Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Valuation
2. Veritas
3. Elections
4. Minorities
5. Lithium
6. OSIRIS-REx
7. Hatchery
8. Clintons
1. Valuation. In the spirit of Red Queen World anti-Trump prosecutions, I will go with the conclusions first: Garbage opinion, by a garbage judge, in a garbage case, tried in a garbage state. Clear enough for everyone? The trigger for this conclusion was a summary pretrial judgment by an elected democrat state judge in NYC in NY Attorney General Letisha James civil lawsuit against the Trump organization for diddling valuations of his property. The ruling, issued Friday, found that Trump committed fraud for years, building and operating his real estate empire. The opinion went on to remove some of the companies from Trump’s control and start its liquidation. It also revoked business licenses, and put it into receivership, making it impossible for them to do business in NY. Think of this as sovereign theft at the stroke of a pen. The non-jury civil trial starts in NYC this morning. The overall claim by the prosecution is that Trump massively overvalued his real estate properties. The judge gleefully went along with the sham, finding that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth while making deals and securing loans. Before fisking the finding, we need to step back and consider what constitute real estate valuations. There are at least six different methods to value property and none of them return the same number. The most important valuations are these: what the bank thinks the property is worth; what the insurers think the property is worth; what the various governments think the property is worth (property and income tax); and what the owner thinks the property is worth. These four entities all have their own self-interests, with the governments and owners tending to value high while the banks and insurers tending to value low. It is important to note that none of these entities are complaining about valuation. Not a single one. Not the banks. Not the governments. Not the insurers. Not the owner. Essentially James and her idiot judge created a victimless crime and are systematically using it to put Trump out of business in NY. Note that all four entities do their own valuations. The heart of the negotiation process takes place when their valuations don’t agree with what the owner think the property is worth. James and her idiot judge are trying to criminalize that negotiation process because Trump is pretty good at it. Their problem is that this negotiation is done by every single business and property owner when they apply for loans, take out insurance, pay property taxes, and file their income taxes. Essentially, James and her idiot judge are dragging the Trump organization through the civil courts for doing something every single business owner in NY does every day of the week. Now this is not saying that whatever Trump did is OK because everyone else is doing it. Rather, it is saying that the State of NY is stepping in the middle of the commercial real estate marketplace, fundamentally changing the rules of that marketplace all in an attempt to destroy a single carefully selected political opponent. And they are doing it all without the benefit of legislation or participation of the elected representatives of the state, changing the rules of how business will be done in NY. If you wanted to put a multi-megaton nuke in the middle of the already highly stressed commercial real estate market in NY (lots of empty high rises still in NYC following the COVID lockdown and work from home movement), I could think of no better way to do that than going after Trump this way. If they can to this to Trump, they can do it to anyone, sending a very clear message to property owners in NY to get out of the state Right Now.
2. Veritas. The Board of Directors of Project Veritas, the media organization James O’Keefe founded and built into a media powerhouse, last February decided that they no longer needed O’Keefe, and concocted various reasons to push him out. Didn’t take O’Keefe long to see the handwriting on the wall and he left, taking some trusted employees and supporters with him. He also took all the donors with him, effectively zeroing out Veritas income. In response, the Board installed Hannah Giles, who worked with O’Keefe on his famous 2009 takedown of ACORN as CEO in April, thinking was that she would carry some of the O’Keefe magic along with her and bring donors back. It didn’t work. Project Veritas had between $6 – 8 million in the bank in Feb. O’Keefe didn’t have access to any of those funds. That money is all but gone today. The first mass firing was in Aug, moving the number of employees from 65 to 18. The second and final firing took place Sept 20, taking the total down to zero. For his part, O’Keefe set up a new group O’Keefe Media Group, (yes, OMG is their acronym), to do what he was doing at Veritas. And his donors have followed him. The work of Veritas continues under a new name. Uppity Board members need to be careful what they want. Sometimes they manage to get it, though usually at unexpected cost.
3. Elections. We here in Anchorage witnessed a September Passion Play where the Municipal IT Director was forced out of office after writing a policy to scan thumb drives used to transfer data off election machines for viruses. The machines are not connected to the internet so data must be transferred manually. This is part of a decade long tightening of security policies at the Muni. Antivirus scans are computer security 101. Anyone with physical access to any computer can own that computer with a bootable thumb drive created with tools easily found on the internet. Kali Linux is one such example. An interesting thing happened on the way to greater security. The Municipal Clerk, who works for the Assembly freaked, complained and apparently asked for a written policy on the new scan requirement. A policy was written and submitted. The Assembly majority, a veto-proof group of 9 democrats currently at war with the Republican mayor, used the event as a vehicle to further damage the mayor, extracting a hair-raising report out of the formerly nonpartisan Ombudsman, who magically transformed himself into a partisan hack for these purposes. The report concluded that the IT Director was meddling in local elections which got him fired. Note that the IT Director did nothing wrong. Nothing. Over the weekend, it looks like the Assembly majority is doing their best Rahm Emanuel impersonation, not wanting to let this crisis go to waste, reportedly using it as a vehicle to put them more completely in charge of Muni elections. We will see how successful they will be. Next Mayoral election is April 2024 and they are positioning themselves nicely to ensure their boy or girl is elected.
