Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Elections
2. Chugach
3. SCOTUS
4. Safety
5. Trans
1. Elections. Today’s lead is going to be more of a downer than normal, but setting the stage is important, I think. Will follow it with some analysis, a suggestion for future work, ending with the pro-forma doom and gloom, nuclear winter warning (which you are reading now). One of the more important analysts of the election debacles since 2016 for me has been Jay Valentine, writing election pieces in American Thinker. Valentine’s expertise is data analysis, specifically ferreting out massive fraud in Medicare / Medicaid and other insurance activities. Over the last 4-5 years, he and his group has applied that expertise to suspected election fraud, which he calls sovereign fraud, where the government is involved with the democrat fraudsters. In recent weeks, he has been particularly dark in both his conclusions and predictions for more of the same in future elections. The good news is that the fraud is concentrated in the seven primary swing states, WI, MI, MN, PA, GA, AZ, NV. These states are all dominated by large blue cities, which in turn are able to flip closely contested statewide races to democrats. The good news is that we know where they are. The bad news is that the rot is spreading.
- First piece of this puzzle is Kari Lake’s loss in an AZ courtroom last week. While Lake concentrated her legal firepower on signature verification, which appears to have been pencil- whipped (everything that came in was approved), her problem was that there were no written standards for what constitutes a match for a signature. This is intentional, as it allows the party in power (democrats in Maricopa County) to approve all signatures for democrats and subject signatures of Republican voters to strict scrutiny. Additional games included (but were not limited to) changing the printer settings so Republican ballots couldn’t be tabulated, ballot harvesting, diddling the voter database, diddling overseas military absentee ballots, phantom voters, third party visibility into the cast ballot list, USPS union members gathering loose ballots for leftist groups, etc. There are others, but you get the idea. Each of these would have swung tens of thousands of votes for democrats. I suspect all were used. The newest trick was to artificially inflate the voting rolls by adding tens of thousands of new voters and over 100,000 changes to the voting rolls in the hours before the ballots were sent out. Those changes were then quietly reversed as the ballots were received, covering all trace of the changes. If you are not monitoring in real time, you don’t see the changes. Valentine claims that his group warned the Lake campaign what was going on and offered several times to help publicly flag what was going on. Those offers were ignored, leading to the loss.
- Second story comes out of Nassau County, NY. This Long Island county has a population of nearly 1.4 million. They sent out new voter registration cards two weeks ago, but their printer made a “mistake” as none of the 315,000 registered Republicans are able to vote in a Republican primary. By the way, the next primary in NY is June 27. Of course, this was simply a “mistake” and apologies were made all around. Interestingly the printer was selected on a sole source non-competitive basis. Also interesting is that Republicans in Nassau County did very well at the polls in 2021. I’m sure that is entirely a coincidence. Looks like the county leadership got what they wanted, intentionally disenfranchising every single Republican voter in Nassau County. New cards are promised Real Soon Now.
- Final story was the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by the Texas House. The impeachment was a last-minute deal, with no defense by either Paxton or his attorney. This happened quickly and quietly, which makes me scratch my head a bit. Valentine believes that Texas democrats and RINOs are teaming up to set the stage to take out Ted Cruz and flip Texas in 2024. Paxton was (and may still be) very popular. He is also a dogged opponent to election fraud, having prosecuted numerous fraudsters in Houston (another blue city). Take Paxton off the board, and the fraud machine cranks up nicely in Houston, DFW, San Antonio and Austin, overwhelming everyone else in the rest of the state. Watch this one closely, as it has the potential to turn quickly ugly.
- Analysis. If we take Valentine at his word, and accept the big blue election fraud machine is installed and in operation, we must confront the questions of where did it come from? Who is running it? How do we break it up? And what to do in response? Should we fail to properly address this, things in this nation will get ugly in short order, as once democrats who benefit from election fraud get used to using it early and often, they will continue to double down on doubling down, and get exponentially more reckless and dismissive of anyone who disagrees, which won’t end well for any of us. I believe election fraud was always a small part of our elections, with a few obvious national examples in my lifetime. Under O’Bama, it became institutionalized somewhere between 2010 – 2014, with Eric Holder and Mark Elias in the lead. O’bama himself is a lazy schlub, but his people are busy little beavers. I believe the O’Bamaoids and their fellow travelers at the state, county and local levels are running these operations with tacit support (looking the other way) of both the courts and other party officials (RINOs in our case). They’ve developed a full toolkit of dirty tricks. From here, it looks like the first thing we need to do is view every single attempt to change elections away from voting on election day or loosen the rules on mail-in ballots or absentees as an attempt to set up the operation at the newly targeted location. Candidates need to maintain their own databases. They need to monitor any and all changes to voting rolls in real time for changes.
- The one thing that bothers me about this is that such a coordinated fraudulent operation is difficult to keep quiet, though that gets a lot easier when law enforcement and the courts are in on the game. One of the things that happens to these arrogant skunks is they really, really enjoy rubbing our noses in their “unexpected” victories. It feels good. And when things feel good, they will do more of it with a decreasing level of internal security and increasing recklessness. While this will go on for a while, it won’t go on forever, which explains why Do(In)J is coming down on the Jan 6 protesters like a ton of bricks. I don’t think that intimidation is going to work very long.
