Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. AB 957
2. ADL
3. Sports
4. Uninvestable
5. Graves
6. Paxton
7. Dragon
8. Repair
1. AB 957. Latest reminder to parents and other thinking people to flee Cali as soon as possible is AB 957, legislation that strips children’s custody from parents if they don’t affirm their child’s gender identity. The legislation is now on Governor Newsom’s desk for signature. It was passed in both houses by veto-proof majorities, so Newsom has plausible deniability should he decide to veto. The bill directs judges to consider “health, safety and welfare of the child” when making decisions. This should work out in family court as get out of jail cards for hysterical mothers using their children as emotional support animals in the divorce wars. Worse, defining the standard as “health, safety and welfare” in the California Family Code subjects objecting parents to charges of child abuse or neglect for refusing to participate in the child’s journey into medical mutilation. Democrats in Cali are ensconcing the money grab by unscrupulous health care professionals (and I use that term loosely) into state law, turning transitioning into a single direction ratchet. Worse, given the teachers unions are instructing their members to destroy all evidence of their participating in seeding sexual confusion among their charges, parents will have no legal means of finding out, much less fighting this state supported and encouraged child abuse. An American Thinker column predicts that should democrats win in 2024, they will make a very real attempt to grab all control of children from their parents. When they do so, I predict a return of the Vigilance Committees, which will be long overdue.
2. ADL. For pure comedy gold, we have the possible lawsuit by Elon Musk’s Twitter / X against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which has been orchestrating a campaign against Twitter / X advertisers since he purchased it last year. Over that period, Twitter / X suffered a 60% drop in ad revenue. Last week, Musk pointed the finger at the ADL, threatening what may end up being a $22 billion defamation lawsuit with the total being the amount of value the company has lost during the festivities. Should Musk win, he tweeted that he will force the ADL to drop the “Anti” from its title. Over the years, the ADL managed to turn itself into a simple leftist tool aimed at people or things democrats don’t like or can’t control. The ADL’s trick is to accuse the target of antisemitism, something that never seems to be aimed at elected democrats or their antisemitic supporters. Aiming the ADL at Twitter / X is one of a thousand tools currently used by the left against Musk in an attempt to bring him in line. As the election season ramps up, the tool is being used with increasing frequency, with Scott Adams turning off YouTube comments to his daily Coffee With Scott Adams podcast over the weekend because the antisemitic trolling by the left (Adams is hated by the left) got to be too much to deal with. Musk went on to note in tweets that advertisers avoid controversy, so it is easy for the ADL to crush ad revenue via unfounded accusations. This works particularly well in the US and Europe, not so well in Asia where revenues are still strong. The ADL ran a similar campaign that contributed to Tucker Carlson’s departure from FNC. It took years but was ultimately successful. The initial vigorish demanded by the ADL protection racket is for Twitter / X to remove Libs of TikTok from the platform. Musk is looking into dumping correspondence between it, the ADL and advertisers in the upcoming weeks. Should be quite the spectacle. Note that if the ADL is found to be responsible via defamation for a loss of 10% of Twitter’s revenue, that is still a $2+ billion judgment, effectively putting them out of business until some leftist billionaire resurrects it under a new name.
3. Sports. In a surprise to many of us in Alaska, the State Board of Education voted a couple weeks ago to prohibit trans-identifying men from competing in girl’s high school sports teams. They are limited based on the sex assigned at birth. The move met with immediate and vociferous condemnation from all the Usual Suspects on the political left, which were all ignored by the Board. Within two hours, the Chair of the Anchorage School District (ASD) Board and her unqualified boy Superintendent issued a prewritten press release condemning the decision. Note that ASD has been unable to release annual testing results for students though the tests were completed in April. But one must have one’s priorities as this press release on trans in girls’ sports was much more important than test scores for their students. Note that ASD spends over $19,000/student/year and performs 49 – 50 out of 50 states in the union based on student test scores. Nothing like priorities for our friends on the political left.
4. Uninvestable. While former President Trump had an awful track record in his political appointees, particularly those either in uniform or formerly in uniform, one thing he knew and did superbly was conduct economic warfare. And his approach to dealing with China triggered CCP responses that today have made China uninvestable by American Companies. Don Surber reported last week that a delegation of trade representatives complained to Biden Commerce Secretary Raimondo that the CCP has made it too risky to do business in China. The problem is that the CCP has doubled down on evil, paying off politicians worldwide. Those purchased politicians allow China to be treated as a western democracy rather than the thuggish communist cesspool it actually is. Companies who currently do business in China are looking to get out as soon as they can. Trump started this process, and it is accelerating. Given the purchased support for China in the Biden WH (those tens of millions through Hunter went a long way), the administration continues in their full-throated support of US companies doing business in China. Happily, those companies don’t agree and are fleeing China as fast as people are fleeing Cali. CCP response to the departures and economic pressure? Authoritarian crack down on the companies that stay, sort of a punishment will continue until morale improves approach. And we haven’t even started the COVID reparations discussion with China yet.
