Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. TikTok
2. Durham
3. Whistleblowers
4. Frankenpig
5. Patriot Front
6. Pandemic
7. Cali
1. TikTok. Montana became the first state in the union to pass a statewide ban on TikTok. This has been presented as a Great Victory for Our Side in the political world. Upon further review, it is not. Worse, it may simply be a setup allowing TikTok to set a few precedents for itself in federal court making it ultimately more difficult to ban it here in the US. What happened? SB419 passed by the MT legislature is a ban on TikTok from all devices owned by MT residents. Aside from the expected free speech caterwauling and legal challenges, we have the operational difficulty that the various Apps Stores are set up and operated on a country-by-country basis. They do not currently have the ability to geofence their wares based on residence in states or smaller governmental subdivisions. This is not the first time a state has tried to ban a nationwide online offering. Utah passed a law requiring PornHub to verify user’s ages before they used the site. PornHub responded by disabling its site for users located in Utah, which nicely demonstrates the ease of the Apps Stores to comply with the newly passed MT TikTok ban. As an aside, anyone else remember when firearms training videos were supposed to be moving to PornHub in response to Goolag bans of them on YouTube? How did that go? Back to MT and TikTok. As expected, the lawsuits are already being filed, mostly on First Amendment basis, and will be working their way through the federal courts. This is where the problem comes in. MTs’ ban is based on the data TikTok has, who or what has access to that data, and how it is used. Everything in the ban is based on data. The problem is that TikTok can change (or claim they changed) who gets access to that data at the drop of a hat. Hosting in China? No problemo, we’ll host it in the US. CCP, has access to the data? No problem, they don’t anymore (though good luck proving that). What happened to the legacy data, everything picked up so far? Don’t know, don’t care, as it has all been deleted (though the CCP undoubtedly retains their copy of the corporate cache). Good luck proving otherwise. So, we can see that dealing with data is easily defensible in court, and TikTok can (and will) publicly make whatever changes they need to make to maintain their business presence here in the US. But data is not the primary problem with TikTok. The primary problem is persuasion. It is an extinction level persuasion tool. TikTok is at the heart of the trans craze. It is at the heart of making young women, particularly late teens and early 20’s crazy. It still retains the trending button, the ability to push a single control button, and turn any topic into a hot, trending topic. Today, TikTok retains the use of their trending button which is used at the discretion of its masters, the CCP. MT’s legislation completely ignores persuasion, focusing instead on data, which is easily obfuscated. A real cynic might observe that MT is being set up as a test case, a small, out of the way western state selected to provide TikTok a legal precedent in a federal court that will defend its continued operation against future bans. In the words of Admiral Ackbar: It’s a trap.
2. Durham. Special Prosecutor John Durham dropped his 306-page report on the Russian collusion hoax last week. It documents FBI failures (which ended up being outright collusion with the Hillary Campaign) in opening numerous investigations based on the Hilly-orchestrated Steele Dossier. Durham calls it “confirmation bias” rather than outright criminal activity by the FBI, its leadership, and those agents who went along with their ongoing fraud. They actively ignored, minimized, rationalized, evidence that undercut their predetermined conclusions that Trump had in fact colluded with the Russians. The report also notes that the FBI shut down no less than four separate criminal investigations into the Clintons over the period. Durham also noted the care the FBI took not to appear biased in its investigation of the Hilly Campaign, care that simply did not exist as they pulled out all the stops in their pursuit of Trump. Basically, everything Trump said about the Deep State going after him turns out to be true, and every single thing claimed by democrats, their media cheerleaders, and their FBI attack dogs turns out to be a lie. Next step is to completely defund, remove, and eliminate the FBI. It is far too corrupt to continue in its current form. From here it appears that corruption was a built in feature rather than a bug.
3. Whistleblowers. With the Durham Report in mind, we come to a couple other whistleblower stories, one about the FBI, the other about the IRS (anyone else notice the continuing theme here?). The House Select Committee on Weaponization took testimony from 16 FBI whistleblowers last week. The topic was institutional retaliation against anyone who expressed internal concern with political investigations, legality of orders, targets chosen, and targets ignored. The go-to retaliation technique these days is to simply revoke the clearance, which instantly gets the employee put on unpaid administrative leave. One of these happened while the agent and his family were enroute to another posting, leaving everything in limbo. The unpaid part puts them under instant financial pressure. Many whistleblowers are working crowdfunding approaches to keeping their family lights on. Apparently, the federal laws against retaliation no longer apply to the corruptocrats running the FBI. In related testimony, the FBI demanded banking information about any American who used their services in the DC area on and around Jan 6 (credit cards, debit cards, ATM and personal checks), whether they were part of the protests or not. Bank of America happily complied with the demand. The same whistleblower also testified that anyone who purchased a firearm with Bank of America account was automatically elevated to the top of the list provided to the FBI Washington Field Office. It is unclear if Bank of America voluntarily provided the data or was complying with a bulk subpoena, though the whistleblower reported there was no legal process behind the request for the information. Either way, this is yet another violation of federal law. In a related story, at least 5 whistleblowers have come forward with reports about concerns with the Biden Crime Family. The FBI ignored Biden’s role in the Ukraine business dealings. They participated in the coverup of the Hunter laptop story and ignored Biden bribery allegations when they were flagged to Do(In)J in 2018. Finally, we have the IRS firing the entire investigatory team from a long-running tax fraud probe of Hunter Biden. The move followed a whistleblower approaching congress about the investigation, meaning the FBI isn’t the only federal agency engaging in retaliation against its employees.
