Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Coverup
2. Medicine
3. EV
4. Paxton
5. Election
6. Ramaswamy
7. Eruption
8. Feinstein
1. Coverup. Story of the week comes out of the House, which finds that Pelosi’s January 6 Committee destroyed nearly 2 terabytes of original material used in their so-called investigations. In most worlds, you don’t destroy investigatory materials unless you are actively covering something up, in this case awfulness done to Donald Trump by House Speaker controlled law enforcement. The incoming House Oversight Committee was supposed to inherit the files from the Jan 6 Committee. Instead, they were handed a jumbled mess of unorganized filed and computer records without an index. At least half of the initial records are missing. This is illegal due to laws about preservation of records (Jan 6 Committee findings are being used on both sides of federal prosecutions in DC over Jan 6). Jan 6 defendants have been requesting access to the records for their defense, claiming that they contain exculpatory evidence. In short, this is obstruction of justice by the former House Majority, its leadership, and the entire membership of the Jan 6 committee. Intentional disorganization of discovery information is a common though underhanded legal tactic used by sleazy lawyers to rob their opponents of the time to sift through information provided in discovery. The Good Stuff is buried under dump truck loads of irrelevant documents. Note that all depositions from people who disagreed with the predetermined conclusions of the Committee were missing. No surprise, that. There will be more on this, and it will be interesting to see what the new House Majority decides to do to the members who participated in this fraud.
2. Medicine. An Oregon university clinic banned a patient who criticized their trans flag at the entrance of a University clinic. This demonstrates the shambling awfulness of politicized medicine today. The Oregon Health and Science University medical clinic dropped a cancer patient after her criticism of a trans flag at its entrance. The message was aimed at her attending physicians, picked up by the administration and the trans activists who apparently run the show on staff, and she was summarily discharged from their care, as her comments were apparently too hurtful to their staff. So, in the Oregon Health and Science University Medical Clinic, comments by a breast cancer victim were sufficiently hurtful so that they felt comfortable withholding lifesaving medical care, goaded on by Twitter death threats, not a bit bothered by her future death by cancer. Apparently, in the trans world, sticks and stones no longer apply. The clinic continues to claim that they are Building an OHSU Where All Feel Welcome, though apparently not those who disagree are not invited to participate in the joy of their Brave New World.
3. EV. Fun story out of Motor Trend last week courtesy Western Journal detailed What Happens When a Rivian EV Runs Out of Battery. Short version: Don’t do it. As you run your EV battery to zero charge, it screams bloody murder, giving you all manner of warnings of how little time you have left to find new charge before you swell up, turn purple, and die. Once the main battery is gone, all that is left to power systems in the vehicle (2022 Rivan R1T in this case) are a pair of 12-volt auto batteries. Once they are gone, nothing works. You can’t’ release the emergency brake. You can’t open the charging door. Once you manually open the charging door (force it open), the system interprets that action as damage and will not allow the main battery to quickly recharge, so you recharge at slow speed, taking hours to days. Fixing the locking mechanism on the charging door is a 22-hour job that requires replacing the entire front wiring harness, dropping the front motors out of the truck. Several don’ts fall out of this story. Don’t completely drain the main battery. Don’t drain the 12-volts. Don’t pry the charging door open. Things will get ugly very quickly.
4. Paxton. Two pieces on continued lawfare against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last week. The first was from American Greatness, Ham Sandwich Indictment, detailing the festivities up to this point. The piece reprises festivities up to this point including but not limited to still pending criminal proceedings, government hiring partisan mercenaries as prosecutors, filing frivolous charges, moving to change venues to deprive Paxton from a jury of his peers, colluding with reporters to prejudice the public. None of these worked so far, with Paxton being reelected in 2018 and 2022 with wide public support. Paxton’s legal team is fighting back, demanding production of relevant documents before the Sept 5 scheduled trial, greater specificity on charges (none of the Articles of impeachment contain names, dates, or particulars of each specific crime), and have objected to senators, the jurors, who have publicly expressed belief that Paxton is guilty before hearing any evidence. Finally, they have moved to dismiss 19 of the 20 Articles because of the intervening 2022 election. We will see how much uglier this will get.
