Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. SCOTUS
2. Jan 6
3. Unmasking
4. Pizza
5. Starship
6. China
1. SCOTUS. The last week in June is when the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) releases its most controversial / important opinions. There were four of note last week, three striking 6-3 victories for the Rule of Law, the fourth, the start of the discussion. I will list these nominally in order of importance, though as usual, that ranking is entirely in the eyes of the beholder and will change over time.
- SCOTUS tossed out the Biden attempt to forgive $430 billion of student loans for college. The attempt was based on a law passed after 9-11 that allowed the Secretary of Education to extend student loan payoffs into outright forgiveness of those loans. This was a central piece of the 2022 democrat congressional campaigns, as they purchased student votes with our tax dollars. The regime got a little too cute with their justification, attempting to ensure the federal courts would not take up any challenges to the takeover over lack of standing. They screwed up because there are state-level nonprofits that would have been harmed by the loan cancellation. One of these was in MO, which gave MO standing to sue, and the conservative majority an opening they exploited to shut this lawless power grab down. Essentially, SCOTUS said this sort of loan forgiveness belongs to congress, which has not acted on the problem yet, though congress did have their grubby little paws on creating the student loan problem by nationalizing student loans via an amendment to O’BamaCare in 2010. It took the Biden regime a full two hours to come up with another law to use as justification for their next attempt to commit fraud on the public.
- In keeping with the colleges and universities topic line, we have the opinion finding the use of affirmative action for college applications unconstitutional on 14th Amendment grounds. The opinion was roundly panned by all the Usual Suspects on the political left. It triggered Justice Brown into a hysteric dissent which was then blasted into ash by Justice Thomas, who read his concurrence from the Bench. Brown, one of three democrat affirmative action appointees on the SCOTUS, was less than pleased. The difference between Thomas and Brown is cultural / class based, as Thomas was a child of the segregated south, while Brown was a child of a pair of well to do parents in DC. Thomas sees us as individuals while Brown sees everything based on racially divided economic classes. Reaction from the racialists at colleges and universities was predictable, promising to do everything humanly possible to weasel their way around the opinion. Note that the majority predicted this sort of reaction, opening the door for future lawsuits for defacto affirmative action. Like any fungus, this one is going to take a while to snuff out. Like most funguses, we have a majority of Americans across party of lines, less than pleased with its presence, ready, willing and able to snuff them out. One of the related fallouts from this opinion was the self-destruction of RFK Jr’s previous appeal to Republicans and indys, when he came out strongly in support of affirmative action. There is a reason people run as democrats.
- The last of the good news was yet another LGBTQWTF case out of Colorado, where a website designer refused to create a web site celebrating same sex marriage on religious grounds. She was hauled into court under the same CO law that thas been slapped down by SCOTUS in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case. That slapdown didn’t help Jack Phillips much as he was immediately hauled back into state and then federal court for refusal to create a cake celebrating a transitioning customer. The previous slapdown did not find the CO law unconstitutional. This one did, finding that compelled speech is a violation of the First Amendment, an opinion that is applicable to any number of Christians who have been specifically targeted by the LGBTQWTF crowd for WrongThink. The opinion is applicable to any number of Christians (all small business owners) who have been targeted and lost in court over the years. This case prompted another hysterical dissent, this one written by Justice Sotomayor. Justice Gorsuch, one of the most libertarian Justices on the Court dissected Sotomayor’s screed in a near clinical fashion.
- The final case was initially troublesome but may provide an opening to fight the takeover of state election law and redistricting by state courts. The NC case was caused by a newly ensconced democrat majority on the state Supreme Court that overturned a Republican redistricting map. This was challenged by pointing out that state elections are an activity handed to state legislatures rather than the state courts. State courts are never mentioned. The actual constitutional language follows:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
Initial reaction to the 6-3 opinion was that this was a big loss, as it will mean we on the political right will never be out of court during election season. My kneejerk reaction was that the SCOTUS was simply defending their turf, making sure that their ability to review the constitutionality of state and federal laws continues unabated. If they can no longer meddle in elections, there will soon be other things they are not allowed to meddle in, a problem as they so do like to meddle. Shawn Fleetwood writing in The Federalist had another opinion, that the not only do the state legislatures not have exclusive and independent authority to set rules regarding federal elections, but there is a limit to the power of state courts to interpret state election law. While the opinion keeps the Mark Elias election lawfare operation alive, it does not give state court judges a blank check to skew rules in favor of the left. I view this as a start of the discussion rather than the finish.