4. Frankenpig. Alaska senior US Senator Lisa Murkowski at the behest of the state’s commfish community has long fought against genetically altered salmon, calling them frankenfish (a great persuasion name). Aqua Bounty came up with a genetic alteration that allows their Atlantic salmon hybrids to grow up to three times as fast as an unaltered fish. Their approach was a bit too high tech for Lisa’s commfish constituency, who wants to clear all other competition for their product (summer caught Alaskan salmon) from the marketplace. Political pressure on Aqua Bounty continued to the point where they can no longer operate in the Pacific NW or Canada. Their salmon farms are entirely land based in IN and OH. The opposition has successfully tied them up in environmental lawsuits alleging damage if the sterile fish escape their closed system tanks. Concern about salmon interbreeding is real, as a chinook (king) pink hybrid called pinook has been caught in the Great Lakes since the 1990s. In the Pacific, kings and coho (silvers) have interbred. Note that while genetic manipulation of salmon is relatively new, humans have been genetically modifying plants and animals for centuries. Medred’s piece contrasted a newly announced technique to genetically modify pigs to grow faster with the ongoing commfish led cacophony aimed against genetically modified salmon raised onshore. Note that the Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) are completely self-contained, with no connection between the growing tanks and flowing waters around them. My prediction is that the RAS fish are going to deal yet another body blow to commfish protectionists as the worldwide marketplace for them continues the slow but inexorable squeeze into economic oblivion. As usual, the only thing protectionism does is protect its practitioners from success in the marketplace.
5. Patriot Front. Timing is everything. Biden went in front of Howard University’s graduating class a week ago and ran his race baiting mouth, calling white supremacy the most dangerous terrorist threat to the nation. How quickly Biden turns to race baiting when he is in political trouble. At the same time (convenient timing, completely disconnected from his speech, I’m sure), a new group calling themselves the Patriot Front turned out 200 to march in DC. For some reason, they has police escort and continuous media coverage during their entire performance. If they are a domestic terrorist threat, as Slow Joe claims, why do they get a police escort rather than paddy wagons? Better yet, why do so many of them look like recent graduates from the FBI Academy on Quantico? Reaction to these bozos was immediate, universally calling them feds. And they did nothing to disrupt that discussion. Yet another demonstration (and reminder) of the endemic corruption of federal law enforcement today, where the rot goes all the way down to the new recruits, who happily turn out on the weekend to video a campaign op in support of Biden’s ongoing race baiting. Cute.
6. Pandemic. A couple follow-on pandemic stories last week, one on masking and the other on profits by hospitals during the orchestrated panic. City Journal ran a piece reviewing a study that found mask mandates were perhaps the worst public health intervention in history, that made little to no difference in preventing virus spread. The German study found that excess CO2 breached by mask wearers may have substantial negative health effects on wearers, especially pregnant women and their unborn children. Essentially, masks jack up ambient CO2 during the inhale to about 35 – 80x the normal range, well above toxic levels of exposure. The impact of toxic levels of CO2 on reproduction has been known since 1960. The CDC / OSHA limits CO2 exposure in the workplace to 3% CO2 for 15 minutes and 0.5% for 8 hours in the workplace. Yet the CDC has been the primary pusher of masks in the US. And it is not just the increased CO2 levels that is the problem. It is also exposure to rebreathing viruses shed during exhalation and inhalation of synthetic microfibers, carcinogens, volatile organics, and displacement of O2 in the air that negatively impact health, especially among the young. The second story comes out of Open the Books Substack that reported the 20 top US non-profit hospitals pocketed $23 billion in COVID aid from the US government. Their cumulative assets grew from around $201 billion in 2018 to over $324 billion in 2021. Only two of these hospitals partly paid back their COVID bailouts. During the same time, life expectancy in the US fell 2.5 years 2019 – 2022. The more we look at COVID, the more it looks like a simple, though huge, money grab by the public health community.
7. Cali. Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog summarized a VDH video discussing how California destroyed its middle class, returning it to a fundamentally feudal system of governance. The actual video is at the end. A few items from his summary follow:
- Cali now has the highest number of homeless in the US. Half of all US homeless live in Cali.
- One third of all welfare recipients in the US live in Cali. One fifth of all Californians live below the poverty level.
- Cali has the highest taxes in the US, the highest property taxes, the highest sales tax, and the highest income tax.
- The middle class is unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.
- As a result, the middle class is leaving. Cali so far lost 8 – 12 million in the middle class.
- At the same time. The US allowed over 20 million illegals to enter the country. Half of them are in Cali.
- No aqueduct built in 40 years as the state’s population doubled. Schools are now in the bottom 10% of the US. They used to be top 10%.
- During the period, $5 trillion in market capitalization grew out of Silicon Valley. This created a wealthy caste exempt from the consequences of their newfound leftist ideology.
- The wealthy made a governing alliance with the very poor, eroding and destroying the middle class.
More later –
- AG