5. Election. One of the myths that the political left gleefully push is the notion that elections here in the US are clean as the driven snow. Of course, if you have ever seen the black pile of ice that a snow dump is during July, you will realize that snow is not all that pure. With that in mind, one of the things we all learned during the COVID years is that institutions are completely, irrevocably. CDC is broken. Public health is broken. The EPA is broken. DoD is broken. Justice at the federal and blue state level is broken. The FBI is broken. The left would have us believe (gaslighting at their level best) that 51 election systems (one in each state plus the District of Columbia) are perfect, clean, and functioning like a Swiss watch. Really? In related news, Secretary of State Blinken took to the media decrying what he referred to as a political conviction and continued incarceration of Russia opposition leader Alexi Navalny, most recently sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges of supporting extremism. Navalny has been in jail since 2021 and has been criminally convicted five times. Blinken, whose claim to fame was orchestrating the infamous hoax letter signed by 51 intel officials calling the Hunter laptop story Russian disinformation, apparently doesn’t remember that the administration he is part of, fronting for, busily indicting and attempting to convict the opposition leader on what can best be described as specious criminal charges, a political prosecution. Ok for the Biden regime, not ok for Putin. Got it.
6. Ramaswamy. As Vivek Ramaswamy pushes past Ron DeSantis into second place in the Republican presidential primary, we are starting to see some pushback. Generally, the pieces paint him as O’Bama 2.0, someone of the left who is presenting as someone on the political right. As of this writing, I haven’t seen enough to believe or reject either his support or his critics. On the positive side, he is really smart and has a very good ear for political wars, especially from a persuasion standpoint. This fits in with Trump nicely, as he is drawn to smart, hardworking people. The leading edge of negative articles has started hitting the web, with the first being a Breitbart piece last week about Nigel Farage warning Trump to watch him very closely, as he has not yet been tested during the course of the campaign. Overall, Farage likes Ramaswamy, but needs to see how he handles himself during the rigors of a presidential campaign. As he rises in the polls, I guarantee that testing will happen. Final piece comes out of WLT Report, which goes all the way back to his High School commencement speech as a grizzled, veteran 18-year-old, calling him fake and polished. The piece also notes that DC Draino doesn’t like Ramaswamy all that much either. While I’m not all that proud of people going all the way back to high school to find dirt to bludgeon political opponents, I do get it that it is part of today’s game and if we don’t do it to our own side, the Other Side will most certainly do so, reaching all the way back to elementary or Pre-K to get whatever they can. Interesting thing about the WLT Piece is that it concentrated entirely on the form of how Ramaswamy is doing what he is doing, never taking issue with the substance of what he is saying. And the comparison with O’Bama is broken in that nobody on Our Side thought that O’Bama meant a word that he said during the campaign, as we had seen it all 16 years earlier when Bill Clinton ran in 1992. Take this as a data point. It won’t be the last one. Think of it as full body contact vetting.
7. Eruption. There was a bit of a bomblet the last week or so over a story blaming the Jan 2022 massive eruption of Hunga Tonga Hunga Haapi volcano for the warmer than normal summer 2023. The story comes shortly after NASA announced satellite results that the eruption hurled a huge amount of water into the stratosphere, perhaps 10% of what is normally there. This is 4x the amount of water that Mount Pinatubo ejected into the stratosphere in 1991, though Pinatubo injected much more sulfur dioxide aerosols into the atmosphere. The skeptic community quickly grabbed the story as a vehicle to demonstrate that volcanoes do awful things to the atmosphere and planetary temperatures just like the greens are blaming CO2 emissions for. As with most things, it turns out that both sides are wrong. CO2 emissions are causing global temperature spikes. Neither did the additional water in the atmosphere. One of WUWT’s resident data dinks, Willis Eschenbach, posted an analysis noting that there was a 14-month long delay before global temperatures started rising. As the eruption was Jan 2022 and a summer immediately followed (pretty warm in the tropics in Jan), why the year long delay? Especially given the 14 months gave the H2O time to start being removed from the upper atmosphere by sunlight and other processes. It is a data and graphics rich post, well worth your time to read.
8. Feinstein. Latest story out of the democrat geriatric ward that calls itself their majority in the US Senate has 90-year-old US Senator Diane Feinstein signing a power of attorney over to her daughter. The power of attorney allows the daughter power over the senator’s legal affairs. The Feinstein family is at war over disposition of assets left by her deceased husband. Feinstein and the daughter with the power of attorney want to sell a beach house. Three other daughters do not. There is an additional dispute over the proceeds of his life insurance policy which the daughters want to distribute among themselves, while Feinstein says she needs for medical expenses. The power of attorney story was broken by the NYT a week after Feinstein was confused during a Senate Appropriations Committee vote which the Chair Patty Murray instructed Feinstein how to vote. Feinstein announced her retirement next year, with some real winners including Rep Katie Porter, Barbara Lee and Adam Schiff announcing their candidacies for the seat. As bad as Feinstein has been, none of these will be an improvement. Still, Cali is about to get what they want, and get it good and hard.
More later –
- AG