Interesting Items 12/19

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue –

1.  Twitter
2.  Infrastructure
3.  Gibson’s
4.  Sinema
5.  Artemis
6.  Fauci
7.  Pediatrics
8.  Brinton

1.  Twitter.  We are nearing the end of release of Twitter – FBI coordination materials by the Musk-led Twitter.  There were at least 80 FBI agents embedded in and working with Twitter.  They regularly supplied lists of unacceptable tweets which in turn were both taken down and the sources banned by Twitter at government request.  Can you say government censorship?  I knew you could.  Note that the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop in their possession for nearly a year before Election Day 2020, yet they pushed the Russian disinformation hoax and subsequent Twitter bans connected to it for the entirety of that year.  None of the activity the FBI was interested in removing was criminal.  Rather, it was all activity disadvantageous to the Biden election, with the FBI becoming a defacto arm, consigliore of the campaign.  The good news about these agents working directly with Twitter is that they appear to be incompetents.  The bad news is that even the incompetents managed to manipulate the election sufficiently to elect Biden.  Musk fired a former FBI lawyer, James Baker a couple weeks ago after Baker was caught sanitizing Twitter internal documents to remove things embarrassing to his buds in the FBI.  Musk found out about the sanitization process as the first tranche of information was released.  Baker was hired as Twitter’s General Counsel and was working for Twitter at the time of the firing.  He was formerly the FBI’s General Counsel and had a central role in spreading the Steele dossier triggering the Russia collusion hoax.  Baker was also in the middle of committing fraud in front of the FISA Court preparing the affidavits requesting warrants to surveil Trump and members of his campaign.  Baker is a truly, truly swampy kind of guy.  And he keeps popping up like a bad penny, becoming the Kevin Bacon of the Russia collusion scandals.  Baker worked closely with former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, FBI lawyerette Lisa Page.  He defended the pair while a CNN contributor.  He was hired by Twitter five months before the 2020 election.  Convenient timing, that.  The only question is how much information Baker managed to delete before being caught.  Note that the FBI and Merick Garland’s Do(In)J is not taking this unmasking lying down, as they have opened an investigation into Musk’s Neuralink Corporation (physically embedded hardware) for possible animal welfare violations, which they will either find or manufacture. 

2.  Infrastructure.  There have been multiple attacks on power stations over the last few weeks including attacks on substations in NC, SC, OR, WA.  There was also an oil spill out of the Keystone Pipeline in KS.  The first attacks took place against two substations in NC.  They cut electricity to over 45,000 customers.  Further attacks took place in NC and the rest of the states named above.  All were committed by gunfire, likely a hunting rifle.  These seem to be organized, well thought out, planned, and orchestrated.  Bonneville Power Administration released a memo blaming the attacks on extremist groups (likely AntiFa in that part of the world).  The memo blames extremists across the spectrum, though I don’t think anyone on the right is involved, as they understand the negative ramifications of being cold and dark in the winter, AntiFa, not so much.  Duke Power in FL reported six incidents ranging from break-ins to vandalism with no long-term loss of service.  Most concerning about the attacks are their similarity, timing and sophistication.  With that going on, there was an oil spill in rural KS that shut down the Keystone Pipeline.  The pipeline spilled around 14,000 bbl.  As of this writing, there is no indication why it spilled.  The previous spill from this pipeline was 383,000 bbl in 2019.  A green spokesman was right on cue decrying the danger of oil from the Alberta oil sands and the difficulty of cleaning it up. 

3.  Gibson’s.  Best news of the week comes out of Ohio, where Oberlin College finally paid $36 million to the family that owns and operates Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin Ohio.  Gibson’s is a family-owned and operated small business in Oberlin for nearly a century.  They have a bakery operation that supplied baked goods to the college cafeterias.  A few years ago, a couple students were caught shoplifting wine and forced to leave the wine.  They were also arrested.  Unfortunately, the student thieves were black, and the store clerk (part of the family) was white.  Oberlin was (and still is) the typical leftist woke hotbed.  It was also the largest business in town, accustomed to local merchants being deferential to whatever they demanded.  Gibson’s wasn’t.  The Dean of Students (another woke black woman) participated in and egged on student protests accusing Gibson’s of being racist.  The Dean participated in distributing flyers stating the same.  Business cratered, especially among students who used to frequent the establishment.  The bakery contract was summarily cancelled.  Gibson’s finally took Oberlin to court on a defamation complaint.  They won that lawsuit.  They also won punitive damages.  Oberlin, which has a massive endowment, did everything humanly possible to keep from paying the settlement, stretching it out as long as humanly possible, appealing multiple times.  During the festivities, they also tried to unseal FaceBook accounts of the Gibson kids so that they could be tried in the court of public opinion as racists.  The Ohio courts wisely refused to unseal the social media account, as those accounts weren’t relevant to the incident.  This sort of legal foot-dragging led Gibson’s to request an appeal bond against the judgment after the verdict.  The verdict was Jun 2019.  Oberlin has been accruing interest on the judgment to the tune of $4,000/day.  Last week, Oberlin finally paid the judgment, though with no acknowledgement of any error on their part, or apology to the business.  Sadly, the eldest Gibson, Allyn and his son, David passed away in the last few years and were unable to see the final outcome.  The rest of the family and the business remains.  There is nothing so arrogant than a small, woke liberal arts college that is the biggest dog in a small town.  Thanks to Legal Insurrection for covering this story over the last several years.

