Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Cocaine
2. Threads
3. Defection
4. Luft
5. Land
6. Academies
7. Books
8. Collegial
9. Cruelty
1. Cocaine. We talked about the bag of cocaine found in the WH last week mostly from the perspective of what if it had been a bag of anthrax. This week, the story changes from an incompetent security apparat to the apparent corruption of the Secret Service itself, joining the FBI, Capitol Police, Intel agencies and Do(In)J in partisan infamy all in support of the Biden regime. News last week was that the Secret Service simply couldn’t identify the perp and were closing the investigation. There are multiple oddities about drugs in the WH. These include at least two instances of marijuana being found Sept and July 2022. No perp tied to these instances either, as the street value of the pot did not meet the threshold for federal charges or DC misdemeanor criminal charges. The drug was collected and destroyed. The Secret Service related the information to a House committee last week. As to the cocaine, it turns out that the Secret Service narrowed down the list of possible perps to a mere 500 and conveniently decided that it was not worth their while to interview or drug test anyone. There was at least one report of fingerprints on the baggie, which if true, was not followed up either. Reaction to this was swift, with Dan Bongino begging his former agency not to follow the FBI down the path of politicized law enforcement. Note the over the top effort that the FBI / Do(In)J have used going after the first 1,000 Jan 6 political prisoners. Note also that they promised to go after another 1,000. This would seem to indicate that political protesters and grandmas taking selfies are far more a threat to the regime than unidentified white powder (and possible WMD) in the WH is. Got it. With that in mind, I would propose more changes to federal drug laws. First for marijuana, no penalties at all other than forfeiture for two ounces or less. For coke, same penalty ought to apply. Not important enough to investigate and keep the president safe? Great, I’m sure there are a lot of convicts in Club Fed doing hard time for drug possession. Those sentences ought to be vacated and restitution paid out of FBI, Do(In)J and Secret Service budgets.
2. Threads. Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter clone Threads was launched a couple weeks ago with great fanfare. It was a massive initial hit porting over 100 million accounts in the first week, after which growth ran into a brick wall. Essentially, Threads is digital happy juice, not unlike the CCP’s TikTok, without the brain reprogramming built in. The feed is filled with celebrity content and memes, attempting to cultivate what Zuck believes is a positive Twitter experience without actual news. Threads ends up spamming your feed with celebrity and influencer content and stolen Twitter memes. The algorithm ensures you don’t see anything unpleasant. Their problem is that one can survive on an endless supply of saccharine for only so long. There are several little nuggets buried in Threads. One of these is a Hotel California cancellation policy, where you have to be on Instagram to sign up for Threads. When you choose to cancel Threads, you also have to cancel your Instagram account. You can check out, but you can never leave. By the end of the first wave, there was a 25% drop in Threads daily users and a 50% drop in time spent on the new platform. Of course, Twitter’s Musk is threatening a lawsuit aimed at Zuckerberg for copying parts of Twitter for Threads. It wouldn’t be the first time Zuck has copied something not originally his. Just ask the Winklevoss twins.
3. Defection. Tolerance by the political left rarely exists, though they demand it for their hare-brained schemes on a continual basis. Latest example of this was a democrat member of the Georgia General Assembly who decided that she had been sufficiently insulted and threatened for standing up for public school students. Her solution to the abuse? Switch parties and join the Republican caucus, giving them a 102 – 78 majority. The representative is black and from an Atlanta district. She had been at odds with her party for most of the session, most recently being the only democrat voting for a school voucher bill. Last year, she sued Fulton County Commissioner, the Fulton County DA and the county in federal court alleging that they violated her civil rights by allowing a former campaign worker to stalk her. The Commissioner, acting as the man’s defense attorney improperly used his position as a commissioner to get a plea bargain for the stalker. The DA, who is busily investigating Trump for election charges was too busy to investigate the crime before the plea bargain. A US District Court judge dismissed the case March ruling that the alleged actions didn’t constitute a civil rights violation. Welcome aboard, Madam. I hope you have a great run for as long as it is amusing and rewarding. Response to the defection from the Usual democrat Suspects online was vicious and mostly unsuitable for publication.
4. Luft. One of the ways the regime fends off scrutiny and defends itself from public discussion of its malfeasance is old fashioned messenger shooting, usually aimed at destroying whistleblowers, a technique practiced to perfection under O’Bama. Given that Biden is the functional equivalent of the O’Bama third term, this should be no surprise. FBI whistleblowers who came forward all had their clearances pulled. No clearance? No job, for there is nothing that you can legally do. No word as yet what substantially they have done to the IRS whistleblower other than multiple threats. Last week, they went after Gal Luft, a Israeli – US dual citizen for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for working with CEFC China Energy. Luft came forward with testimony about the Biden Crime Family, specifically information about payoffs laundered through Hunter Biden, the family bagman, into Joe’s (and other family members) pockets. Luft is currently on the run internationally and has agreed to testify before a House Committee. Up until the Manafort persecution several years ago, FARA violations were never prosecuted. But anti-Trump prosecutors managed to get a conviction of Manafort by a DC Jury and promptly created a new tool to use against their political opponents. The plan was to bag Manafort and flip him against Trump. Manafort never flipped. The Luft indictment is particularly ironic given the millions that Hunter Biden has received from foreign corporations and laundered through at least 30 shell companies and bank accounts into Biden Crime Family pockets. FARA becomes yet another tool used against Republicans and conservatives, not unlike what we are seeing with the use of Parading, Obstructing an Official Proceeding, and my personal favorite, the Civil War era Seditious Conspiracy. Not a single one of these charges were considered or brought against anyone on the political left. They are now all regularly used against political opponents of the regime. As such, every single one of them is now a candidate for repeal. Sooner would be better than later.
