mail communications between the botanist and the feds. Appears he turned from a hired expert to a green advocate, something the mining company paying him ought to know. For its part, the mining company promises to ensure expansion of the plant’s numbers and coverage. Given it is a desert plant, located in the high desert 320 km E of Reno, a little water ought to do the trick. Things grow great in the desert following a rain. Not good enough for the Center for Biological Diversity who sued to get the plant listed so they can kill the mine.
7. Tulsa. Nothing like continuing to scrape the healing scab of time off the long-forgotten festering carcass of past racial ugliness here in the US to keep democrats in power. Latest example was the “remembrance” of a 1921 race riot, now designated as a massacre in Tulsa. This was going to be a big public deal, with appearances by race-baiting luminaries such as Stacey “I was elected as Georgia’s governor” Abrams. The celebration turned into a money grab, with a demand of $2 million up front and $100,000 for each surviving family descendent. The “celebration” was cancelled. Next up was President Xiden, who went into full race-baiting mode (he only learned from the very best in his early days in the US Senate) in a speech commemorating the event in Tulsa. Basic assumption from all of this is that we Americans are so filled with original sin, fundamental evil, from whence there is no forgiveness, no ability to learn from the past (which is why the left is busily erasing the past), and not ability to ever do anything better. We must wear the hair shirt forever and remain in a state perpetual obeisance for our sins until the nation is disestablished and reformed into a more perfect union under the watchful eyes of our Betters, the democrats and their mobs of enforcers. Forgive me if I choose not to play. What happened in Tulsa? Something ugly involving a rape accusation, guns on both sides, dueling mobs, ending up with burning down part of town. Around 40 ended up dead afterwards. These sorts of events were not all that uncommon – the men with guns part – a century ago. Even as recently as 1946, the Battle of Athens had seasoned WWII vets take up arms following what they viewed as a corrupt local election. These sorts of actions took place in many places in the south where vets took on entrenched, corrupt democrat local governments. Xiden, democrats and their media cheerleaders don’t want anyone to know that over the course of the last century, we Americans have figured out how to do things at least a little bit better.
More later –
- AG