Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. RFK
2. ESG
3. DEI
4. Canada
5. Groupthink
6. Intel
7. Tucker
8. NARA
1. RFK. The campaign of RFK Jr for president ramped up last week with an extended interview by Joe Rogan. It was quickly followed by Goolag’s YouTube pulling video of a discussion between him and Jordan Peterson on the vax for vax disinformation. Not demonetizing it, not censoring it, not labeling it as inappropriate content, but pulling the video of a major party presidential candidate, one that is pulling equivalent numbers to Ron DeSantis in second place for the democrat nomination. Now, I do enjoy fratricide on the democrat side, especially when the O’Bama machine is deployed and operational against the challenger. They remain fully armed, with full support of the Deep State, the media, and the voting fraud machine they so carefully built and perfected over the last two decades. Still, RFK Jr taps into anti-Deep State sentiment, especially skepticism of the public health apparat. And to be doing as well as he is doing against Biden so far is eye opening. Never forget that he is an extreme green, though claims to be open to listening. All that remains to be seen. Historically, a primary challenge to a president up for reelection generally signals defeat (think Bush 41 in 1992 as the last one of these). Whether that holds true with the fully operational and active voting fraud machine is something else entirely.
2. ESG. One of the marvels of the corporate world these days is the visible suicide of corporations in their over-the-top embrace of the political left in the culture wars, most recently the trans piece of LGBTQWTF. One would think the corporate suicide of Disney, Bud Light, Target, and last week the LA Dodgers would be a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual. One explanation in Alt-Market.us last week took us all smartly back to the old reliable, follow the money admonition, though the new game isn’t about corporate profits and keeping customers happy, which clearly the woke corporations are no longer doing. Rather it is keeping the lenders happy, particularly the lenders who have signed up completely with the ESG scoring system. Bottom line is no capital loans? No business. The piece goes into great depth about how the system works. It starts noting that conservative boycotts are working spectacularly well, with the left cranking up the rhetoric calling it economic terrorism. The right is starting to fight back in the culture wars started by the political left, globalist institutions, using leftist activists as its enforcers and saboteurs. The activist groups would have absolutely no power without the unprecedented backing they get from non-profits, governments, think tanks, the corporate world and the media. A lot of this support has been injected through ESG guided financing. ESG is a form of impact investing, where major lenders like Blackrock, Carlyle Group or various foundations seek to control societal outcomes using lending as leverage. In the past, lenders would base their financing standards on good credit scores and return of investment. Today, lenders are trying to set political and ideological terms for lending. Borrowers must virtue signal to get access to money. The higher your ESG score, the more likely you are to qualify for a loan. All of this sounds like a violation of both the financial laws in a manner fully in violation of RICO at both the civil and criminal levels, neither of which have been tested in court. The problem is while ESG appears to be dying to outside observers, it soon may be the only way to get a loan. Response to the next crash, if the democrats are able to pull it off, won’t be a free for all money grab like it was in 2008 and 2020-2021. Rather it will be selective, with the money flowing to those companies most subservient to ESG. It is our job to make sure this doesn’t happen.
3. DEI. PowerLine ran an extended piece on the recently passed anti-DEI legislation in Texas entitled Why Aren’t Red States Red? (Part 1). The piece excoriated SB 17, which claims to outlaw and defund DEI departments, practices, mandatory training at Texas state universities. Governor Abbott is not expected to veto it. Conservative groups have loudly celebrated its passage. Unfortunately, the writer is not so sure of a positive outcome. Apparently, the original SB 17 was eviscerated by a faction of House Republicans led by the Speaker who removed enforcement and disincentives for violating the new law. He went on to note that this is what we tend to see from putatively conservative (red) states who elect a lot of Republican legislators who end up not being all that conservative once in office. Texas has that problem. So do Wyoming and Alaska. In Texas, the House Speaker was elected by members. He had his core of supporters but had to include some number of democrats in order to end up as Speaker. Original provisions in SB 17 were systematically whittled away as it made its way through the process. They even removed the standard severability provision, which means that any court opinion throwing out any portion of the law tosses the entire law. Cute. The remainder of the piece is a well-written screed against both process and the leadership in the Texas House, entertaining, but ultimately not useful. Bottom line? Winning elections is just a start, rather than a finish. Once they are in office, it is up to all of us to kick them into play from time to time.
4. Canada. Two Canadian stories last week. The first follows up on the smoke from Canadian wildfires that turned air in NYC murky for a week. The second is the fallout from the Canadian trucker’s strike, which was not the failure or political disaster for the truckers the media has been reporting.
- While everyone had a great time blaming the wildfires on manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions, aka climate change, the reality ends up being arson coupled with typical lefty lack of forest management. The particularly happy outcome with the fires was its impact on renewable energy, cutting solar output up to 50%. Like California, Canada under Trudeau has given free rein to greens, pandering to them and their whims in everything. In Canada, these whims, like those in Cali, directly targeted wildfire management policies and activities, particularly logging, forest management and brush clearing. As long as anything grows, it will go through its life cycle, eventually dying. In the natural world, this means it will eventually burn. The more stuff to burn, the hotter and more devastating the fires will end up being. The Canadian government has systematically opposed controlled burns, getting themselves out of control wildfires. Interestingly, over the last 30 years in Canada, there has been a significant and continuing decline in the number of wildfires with no trend in the area burned, meaning that while the number of fires has fallen, they have gotten larger as they burn more available fuel. Final piece of this is arrest of multiple arsonists in multiple provinces for arson. Media coverage of these arrests has been nonexistent, continuing to focus on the nonexistent climate change angle.
