Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. SpaceX
2. Coordination
3. Protest
4. Haaland
5. Raid
6. Moon
7. Queen
8. Panic
9. Mug Shot
1. SpaceX. The most Bizzaro story last week was the announcement of a Do(In)J lawsuit against SpaceX for discriminatory hiring practices. The lawsuit alleges that SpaceX discriminates against asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring practices. On the face of it, this would seem to be a slam dunk win for SpaceX, as their hiring practices are transparent. Do(In)J claims to have been investigating this since 2021, or about the same time Elon Musk announced he was purchasing Twitter, removing it from the government news censorship cabal. Gangster government at its worst. Nice little rocket company you have there, would be a shame if anything happened to it. The problem here is something called International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) administered by Department of State and DoD, that requires SpaceX to hire only American citizens. Do(In)J’s lawsuit claims otherwise, so they are at least aware of the conflict and are angling for a suitably leftist judge to sort out the conflict created by congress for them while they bleed SpaceX dry via endless legal fees. ITAR limits information about military technology to US citizens and companies. The law uses the term US citizens to include naturalized citizens and green card holders. By definition, asylum seekers and refugees do not yet hold green cards, though the corruptocrats in DHS are furiously trying to rectify that minor problem. Violations of ITAR rules come with hefty fines and removal from the ability to get future contracts. As the largest, most capable launch service provider in the entire world, SpaceX intelligently guards their ability to launch government payloads well. ITAR regulates possible dual use technology like rockets to non-US citizens. Consider this lawsuit as the first shot across the bow of the SS Musk by the deep state to see how quickly they can rein him back on their reservation.
2. Coordination. A couple stories last week about coordination between Do(In)J, the Biden WH, Special Prosecutor, and state prosecutors going after Donald Trump all at the same time. Appears the plan is to force quick trials simultaneously in all four venues, get some number of convictions (which Derschowitz predicts), and use those convictions to defeat him in 2024 before they are overturned on appeal. Democrats used this timing to remove Alaska US Senator Ted Stevens from office in 2008, an act which elected democrat Mark Begich to the US Senate for a single term. Begich provided the necessary filibuster proof majority vote allowing democrats to ram O’BamaCare through congress. In the first story, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich reported that Fulton County State Prosecutor Fani Willis received a phone call from DC telling her to indict Trump the following Monday. Rationale was to cover negative fallout from the Hunter Biden plea deal falling apart. Gingrich pointed out that the report was hearsay but stands by the source and points out that the timing describes perfectly the timing of what Willis did the week the indictment was announced. Second story comes out of the NYP, reporting that a member of Jack Smith’s special counsel team met with the Deputy Chief of Staff for the WH Counsel’s office May 31, 2023, about 9 weeks before Smith indicted Trump on the Mar a Lago documents case. An FBI field agent joined that meeting in progress. There were two previous meetings between DoJ and WH Counsel office before Smith was appointed. This indicates that the investigation and prosecution has been coordinated with the WH from the start, something former Attorney General John Mitchell was convicted of doing before he left the Attorney General position to run the Nixon 1972 reelection campaign. Once again, we have this administration becoming the very thing they claim to hate the most: using a creatively executed legal process to take out their political opposition.
3. Protest. It is always gratifying to see the general public rising up to protest over the top environmental regulation. This one comes out of London, where Mayor Sadiq Kahn has declared war on vehicles, specifically privately owned vehicles. He has attempted to tax vehicles per mile, and pressuring academics to support his Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) program. ULEZ was imposed by Kahn in 2019 as a way to cut vehicular emissions. While it was first proposed by former London Mayor Boris Johnson, he never executed what Kahn has installed. The zone is enforced today by 1,775 cameras, and vehicles emitting too many harmful emissions are fined £ 12.50/day. Lorries, vans, busses and minivans are all exempt, as are larger vehicles. Private vehicles and motorcycles are the targets of this. The zone currently covers all of London, and the mayor is busily working to expand it into the suburbs with another 1,000 cameras much to the distress of those communities. This is where the protests come in. There is a group of like-minded protesters who call themselves Blade Runners who are tracking locations of the cameras on interactive websites. Enterprising members of the group then attack the cameras, either removing them outright or covering the lenses with material to disable them. They are doing pretty good, with over 90% disabled in a couple areas of London. There has been little decrease in emissions in London, so this plan becomes precisely what photo radar, red light cameras, and speeding cameras have become, simple revenue generators pretending to enforce and execute some supposed agreed upon societal good. And the Mayor, like all liberals before him, will find all manner of ways to increase the scope and in turn the revenue generated by these devices right up until the point where he can’t.