4. Minorities. This week’s exercise in anti-white racism comes courtesy of Mary Chastain in Legal Insurrection who reports that 96% of the 300,000 new jobs in the top 100 companies (S&P 100) went to people of color after 2020. This means that just 6% went to whites. Remind me again why we have an EEOC? The move happened in response to the George Floyd riots. The jobs were mostly on the lower end of the pay scale and hires were initially mostly black. Bullying once again works, aided and abetted by cowardice in the HR / ER departments. Of course, it might not be cowardice at all, given the diversity fans being churned out of the universities like so much popcorn. I’m not so sure I believe the 6% number, as somewhere along the line, whites will start lying about their ethnicity, with Native American and Latino bring the most obvious and easiest choices.
5. Lithium. This one is a couple weeks old but was finally echoed in The Atlantic of all places last week. It is the discovery of the world’s largest known deposit of lithium in Nevada. Lithium today is an important component of large batteries targeted for use in Electric Vehicles (EVs). The lithium find was concentrated by hydrothermal action though an ignimbrite deposit in NV. There was a caldera flareup in the SW US a couple tens of millions of years ago. Over time, residual heat powers waterflow through those deposits, concentrating minerals and metals. The company that found the deposit expect to begin mining the site by 2026. This is where things get interesting, as Paiute and Shoshone claim the region as unceded ancestral lands they lost during the Snake War in the 19th Century. The tribes, greens and local ranchers have all sued to prevent creation of an open pit lithium mine in the region. So far, they have been unsuccessful, but as long as there are democrats in positions of power, there is always the chance they will be successful, even the possibility that Biden or someone like him will do what Clinton did to the coal deposits in Escalante Staircase in 1996, creating a National Monument around it to prohibit mining.
6. OSIRIS-REx. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned the first US regolith sample from an asteroid last week. The capsule successfully parachuted to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The capsule and onboard samples were taken to the NASA clean room at NASA JSC in Houston for further study. Asteroid samples have been previously returned by Japan’s Hayabusa2 in 2020 and have been studied since their return. The OSIRIS-Rex mission was launched in 2016, entered orbit around its target Bennu in 2018, and took samples in 2020. Bennu turns out to be a rubble pile asteroid, and the tag maneuver (touch and go) to take the samples almost completely engulfed the spacecraft. There was so much stuff that they had a difficult time closing the sampling container. Bennu is also listed as a potentially hazardous asteroid with a non-zero chance of impacting the earth. After releasing the sample return capsule, OSIRIS-Rex made a course correction that will take it to another potentially hazardous asteroid, Apophis, arriving and entering orbit by 2029.
7. Hatchery. One of our best outdoors reporters up here is Craig Medred. He has been writing about the folly that is commercial fishing in Alaska for decades. Over the last couple weeks, he did an in-depth series of articles on the growing environmental destruction that commercial hatchery release of pink salmon fry has been doing to the North Pacific. While Alaska has a ban on commercial fish farming in place since 1991, it does not have a similar ban on ocean ranching, where salmon fry are raised and released into the salt water to complete with wild fish for food. Over the last 20 years, commercial hatcheries have released over a billion pink salmon fry yearly into the salt. Commercial fishermen then harvest the returning pink salmon for commercial sale. Note that pinks are the least valuable salmon in every salmon fishery. Those voracious little mouths are very good finding what they are interested in eating, out competing the longer-lived salmon (silver, chum, red and king) for what they eat. This in turn has wrought significant damage on returns of the longer-lived fish, particularly kings statewide, damage that is starting to be documented by researchers. All claims of environmental damage due to ocean ranching has been vigorously denied by both commfish and ADF&G biologists who support them. One of the mysteries of salmon return has been the difference between even and odd year return numbers for pink salmon. The research is suggesting that the large return years remove a lot of available food from the ocean. The small return years allow that food to recover a bit. Today we have far more data, actual experience in wanton environmental damage to the North Pacific and the multiple salmon, dolly varden and steelhead species by ocean ranching for pink salmon than exists for the proposed Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay watershed greens have been fighting for 20 years. Some forms of environmental destruction are more acceptable than others.
8. Clintons. No grift is as good as the old grift. The Clinton Global Initiative was created as a influence peddling scheme. Unlike the Biden Crime Family which is barely over $50 million, the Clintons did business in the multi $100+ million dollar range, though business tailed off significantly after Hilly’s defeat in 2016. They changed their business model to start grifting off disaster aid in response to the 2021 Hati earthquake and went quiet afterwards. Looks like the next target for grift is rebuilding Ukraine, as they announced last week they were building a new network to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians. DC looks at Ukraine as a two-fer: a way to cause Putin pain; and a way for well connected democrats (are there any other types of democrats these days?) to get rich. Note: don’t try this at home, for these new rules do not apply to us mere mortals.
More later –
- AG