- Second story comes courtesy American Thinker by Andrea Wildburg who noted that the Canadian truckers were actually pretty effective in their protest. She picked up on an extended tweet by a user calling herself CatGirl Kulak describing the aftermath. There was a massive political shift shortly afterwards, with several pro-lockdown politicians including the Alberta Premier forced out of office. They were replaced by anti-lockdown people. Trudeau invoked the odious Emergencies Act and needed parliament approval after a week. The Canadian House of Commons signed off at the last minute. The Canadian senate, normally a useless nest of cronies, criminals, fall guys, and connected activists was called on to sign off too. They didn’t, and Trudeau withdrew the act at the last minute. Canadian Finance Minister threatened to use the financial system to target protesters, their supporters and the unvaxxed. She didn’t. Trudeau weekly tried to claim victory. These claims were mostly ignored by everyone other than the media. Enforcement for the vax at the border ended. IN the end, there was a hostile overthrow of the government of Alberta and the moderate wing of the Conservative party. Trudeau was nearly forced out, his government humiliated, and now fails to pass even popular (on the left) gun control over moderate opposition. All domestic travel restrictions based on the vax were gone within 2-4 months. All international restrictions ended within 8 months. It was one of the most logistically challenging protests in history, done in the middle of winter over thousands of miles. The reason the regime wants you to think it was a failure is because these protesters and their supporters are the greatest threat to them in decades, not unlike the MAGA movement is to the Deep State on our side of the border.
5. Groupthink. Interesting piece in Bastiat’s Window entitled A Quiet Bluegrass Genocide reprises the great eugenics project that ran for the first 75 years of the 20th Century. This one essentially sterilized poor women of all colors, especially in Appalachia, with hysterectomies, tube tying, of women deemed unfit to reproduce. The scientific, political and public health communities in the US were solidly behind and participated in the project. This includes public health which always, always involved. Women weren’t the only ones sterilized, as no small number of jailed men were sterilized also. And it didn’t take long for that moribund infrastructure to spin itself up again when COVID hit the fan.
6. Intel. Worst news of the week comes courtesy Wired, who reports that the intel community is purchasing data troves on Americans. That’s right, Americans, not her enemies. The US intel community has been purchasing large amounts of commercial data and adding it to their internal databases. The news comes out of a newly declassified report uncovered via an attempt to untangle a web of business arrangements between data brokers and the US intel community. Congress and the SCOTUS have made it clear for decades that the government ought not to have this information. Of course, unless they enforce that harshly, the practice will continue. It all comes down to the notion of privacy, which oddly provides common ground between the left and right. On the left, privacy only applies to abortion. To the right, it applies to everything else. And Oregon US Senator Ron Wyden, the uber aborto US Senator, is really critical of this data grab. For its part, the intel community has so far ignored any and all questions on the topic. They might not be able to do so for long.
7. Tucker. One of the funniest stories last week was a cease-and-desist letter from the Fox News legal team to Tucker Carlson, ordering him to cease and desist from his Twitter commentary, now four episodes in. Apparently, the contract between Carlson and FNC requires him not to sell his services to another outlet, which the FNC legal team and whomever ordered his firing thought sufficient to silence him through the 2024 election cycle. The idea was that if they continued to pay Carlson while not allowing him to be on the air, it would serve the diktat of their new Masters, whomever they may be. Sucks to be them, as Carlson brilliantly figured out that if he did whatever he wanted to do, a daily show, without being paid for the show, he could continue, which is what he has been doing. The cease-and-desist letter was an attempt to shut down the end run. Like I said earlier, sucks to be them.
8. NARA. I wrote a week or so ago about claims by Trump lawyers that the National Archives orchestrated the process to the FBI raid of Mar a Lago as a political gotcha. Got confirmation on that last week via a Conservating Treehouse piece reprising a Greg Kelly Newsmax video on the double standard setup of the raid. The piece confirms the notion that the National Archives refused to participate in the WH shutdown process, ignoring what they had done the last four transitions. Do(In)J and the National Archives weaponized the process, fought with the FBI who told them the National Archives complaint was garbage, in order to get a politically motivated search warrant. The Do)In)J refuses to release documents they used to lie to the Magistrate for the warrant. They will not release a list of the documents they later claimed were classified. Finally, today they don’t even refer to the documents as classified anymore, rather calling the national defense sensitive / related. Gonna be tough to convict Trump on something that lawyers can’t even agree is a violation of the law while at the same time refusing to allow the public to see those documents. I gotta secret is hardly a positive governing philosophy for what is supposedly an open government.
More later –
- AG