4.  Sinema.  Krysten Sinema threw a wrench in the finely tooled gears of the expected muscular democrat majority in the US Senate with her announcement that she was leaving the democrat party and would be an independent.  The other three senate independents, Angus King (ME) and Bernie Sanders (VT) both caucus with democrats and Sinema usually votes as a leftist, so this might be a difference without a distinction.  OTOH, Sinema has refused to support some of the more outrageous stunts by Chucky Schumer’s majority attempted the last couple years, so the ultimate impact of this move remains to be seen.  AZ democrats believe there is something real going on here, as they already kicked her out of the party and are busily lining up someone to run against her when she runs for reelection.  If she refuses to caucus with democrats, this leaves Schumer with a 50 – 49 majority.  If Joe Manchin follows her out the door as an indy or switches parties, something he might do to defend his seat as a US Senator from WV, we will be back at a 49 – 51 split, something that might end up giving Mitch McConnell an actual majority.  This may help explain, at least a little bit, the failure of senate democrats to shove most of their legislative foolishness through the ongoing lame duck.  Sadly, there’s still time for awfulness, as the omnibus is still in process.

5.  Artemis.  Artemis 1 splashed down a week ago marking the end of a very successful test flight.  The booster and spacecraft all appeared to work well, putting the capsule into a very high lunar orbit that extended nearly to the sunward LaGrange point.  As of this writing, there does not appear to be any serious problems with the mission.  What do you do with a successful flight?  You fly again, preferably sooner rather than later.  Unfortunately, the current schedule has the next flight sometime in 2024, 18 or so months out.  One of the things I was concerned about Artemis (other than the lack of testing of the launch stack) is its massive cost, $4.1 billion/flight.  With Artemis, NASA (and its supporters in the US Senate) have doubled down on what they ended up doing with Shuttle, operational creating something that is simply too expensive to fly on a regular basis.  And the only way to control costs and ultimately cut them is to fly, fail, and learn on a regular basis.  One flight every year and a half isn’t going to cut it. 

6.  Fauci.  I am a long-time fan of the sadly departed George Carlin.  As he aged, his humor also aged, getting quite angry toward the end.  One of his great rants is the notion that “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it”, a description of the cronyism and inside baseball that passes for governance and influence peddling in DC these days.  Note that the following video is NSFW:

Given the close, incestuous relationship between the FBI and Twitter uncovered in the released FBI files, algore’s decades long connection with Apple, we now have some familial connection between Twitter and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.  Fauci’s daughter worked as software engineer at Twitter during the COVID festivities.  The news fell out of Fauci’s deposition in the MO / LA lawsuit against Fauci.  Fauci had previously claimed that he didn’t use social media and was ignorant how it all works.  He was then asked if he knew anyone who worked for a social media platform and finally provided a straight answer.  He was evasive about communications with FaceBook’s Zuckerberg.  Don’t know how this is going to all sort itself out, but the next topic of internal documents between Twitter and the feds is rumored to be centered on overt coordination between DHHS / CDC/ NIAID / WH and other agencies shutting down all discussion of COVID topics, solutions and treatments not approved by the feds, in short, another exercise in federally orchestrated censorship similar to that done by the FBI and intel community aimed at conservatives on Twitter during the 2020 campaign.  Do I think there is something there?  Absolutely.  I also think what they did with COVID information will be worse than what we found out about the FBI and Twitter during the 2020 election cycle, because there were actual lives at risk.  And Fauci had an insider on staff all along.

7.  Pediatrics.  Washington Free Beacon ran a piece entitled The Hijacking of Pediatric Medicine.  This describes the leftist long march though the institutions reaching pediatric medicine.  The jumping off point was the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) meeting in Oct.  During the meeting, an associate professor of pediatrics at University of Alabama gave an address about standing up for gender-affirming care.  In it, she celebrated an Ohio 17-year old who stepped in front of a tractor, committing suicide.  The official position of AAP on suicide is a warning that glorifying suicide can have a contagious effect, inspiring others to do also commit suicide (sounds like good advice given the ongoing trans craze).  The prof has devoted her short but mediocre career to changing laws to facilitate gender transitions.  Over the years, the AAP has become more overtly leftist, understandable given that two thirds of its members identify as democrats.  In the last week of Jun 2020, the AAP came out strongly against school closures.  It only took three weeks for the AAP to buckle, issuing a statement co-authored by the teacher’s unions, suggesting that a return to in-person education was impossible.  They were also completely on board with masking in schools, completely discarding actual science that seeing faces is critical for early childhood development.  They are also completely onboard with vaxing and boosting kiddos.  The AAP is fully politicized, with a small group of policy makers for the organization well-connected supporting drug companies like Pfizer.  Trans is merely the Next Big Thing in the ongoing money grab. 

8.  Brinton.  Serial luggage thief and one time Department of Energy SES employee Sam Brinton was finally fired by the Department of Energy last week.  Apparently, he was more interested in stealing women’s suitcases so he could wear clothing found in them than his day job of figuring out how to handle nuclear waste at the national level.  When you hire a mentally ill individual simply due to the number of intersectional boxes that individual fills, eventually the mental illness will override everything else.  Having additional time on his hands, Brinton will be able to coordinate with teachers’ unions, school boards, local governments crafting policies that will make any and all opposition to his special form of mental illness illegal.  He’s a smart guy.  Sick, but smart. 

More later –

– AG

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