Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. COVID
2. Quorum
3. Elder
4. Solas
5. Surgeries
6. Revolt
1. COVID. With the waxing and waning of the Delta COVID variant, we are back to the future as government officials at all levels demonstrate they are completely unwilling and unable to give up the power over our daily lives they have seized.
- Appears the vehicle to force universal vax will be multi-pronged. One will be via the government schools, with enforced vax and masking requirements. The venal little gnome Fauci hit the talking head shows over the weekend and pointed out that we enforce vax on children all the time. This was a lie of omission, as those vax requirements are all based on things THAT WILL HURT the kiddos, something COVID does not. The second prong is the Fascist use of businesses and corporations to enforce CDC mandates with the guess that employees will comply as they don’t have the resources to fight the mandate in court after they lose their jobs. This will work, at least for a while until the legal world catches up.
- In response, there is a burgeoning business in manufacturing exemption letters, claims and other vehicles to allow anyone to get around the newly found mandates. An example found in Café Hayek for a religious exemption form for George Mason University is one such vehicle. It comes with instructions on how to use it and who to send it to. If an organization has a mandate, it also has to have a process of exemption. Use that process. Go Cloward – Piven on them and bury them in paper.
- From a persuasion standpoint, dropping the hammer on a recalcitrant general public for failure to mask and vax is a counterproductive approach, but sadly one that appeals to those who want to be in charge, hector, lecture, demand, preen, force their worldview on those who do not hold that particular worldview seem to glory in. It is impossible to convince someone to do something they are reluctant to do by forcing them to do it. You end up turning that reluctance into outright refusal. One comment over the weekend to Scott Adams was an old hypnotist trick: Hypnotism never works on anyone who is getting it for free. If they pay for the ride, it has a chance. It may be that giving the vax away for free to the general public has seeded more reluctance.
- If we are going to have to be living with the virus for the rest of our lives like the common cold or flu (thanks, CCP), then we are going to have to spend more time on therapeutics. The most recent hot item is ivermectin, which apparently did a real good job defeating the Delta variant in India. As usual, the story has been suppressed. Word of the efficacy of ivermectin has made the rounds and triggered a nationwide shortage. A local mayor managed to get temporarily famous over the weekend in national media by speaking in positive terms about its use. The Usual Suspects deride its use as “horse deworming meds” and “vet meds”, which it is. It also has growing use among humans and the NIH seems to like it. While ivermectin may end up eventually discredited like HCQ, from here, it appears that the general public is making up their minds, or at least among the dietary supplement portion of it.
- One of the oddities (or stupidities) of the last 20 months has been the over-the-top response of the English-speaking world, US, Canada, Great Britain, Oz and New Zealand to COVID. Latest two examples have been mass lockdowns in response to only a few cases of Delta. New Zealand locked down the entire nation last week after a single case was detected. Oz has been even worse, with Sidney in lockdown since mid-June, Melbourne since the first of Aug. The lockdowns are harsh and being enforced by the military. Protests started a couple weeks ago and got pretty ugly last week with hundreds arrested in one. Truckers are about to join the festivities with a general strike (not unlike what we saw in France with the Yellow Vests) scheduled for tomorrow. This isn’t going to end well.
2. Quorum. Three democrat House members returned to Texas last week and provided a quorum necessary for the Texas House to work on the election integrity legislation they managed to stop for five weeks. This prompted temper tantrums by democrat legislators who remained out of state. The legislation passed out of the House Friday with a 79 – 37 vote. Following a conference committee markup between the House and Senate, it will be sent to Governor Abbott for signature. And he will sign it.
3. Elder. There may be a political earthquake underway in California as the recall election of California Governor Gavin Newsome is scheduled in two weeks on Sept 14. Newsome is California political royalty who along with the unions and his veto-proof majority in the State Assembly have managed to drive the state into the dust. General public is tired of it. The recall is two votes. The first is a question whether or not to recall. If this passes by a 50%+1 majority, it then goes to the second question of who replaces him. There are 46 candidates. Whomever gets the most votes will end up being the next California Governor, at least for a little while. Whomever that it, hopefully they will end up being better than Arnold Schwarzenegger was. As of this writing, the leader appears to be black conservative and talk show host Larry Elder. Elder is running a good campaign and appears to have the attention of all the Usual Suspects in California as the personal and racial attacks have begun in earnest. First, they trotted out an ex-wife who didn’t like him. That didn’t work. Next, they went after his finances. Nothing there either. About 10 days ago an enterprising young reporterette named Erika D Smith wrote a piece calling Elder “the black face of white supremacy”, going after a black guy for being a white supremacist. That doesn’t appear to have worked either, as Breitbart ran a piece suggesting that the vicious attacks on Elder may be backfiring. We won’t know that for a couple weeks. They are sufficiently worried that they have cranked up the election fraud machine, with a guy found passed out in his car Aug 16 in Torrance had 300+ unopened ballots for the mail-in election in his car. There was even a small story about the holes in the recall ballot envelopes lining up with and exposing a potential yes vote so that they envelopes can easily be identified and discarded by friendly democrat postal worker union members. As Cali media is calling this a “feature” on “some” envelopes rather than a reality, this may very well be fake news, but I would watch this closely nonetheless. If Elder is elected, he, like Reagan has the ability to go directly over the heads of people in the state. Unlike Arnold, he may be willing to fight with his veto-proof Assembly. One final point about this election. California senior US Dianne Feinstein is 88, with noted cognitive decline. Should Elder be elected and Feinstein not make it to her next election, Elder gets to appoint her replacement, likely a Republican which would flip the 50-50 current split to a 51-49 Republican majority. Democrats don’t want to discuss the possible worst-case scenario.
