Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Twitter
2. Swamp
3. Goolag
4. CDC
5. Drag Queen
6. Story
1. Twitter. Elon Musk took control of Twitter late last week much to the dismay and revulsion of the political left. He now owns all internal communications. He now owns the algorithm. He now owns the corporate structure. His first act upon completing the purchase was walking in carrying a sink, suggesting that he was going to throw out everything but the kitchen sink. Visual persuasion is among the best persuasion. The first out with the best visual usually wind the argument. Twitter staff and their fellow travelers on the political left held an epic meltdown. CEO, CFO, Corporate Lawyer, and head of the censorship operation (corporate trust and security) were all fired. There was at least one claim that firing invalidates their Golden Parachutes, something I believe is fake news. He brought in a team from Tesla and announced that the Twitter Board has been lying to the federal court. This announcement was quickly silenced. His Tesla team also locked out all Twitter engineers to keep them from making additional changes to platform code.
Schadenfreude ran thick on the political right, and memes of his first few days as owner were hilarious. Sounds like banned and suspended accounts are going to returned to active status. Musk has stated his desire that Twitter end up as a free speech public square multiple times. There are apparently plans to turn Twitter into a profit-making operation rather than a political one. Internal throttling of right-connected accounts may have been turned off, as many users reported new users. Tyrus, for example reported he picked up 30,000 followers on a single day Thursday on Gutfeld. Tyrus, a wrestler is not an overt player in the political world, though he certainly has the chops to do so. Scott Adams reported an increase in his followers, though not as large. The problem with Twitter turning this stuff on and off is that there are always backups, always code that allowed Twitter to do this. Code leaves fingerprints (logs), even though Twitter engineers have furiously been deleting chunks of code and logs ever since the acquisition was announced. This will be a very busy month at Twitter. Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.
2. Swamp. Perhaps Trump’s greatest achievement since 2015 has been flushing out the swamp so carefully constructed over the last 30 years. The swamp was mostly quiet before his election. But his election shook the box, and they had to come out in the open for their very survival. And cornered animals fight very hard and very dirty. Their Plan B ended up being to do everything humanly possible to destroy Trump and anyone (everyone) connected to him or supporting him. Before Trump, we didn’t know about AntiFa or BLM, the current democrat iteration of the Klan (domestic terrorists). Before Trump, we didn’t know the FBI, federal courts, CDC among others are fundamentally corrupt organizations. We didn’t know the intel community was stuffed with lefties. We didn’t know the same about Big Tech, though when algore went to Apple and Goolag following his 2000 defeat, that should have been a hint. The swamp knows their survival is based on corrupting the kiddos in the government schools. This is why they pulled out all the stops in the schools with CRT and drag. The idea appears to be to get everything possible in place while Biden is in charge. The PJ Media piece ends with a call for Trump to run again in 2024 with DeSantis as VP. I am not so sure I like that, if for no other reason than Trump will be pretty old, 78, the same age Biden was when inaugurated. I don’t think a second term will get the same sort of deferential treatment from the media Biden currently enjoys. Trump can do some enormous damage while not in office at a time and place of his own choosing. He can also serve as a troubleshooter to the next president, whomever that may be. As always, the Ghostbusters admonition “Choose the form of the Destructor” is applicable. Trump is the ultimate Destructor in a time of necessary destruction at the swamp. Note that this piece is in PJ Media, which over the last week turned on an annoying popup window flagging my browser for running an ad blocker. It then asks to whitelist PJ Media in order to read the piece. I haven’t dinked around enough with my browser settings to proceed, though I can generally get to see the piece long enough to grab a copy and drop it on a separate document.
3. Goolag. One facet of Google’s election manipulation this year has been focused on Gmail messages from Republican fundraising. These are “mysteriously” showing up in user spam folders at a much higher rate (nearly 60%) than those from the left. The other technique has been for Goolag to bury search results for information about Republican senate candidates far down the results list while highlighting hits on democrat candidates at the top of the search result page. So far, Goolag refuses to comment on any questions about their ongoing election interference. Goolag’s results were compared with results from Bing and DuckDuckGo. MRC Free Speech America took a look at 12 senate races. I thought election interference was supposed to be a Bad Thing. Apparently not for the political left and their tools in Big Tech.
4. CDC. One of the things we learned from the COVID festivities is that the public health apparat is irrevocably broken, perhaps criminally broken. COVID mandates ended up being pulled out of thin air time after time after time. And the only filter on their actions that remotely makes sense is follow the money. CDC officials hold a number of patents and stocks, and the more money the pharmacological companies make, so too do CDC employees with patents and stocks. From here, the vax mandate is best viewed through the filter of a money grab. With that in mind, several CDC stories this week.
- First, the CDC realized they have a problem. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is looking into CDC reforms based on its failures during COVID. The problem is that its failure was one of focus. The CDC was originally chartered with preparing for the next big infectious disease. Unfortunately, years ago that focus shifted from communicable diseases to behavioral health. When COVID showed up, they were completely unprepared. Note that the CDC was originally founded in 1949 to combat malaria. Their scope shifted to climate change, smoking, diet, and racial disparities. If Walensky’s reforms do not address this scope creep, they, like the CDC with COVID, will fail, earlier rather than later. One of the most egregious failures was the close working relationship between the CDC and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). AFT was a major Biden donor and ended up writing school closure and back to school rules for the CDC. Note that one of Walensky’s proposed reforms is creation of an equity office within the CDC, demonstrating yet again that she simply doesn’t understand her problem.