4. Haaland. One of the oddities about Deb Haaland’s tenure as Interior Secretary has been the rise in permits for oil and natural gas exploration in New Mexico, today producing more than Alaska does, thanks to greens like her. Those permits have been going to someone, likely natives in NM. Last week, we found that those natives weren’t Navajo, as Haaland withdrew hundreds of thousands of acres of native land near Chaco Canyon from oil and natural gas exploration. The excuse was the old standby, to protect sacred lands. Unfortunately, the newly protected lands are Navajo sacred lands and the Navajo are perfectly happy with their ability to both take proper care of the Canyon lands and produce oil and natural gas. The problem is that Haaland is Pueblo, with a daughter working with a Pueblo anti-development outfit and her husband in charge of sales and marketing for the business arm of the tribe. Nothing like using your position as Interior Secretary to damage your tribal competition, is there? The action got Haaland an ethics complaint that won’t go anywhere. It also really irritated members of the Navajo Nation, whose protest blocked Haaland’s visit to the area after her decision.
5. Raid. It’s not often where a police raid in a small Kansas town gets national coverage. On the face of it, the Aug 11 SWAT raid of the business and home of the publisher of the Marion County Record would seem the typical overreaction of a small-town police chief who hasn’t used his SWAT capabilities in decades and was just itching to use them (think of Officer Obie in Alice’s Restaurant). And this might be completely correct, as affidavits released after the raid has the Police Chief using the excuse that a reporter had improperly used a public law enforcement web site to download the driving record of someone the paper was investigating. Police Chief decided it was improper and sent in the hounds with all the bells and whistles. A few days later, the local prosecutor decided there was not enough evidence to justify the warrant, pullet it, and quickly returned seized computers and cell phones. Sadly, the raid was sufficiently exciting that an elderly family member of the publisher died of heart failure the following day. As of this writing, the police chief is still publicly defending his action. We will see how long he remains police chief as reaction to this continues to grow. I suspect this story is not over yet.
6. Moon. The race for water ice at the south pole of the moon continued last week with two spacecraft reaching the moon. One survived the landing. The other didn’t. The first attempt was Russia’s Luna-25, which lost contact during descent and was lost. This was Russia’s first attempt at landing something on the moon since 1976. Since 2013, China has successfully landed three successful landers and rovers, one currently active on the far side. The day after the Russian failure, India landed its Chandrayaan-3, becoming the fourth nation to land something on the moon. The south lunar pole is an important piece of local real estate, as it has a number of craters permanently shadowed from the sun thought to have water ice beneath the surface. Water ice is important off planet, for if you can figure out how to use the ice, you can literally do anything and go anywhere in the solar system. Water ice ends up being propellent, O2 for breathing, water for life and growing plants, and most importantly, radiation shielding, though you need a lot of it. And the farther you get away from the sun, the more ice you find. Only drawback is that you have to bring your own energy, which means nuclear reactors. We are in the early stages of a land rush to the moon, the first one to the south pole.
7. Queen. This week’s entrant to the Left Ruins Everything discussion is a reissue of another greatest hits album by Queen, this one by Yoto. The newly released album studiously omits Queens’ Fat Bottomed Girls, apparently because it contains offensive content. The 45-year-old song has been one of the fun Queen hits over the years. Their decision has been roundly panned especially in UK and Commonwealth media. Somehow, I don’t think this will improve sales of the new compilation, though it will make all the Usual Suspects in the wokester community happy.
8. Panic. Last week’s lesson in industrial, weapons grade persuasion took place in California, with the approach and impact of Hurricane Hilary, which came from S along Baha California, and rained itself out over Southern California. It was for a while a Category 4 storm, with high winds and pushing a substantial storm surge. The media spun up hysterical reportage past Cat 4, calling the storm life threatening in intensity, with catastrophic and historic flooding. LA Schools closed Monday. Governor Newsom declared a state of emergency Saturday and cell phones were bombarded with severe weather alerts every two hours for the rest of the weekend. By Monday, schools and government offices were all closed and dire emergency warnings bombarded everyone in SoCal hourly. Prager’s column on the panic made a pretty good case that nobody learned anything from the years long orchestrated COVID panic. He ends warning that as long as we Americans turn over our wellbeing to so-called experts time after time, we lose our freedom. The government knows this. Some of us on the right know this. Too many on the political left don’t and don’t really care, which is becoming a real problem. There were panics in 2008 and 2020 that elected democrats to the WH. Don’t think this little fact made it past democrat presidential campaigns and their allies in the Deep State unnoticed. Expect to see it again over the next 14 months.
9. Mug Shot. Democrats finally got their Donald Trump mug shot last Thursday night as he was arrested in Atlanta. Trump played along giving his best angry scowl, not unlike the prototypical Uncle Sam and Churchill scowl. Both the Trump and Biden campaigns immediately started fundraising from the photo. As an aside, interesting that the Biden campaign is fund raising off the Biden WH colluding with Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith to indict its political opponent in 2024. The Banana Republic gene runs strongly among the O’Bamaoids infesting this administration. This is the fundamental change O’Bama always wanted, making opposition illegal. While it is good to want things, they should be careful when they get what they claim to want. We are just seeing the leading edge of fallout from the indictment. The story is barely written at this point, and I don’t think it is going to end up the way the O’Bamaoids think it is going to end up.
More later –
- AG