2. Jan 6. One of the outstanding questions for me regarding the federally orchestrated festivities on Jan 6 was why? Turns out it was done to set a parliamentary trap for those in congress who were going to use congressional procedures to challenge the certification of the election. Sundance in Conservative Treehouse describes what happened and why. The big question here is that if Pelosi, Capitol Police, FBI and other agencies had concern that a large protest was going to happen, why did they let it happen? Worse, why did they do everything humanly possible to inflame the crowd? The answer is congressional floor challenges to the election. These have a long, and occasionally sordid history, last used in 2016 by democrats to obstruct certification of the Trump win. The challenges in 2021 would have formed legal and constitutional basis, creating standing in federal court for judicial challenges that would eventually reach SCOTUS challenging the election results. How do you eliminate challenges? You create a crisis, one that creates an emergency that invokes special House rules. The crisis was intentionally created, and Pelosi used it to slap down motion challenges to certification of the vote. Cute.
3. Unmasking. It has long been suspected that democrat rent-a-mobs like AntiFa and BLM are tolerated, even celebrated by law enforcement and the legal system on the political left. Why? These are their muscle, their shock troops, their intimidation. Patriot Front is another such group, dressed in kakis and dark blue shirts, short haircuts, espousing racist views, and most importantly masked so their participants can’t be identified. They get to march around holding blatantly racists rallies, all with full protection and support of local and federal law enforcement, leading most observers on the political right to tab them and their members as feds. Patriot Front showed up at a Proud Boys protest in Portland last week. The Proud Boys were protesting a pride drag show by a local children’s theater group in a small town near Portland. The protest was peaceful until the feds showed up when hilarity (and no small amount of pushing, shoving, and swinging fists) started. Proud Boys chased the infiltrators out of the protest. Several of the Patriot Front were unmasked during the festivities, and they didn’t look all that happy with their unmasking. The police eventually intervened to stop the mele. The search for who these guys actually are is underway, though interestingly not by the feds.
4. Pizza. When things are going perfectly, you can dabble in the smaller issues of this complex and wonderful world. With everything going perfectly in NYC, Mayor Eric Adams, fresh off of calling an 86-year-old Holocaust surviving grandma a plantation owner for asking him uncomfortable questions, decided to solve CO2 emissions by imposing 75% cut in emissions from wood and coal fired pizza ovens in NYC. This foolishness will lead to yet another round of small business failures in NYC, as the pizzerias are forced to move to natural gas / propane fired stoves. Oh, that’s right, no new natural gas hookups in NY because of Governor Hochul’s mandate against new natural gas hookups. I’m sure the frozen stuff heated in microwave ovens will be a great substitute (/sarc).
5. Starship. The quick development and problem-solving process at SpaceX is on full display as they prep Starship for its next test launch, one that Musk believes has a perhaps 80% chance of reaching (sub)orbit. As of today, there have been over 1,000 changes made to the vehicles and the pad. Some of these were differences between the test articles actually flown April 20, and the next test articles in the pipeline. Among the larger changes are the way the stages separate, adopting hot staging (second stage engines are lit before complete separation like Soyuz), and electric gimballing of the engines. The first flight used a hydraulic system which failed. This failure also kept the vehicle from staging. NASA is having a great old time expressing concern (queue the crocodile tears video) that Starship will not be ready for the Artemis 3 mission scheduled for 2026. I think their concern is overblown and convenient, as it distracts from their own expected and predictable failure to be ready on schedule. Through all of this, the FAA has to relicense the stack for its second launch attempt. The following video is a full up 6-engine test of the upper stage intended to fly in a month or two. Looks like SpaceX is getting ready.
6. China. AND Magazine ran a piece last week entitled China is a Dying Paper Dragon. The piece starts by describing how post-WWII peace was installed by the Bretton Woods agreement. That agreement led to an unprecedented 75-year global prosperity, a prosperity that the CCP took full advantage of to build their economic engine. Unfortunately for the CCP, that growth is in the process of being terminated by demographics and the impact of “Xi Jinping thought.” Xi has the same problem Putin has, as he has systematically eliminated everyone who could possibly challenge him. There is nobody left who will look him in the eyeball and tell him the truth. Those on that list either disappear or are jailed. It goes further as the national constitution has been amended to ensconce Xi’s thoughts on socialism and the Belt and Road project. Nobody is left who will dare to challenge Xi on any counterproductive policy. For example, his zero COVID policy led to economically destructive lockdowns and foolishness like sanitizing runways. And if you are completely unable to suggest policy changes, you are by definition completely unable to address the big problem in China, demographics. China is now the fastest-aging nation in human history. Replacement rate is 1.3 at best. In some highly populated areas, that number is as low as 0.7 (Shanghai). The demographic chart is startling, with the largest age groups being 30 – 34 and 50 – 54 years old. The very young 0 – 4 are as numerous as 60 – 69-year oldsters. Clearly, they are not manufacturing enough kiddos. This demographic collapse will take place within a generation, with their working age population, peaking last decade, with the population expected to be less than half its 2020 size by 2050. What happens when China, at the end of the longest supply lines is unable to defend those supply lines? Not via military equipment, rather due to the lack of people to man and use that equipment. And during all of that, its economy is crashing. When an aggressive political party well on its selected path to world domination (in their mind) flames out, what do they do when they figure out that landing is not going to be a soft one?
More later –
- AG