5. Land. It is always fun when a member of one of the victim classes calls out a virtue signaling leftist. In their Fourth of July message, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream called on the Biden regime to return stolen indigenous land starting with Mount Rushmore to the earlier land thieves. This triggered the appropriate reaction from the political right and calls for boycotts. There was a small $2 billion (less than 1%) decrease in market cap for Ben and Jerry’s by week’s end. Most of the animus aimed against Ben and Jerry’s is baked in, as they have made themselves the epitome of virtue signaling lefties for decades. While $2 billion is nothing to sneeze at, neither is it any big deal. What happened next is the funny part, as a chief of the tribe descended from the Indian nation that controlled the land in VT where Ben & Jerry’s corporate headquarters is located is publicly asking for their land back. It only took a week. This should be fun to watch. Sometimes virtue signaling comes with real costs.
6. Academies. While Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard was a nice win for equality in public education, it was not a complete win, as it did not specifically address affirmative action at the military activities. I am a member of a group of former military officers who ask this be considered, while it wasn’t specifically addressed, the overall opinion did leave an opening the proverbial 18-wheeler to drive through and fix this. Legal Insurrection (linked above) ran a piece describing why this took place and next steps. The opinion did not specifically address the military academies because they were not party to ongoing discrimination at Harvard or North Carolina, and thus not included. The opportunity for Our Side is that the overall framework of race neutral admissions ought to apply even more strongly to the academies, a viewpoint basically begging for lawsuits to eliminate. Daily Caller made the same case in a related article. The Legal Insurrection piece references the amicus brief made by Veterans for Fairness and Merit. While not the easy, complete win we all wanted, the door is open for a devastating win, something I expect in the not-so-distant future.
7. Books. Anyone remember the recent ethics attacks on Justice Thomas and Gorsuch? Looks like we have another player as Justice (Sotomayor) dabbles in the ethics pool. This one has her books being pushed on unwilling colleges and libraries by her SCOTUS staff. This seems to happen following a speaking engagement, prodding the colleges and libraries to purchase hundreds to thousands of her various children’s books or memoirs. She has made nearly $3.7 million since her appointment in 2009. Michigan State spent $110,000 for 11,000 signed copies of her memoir in 2018. One participant returned the books, asking for a refund when the event was cancelled. While SCOTUS writes their own rules governing this sort of thing, she does not appear to be breaking any laws. But if Thomas or anyone else on the conservative part of the SCOTUS was doing this, outrage would be early, often, loud, and irrational.
8. Collegial. A real head-scratching opinion out of the Fourth Circuit supported firing of a tenured statistics prof in the North Carolina State University college of education for being insufficiently collegial (NCSU’s excuse). The prof objected to lowered standards used by the school to hire minority faculty. The school retaliated, eventually removing him. The firing was upheld by the Fourth Circus. This is particularly dangerous as it green lights retaliation by university administrations against any dissenting viewpoint. The fired prof was opposed to what he describes as elevating a social agenda above good scholarship. By doing this, the Fourth Circus majority conveniently bypassed recent SCOTUS opinions protecting government employees who made offensive statements. Should this stand, all universities need to do to weed out WrongThink is declare they are not sufficiently collegial and proceed with the purge.
9. Cruelty. Interesting piece by Dennis Prager in Hot Air last week entitled A Pandemic of Cruelty. Prager takes on the growing problem of adult children who have decided never again to speak to one of both of their parents. The vast majority of these people were never abused. Nearly all were deeply loved by their parents. This is happening for three reasons. The first is what he calls the rise of therapeutic mentality. Prior to the rise of psychotherapy, people were governed by shoulds, essentially a moral code. Beginning in 1960, the therapeutic model replaced the moral model. At the time, the supporters claimed there are no shoulds (essentially the Ten Commandments and all the other religious shoulds). The second reason for the Ignore Parents pandemic is parental alienation, usually caused by the divorce wars when one parent paints the other as fundamental evil to the children. Finally, the newest manifestation of the pandemic is ideological. Sometimes, a parent is involved, though it is most often the decision of the child probably based on their education in the government schools, colleges or universities. This is the newest reason for ignoring parents. Voting for Nixon in 1968 or 1972 was not a reason for a child to shut out a parent. Voting for Trump in 2016 or 2020 most certainly is. The intentional infliction of such pain on a parent is as great an act of cruelty as most people will ever inflict on another human being. And the children doing this will not enjoy playing under their shiny new rules for what goes around comes around.
More later –
- AG