4. Solas. I wrote about the NEA-Rhode Island and NEA-South Kingston lawsuit against a mother who was demanding CRT-related communications from her local school district a couple weeks ago in Items 08/16. The piece described her response to the lawsuit via the State’s anti-SLAPP statute and the possibility that the NEA affiliates had bitten off a bit more than they could chew. Last week, it appears that cooler heads in the union’s legal team prevailed and they dropped the lawsuit, withdrawing their request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) during a court hearing. Of course, after thoroughly embarrassing themselves in court, they declared victory. In response, the Solas legal team filed a motion for summary judgement and to take discovery in support of her anti-SLAPP statutory compensatory and punitive damages against the unions. William Jacobson writing in Legal Insurrection 10 days ago also pointed out that the school district and teachers union appeared to be colluding against the parent. Discovery will also find this out. If this goes where I think it is going, someone is gonna write a big check, and it won’t be the parent.
5. Surgeries. Yet another reminder that the trans movement is little more than a money-making scheme between unethical well-connected medical providers, liberal activists, and the media that makes it all possible comes a little story out of Breitbart. Last year, the American Society of Plastic Surgery had a 12 – 15% increase (depending on the type of surgery) in the number of gender reassignment (medical mutilation) surgeries performed 2019 – 2020. This happened when elective patient surgery volume dropped nationwide 30 – 55%. Visits to physician offices, clinics and outpatient departments also sank by similar numbers. This is the initial screening for things like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and all the other things that kill you over time. So, COVID puts everyone else’s health at risk by putting off elective procedures yet the trans world grows like gangbusters. This is patently evil and brought to you by the media and democrats who appear to be profiting from medical mutilation of children.
6. Revolt. There appears to be a revolt among mid and lower ranking military underway. The precipitating event was the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, though the vax mandate, CRT / BLM education, overall wokeness, and the ongoing purge of Trump supporters now defined as white supremacists doesn’t hurt. A week or so ago, some subset of the US Navy sent a warning note to its members and retirees not to disparage Naval active leadership or leadership on the civilian side. The warning carried the threat of consequences top active and retired members. That warning has been buried and I have not been able to resurrect it as yet. We also had a Marine Brigade Commander, a LtCol post a video pointing out the utter and complete failure of those in the General Officer (GO) and their civilian masters to take responsibility for anything, with the pullout from Afghanistan being the most recent example. He noted that when people in the middle ranks screw up, they are summarily fired. Those in the GO ranks are never held responsible. As expected, he was summarily fired, thus proving his point. We are starting to hear stories about pushback aimed at CRT / BLM and the universal vax order. From here, it appears that something serious is afoot and spreading. One of the things threatened in the Navy memo was retirees. Normally, retirees are left alone, though DoD does view retirement pay as payment for continued, though diminished service. Accept that payment, and you can be recalled at any time. This was mostly defined and redefined in the courts via the divorce wars splitting retirement between the member and spouse. The implicit threat from the Navy memo was a recall and courts martial of any retired member who got a little too far out of line blasting away at the GO ranks and civilian DoD leadership. Can they do it? Dunno, as I have found things on both sides of the argument and while such an event has happened a few times, it is rare. At the very least, there’s going to be a lot of lawyers making a lot of money. If a service chooses to do so to their retirees, that will be a fun event. They will probably try to find someone and try to make them an example. It will also be a fun case to defend, if for no other reason than nothing ever happened to the myriad GOs who ran their collective mouths in public and vociferous opposition to Donald Trump for five solid years. Try to whack a retiree for whatever reason, while at the same time allowing the GO ranks to escape completely unscathed after what they just finished doing, and they will have just destroyed respect for everything the military has going for it. Like Vietnam, once you destroy something like that it will take generations to regain it. I fear the O’Bama – Harris – Xiden fools haven’t a clue about the path they are now treading.
More later –
- AG