- Second, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted 15-0 to add CDC vax to the 2023 schedule of childhood and adult immunizations. While over 20 states already prohibited COVID vax from being required for students, 30 states haven’t. Lack of vax will be used to keep unvaxxed kiddos out of the government schools in blue states and cities. Note that there is no data that supports the vax on young people. None. Note that the flu vax has been on the schedule. Only seven states require it for childcare and pre-K. This will be used by teachers’ union members to keep kiddos out of school once again.
- We are once again back to gain of function research on COVID. Boston University created a COVID variant that is deadly to 80% of the lab rats it was tested on. Note that Omicron has morphed to the extent that it is now on the level of the common cold. Boston University has created something deadlier than the first iteration of the Black Plague. Good work, guys. And the next lab leak will be from where?
- Finally, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and a number of WH appointees have been ordered by a federal court to cooperate in discovery in a lawsuit brought by MO and LA (among others) over collusion between Big Tech and the WH / CDC to censor alleged COVID misinformation. Most of that misinformation ended up being inconvenient facts. The judge fast tracked discovery, not allowing the Biden administration to continue slow-rolling discovery requests. While Fauci may not have worked directly with Big Tech to censor, his intermediaries certainly did. This lawsuit is double-edged sword for Big Tech. On one hand, they have long claimed to be independent businesses. On the other, when they censor at the behest of the Biden administration, they become another enforcement arm of that administration, and in turn become eligible to be regulated under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I think they are toast.
5. Drag Queen. City Journal ran a piece last week about Drag Queen Story Hour and the politics behind it. The story goes all the way back to queer theory, an essay published in 1984. The author was a lesbian writer and activist who immersed herself in all the sexual subcultures in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Her project was to install SF weird as mainstream. The problem is where does the process end? Logically, with the abolition of restrictions on sexual behavior at the bottom of the moral spectrum – normalizing pedophilia. In the view of the author, pedos are similar to communists and gays in the 1950s, with no liberty to practice their “craft.” This view started making its way through academia. In parallel, drag, which started out as entertainment, became overtly political in 1969 during the Stonewall riots. By 1990, intellectuals were all on board with the original goal of normalizing sexual weirdness as mainstream. By 2000, the goal of drag shifted to a goal of obliterating stable concepts of gender. Drag Queen Story Hour non-profit was founded in 2015. The 40+ local chapters of this group organized hundreds of performances nationwide. The movement even has a manifesto that demands the traditional life path must be deconstructed. The goal is not to reinforce the traditional family. Rather, it is to “facilitate the child’s transition into the ideological family” reengineering childhood sexuality from the ground up. Drag performances become a visual, symbolic and erotic vehicle for doing this. We fight this by drawing a bright line between adult sexuality and childhood innocence, calling perversion what it actually is.
6. Story. We are in the Fog of War phase of the campaign season, a week out from the election. This is the time when accuracy of viral stories is as ephemeral as accurate reporting about who is winning the war in Ukraine. But we do get stories intended to move the political needle from time to time. This year’s favorite has been abortion stories, specifically stories of women wanting abortions for completely reasonable reasons but not being able to get one in their home state. Gannett turned this sort of dirty trick into a cottage industry. The first of these was in July, where the mother of a 10-year claimed she was a rape victim unable to get an abortion in Ohio. The perp turned out to be the mother’s boyfriend, an illegal, who diddled the youngster. The mother took the kid out of state to shield her boyfriend. Last week’s iteration took place in Missouri, a self-described pro-life Christian, who claimed to have a medical emergency requiring an abortion. She was unable to get one in state and had to drive around for a while, both her and the baby’s life at risk, unable to find a place that would do the abortion. She claimed to have to go out of state for the procedure. Nice story for the pro-aborts and their cheerleaders in the media, who played it for all they were worth. Problem is that due to HIPPA, it is completely unverifiable by the hospitals named in the story, as they can’t release personal medical information. Note that the claimed medical condition makes abortion completely legal from every single medical facility in Missouri that does them, though many in the medical world claim the law is too ambiguous for them to comprehend. That leads us back to the woman, who has an unusual social media presence. For instance, this self-professed Christian has what looks to be a FB post mocking conservatives, finally claiming “This is why I don’t believe in any religion.” Her Twitter account is also suspicious. She opened it in April 2022, only posting a handful of tweets since Oct. Nothing exists before October. Did she delete all her previous stuff? Her Twitter followers are all Missouri democrats or political operatives. One of them is the campaign manager for the democrat Missouri Attorney General, who is in turn followed by Hillary Clinton. Finally, the woman made a campaign ad posted days after Gannett dropped the story. Even Yahoo News sees red flags in this, flagging her “pro-life” in scare quotes. Target for this political op was a Republican State Senate candidate who authored the state’s abortion law.
More later –
– AG