2. Chugach. The Chugach Electric Association held its election for the Board of Directors over the last month. Results were announced last week. Three of the seven seats were up for election. Normally, elections are a contest between the IBEW and those members who don’t want the union to own both sides of the negotiating table. I was one of those, serving a term on the Board 2007 – 2010. It cost the IBEW no small amount of money to get rid of me at the end of that term. This time around, the Alaska Center for the Environment pushed a ticket with the goal of moving Chugach to a carbon-free (wind and solar) future. Today, in this part of Alaska, 90% of electricity is generated by natural gas, 10% small hydro. While reliable, it isn’t particularly cheap. Turnout was around 15%, typical for Board elections. Following the election, the greens now hold a 4-3 majority on the Board. It’s only been a couple weeks, so they haven’t had time to do anything excessively stupid yet, but it is coming as surely as a freight train. There will be an interesting dynamic on the Board, as several members on both sides have close ties to former US Senator Mark Begich. This means that Begich likely now controls the Board. While he is a democrat, he is not a stupid one. If we are lucky, the takeover is only a money grab, aimed at suckling on the federal green energy teat. Regardless, I predict a lot of the Railbelt (Southcentral Alaska) will end up with natural gas / propane fired standby home generation in preparation for the inevitable rolling blackouts should the greens do their expected doctrinaire approach to grid instability and increased costs.
3. SCOTUS. Two outstanding opinions from the SCOTUS last week. Both were victories in support of property rights. Both were 9-0, unanimous. The first opinion was in favor of the Sacketts, an Idaho couple who bought a residential lot in 2004. As they prepared to build in 2007, the EPA told them their lot might be a federally protected wetland that they needed to restore it to original condition or face $40,000/day in fines. They were also told they couldn’t take the case to court because the fines were not a final action by the EPA. The Sacketts won their first SCOTUS case in 2012, the right to take the case to court. This time around, the SCOTUS found that the Sacketts property was not navigable waters. The EPA has been willfully expanding the definition of navigable waters to include anything wet, vastly (and illegally) expanding their authority. The Court split 5-4 in the new definition of navigable waters. The case is a real blow to the EPA, which published yet another outrageous update to the Waters of the US rule first proffered during the O’Bama years. In response, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted the opinion as one from the MAGA Court, something which may surprise Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown. The second case had a MN country seizing a condo owned by a 94-year old woman for unpaid property taxes and penalties. The county sold the condo at auction and pocketed the entire proceeds of the sale. A dozen states and DC allow local jurisdictions to keep excess money after property tax seizures. The woman owed $2,300 in unpaid property taxes, with fees, the total was $15,0000. The county sold the home for over $40,000. The 9-0 opinion notes that Hennepin County, MN following state law, violated her constitutional rights without paying just compensation. Many jurisdictions have turned to property seizure and sale as an alternate income source. This opinion is going to hurt. And it should, as governments ought not to be in the theft business.
4. Safety. When you present yourself as an existential threat to the Deep State, it’s not real long before the Deep State starts threatening you. The latest example of this is the FAA, NASA and Space Force looking into safety issues associated with the use of liquid oxygen / liquid methane as rocket propellant. To date, there have been only two launches using this new fuel mix, Relatively Space Terran 1 on Mar 22, and SpaceX Starship on Apr 22. LOX/Methane offers a higher specific impulse, is more efficient, and burns cleaner than LOX/kerosene. There are three other launch vehicles plaining on using the mix. These are all posed as safety analyses, aimed at impacts during the inevitable accident, and impact on the pad. Given that we’ve been handling the far more volatile LOX/LH2 mix for over 60 years in manned spaceflight (Saturn V second stage), I would expect an unbiased study to come down in favor of the new fuel mix.
5. Trans. Interesting piece by Meghan Murphy in Feminist Current, May 3 entitled it’s the funding, stupid. It describes the ongoing trans craze from the perspective of a feminist. She starts by describing the trans strawman: good, open minded are in constant battle against the evil right, who wants to stamp out the struggling and marginalized. This is an odd strawman, as it is those who question and challenge gender identity in its current form that are under threat, up to and including being jailed for refusing to go along. Media is fully onboard claiming conservatives ignited the fight against the trans craze. She notes the entire thing is (unsurprisingly) all about the money, specifically money following the 2015 Obergefell opinion. The charities and NGOs that were heavily invested in the gay marriage fight were out of issues. They created a new one by gluing “T” onto the LGB and went on with the continuing fight. Democrats and associated organizations were looking for a way to continue to galvanize their base and solicit funding. Republicans were the last ones to catch on to the new game. Feminists had long fended off trans intrusions into their space, speaking against the sexist lie that a man could transform himself into a woman via stereotypes and cosmetic alterations. Gloria Steinem argued against this as far back as 1977. Radical feminists continued the fight leading to 2015 / 2016 when gender identity legislation began to pass in various legislatures. Great effort was made to suppress debate surrounding social and cultural transgenderism and the legislative changes passing. Most of the pushback was coming from women without financial or political power, so they, like conservatives got steamrolled. Planned Parenthood got onboard in Sept 2016. The entire movement morphed to erase women from language. Funding came onboard in 2015 – 2016. Embracing trans ideology quickly became mandatory for any organization wanting continued funding from the corporations and donors. There was (and still is) no grassroots movement. It is not a civil rights movement, either, outside the rights of those who disagree and get buried. Fun article from a former activist on the Other Side. Welcome to the party, Pal.
More later –
- AG