5. Graves. It is always nice with leftist blood libel falls apart. This time, it was accusations of mass graves filled with indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, particularly western Canada. The story hit the rotating machinery a couple years ago and triggered a wave of church burnings by indigenous activists and their loudmouthed supporters. At the time, around the turn of the 20th Century, I thought that claim was plausible given various epidemics floating around that are hard on kiddos, especially those in impoverished parts of the world. Smallpox and the Spanish Flu come to mind. After two years of horror stories, a series of recent excavations have not found any mass graves in 14 schools dug up. As of this writing, the obvious hoax is not being called an obvious hoax, but we are getting closer to that framing. The hysteria kicked off nicely when the leaders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlups te Secwepemc announced discovery of a mass grave of over 200 children discovered via ground penetrating radar at a residential school in British Columbia. Turns out the radar anomalies were not bodies after all. While this all went on, church bashing and subsequent burnings were done early and often as the churches and regional governments operated the schools. Pope Francis even issued a formal apology on behalf of the Catholic Church. In the end, no apology was necessary. Nicely orchestrated hysteria by the Usual Suspects on the political left. And the First Nation Band should be ashamed of themselves for their part in this orchestrated fraud and blood libel.
6. Paxton. We are in Day 4 of the Paxton impeachment trial in the Texas Senate. Numbers here are important, as there are 31 senators, with 21 votes needed to convict. An attempt to drop all charges on Day 1 was rebuffed with all but one charge getting 21 votes to retain. During those votes, Paxton held a solid 6 vote block of senators who believe the entire thing needs to be tossed. There are 11 democrats in the Texas Senate. They need 9 Republicans to join them. Paxton’s wife is a Republican state senator who will not be voting due to conflict of interest. Coverage of this has been about what you would expect, with the media including a lot of conservative media on the pro-impeachment side. The entire affair appears to be a red-on-red fistfight between the remaining Bush supporters in Texas and the Tea Partiers led by Paxton. The Bushies are collaborating with democrats to remove the most prominent Tea Party / Trump supporter in the state. They don’t appear to be concerned they are toying with destruction of the state party and flipping Texas blue doing this. Best reporting seems to be in Breitbart. Keep watching this.
7. Dragon. SpaceX Crew 6 splashed down in the Atlantic off Jacksonville last Monday after 6 months aboard ISS. The Dragon capsule was the same one that took them to ISS and was docked for the time they were in space. The crew of four included two NASA astronauts, one from the UAE and one Russian. Only one had been in space before this flight. Note that SpaceX keeps on doing this while NASA and their contractors struggle to reenter the manned spaceflight business.
8. Repair. The right to repair movement is fundamentally a property rights movement, a legal fight between manufacturers and people who purchase their goods. The first time I heard about it was decades ago in connection between car owners and dealers who wanted a monopoly on repair of their vehicles. As there is good money to be made in vehicle service and repair, especially because vehicle prices have increased to the point where they aren’t being flipped every three years like they were half a century ago. Manufacturers dealt with this via increasing complexity of the vehicles, making them intentionally difficult to repair, especially simple remove and replace modules. They even resorted to legislation in states with friendly legislatures. Apple also zealously opposed third party repair of their computers and cell phones. The right to repair guys are fighting this in a variety of ways with the fundamental question being when you purchase something, how much does it belong to you and how much does it belong to the manufacturer? Warranties are a popular tool used by manufacturers in this continuing argument, often being voided at any attempt to do your own work. It didn’t take long before other manufacturers started playing in this world. One of them appears to be Taylor, manufacturer of McDonald’s notoriously unreliable McFlurry ice cream machines. Two groups are attempting “… to expand the repair exemption for consumer electronic devices to include commercial industrial equipment such as automated building management systems and industrial equipment.” The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) currently restricts unauthorized access to the software. Taylor holds exclusive service contracts for McDonald’s franchises, essentially a monopoly on the repair market for the machines. The groups are requesting a DMCA exemption. They have done a teardown of the machines and found that they overheat and throw error codes. Once the error is thrown, the machine dies until the Taylor repairman shows up which may take weeks to months. The codes are really difficult to interpret, being described as “nonsensical, counterintuitive and seemingly random.” Taylor is currently in court fighting a company that designed a device capable of reading and interpreting the error codes. Taylor doesn’t want McDonald’s franchises from using the device. The startup that created the code reading device is suing Taylor for $900 million. We hope they are successful. In the other right to repair story, has the Church of Scientology in court similarly fighting groups for the right to repair E-meters, a device the Scientologists use for reading mental states of people they are “auditing.” In this case, the Scientologists don’t want anyone looking under the covers of a device central to the structure of their religion, making this far more serious to the Scientologists than a simple repair monopoly revenue stream that Taylor is defending for their McFlurry machines.
More later –
- AG