Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Speaker
2. Debate
3. Hopper
4. Correction
5. Tires
6. Antitrust
7. Musk
1. Speaker. The House of Representatives voted 216 – 210 to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A Speaker pro tempore was appointed until such time as a new Speaker can be elected. The first vote on replacement will be midweek, with at a minimum House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan running. Looks like conservatives will line up behind Jordan while Scalise is attracting the more moderate members.
- As this is the first time a Speakership has been vacated what happens next is a bit up in the air. The Speaker pro tempore adjourned the House pending election vote this week. The Republican caucus held meetings Friday to listen to candidates and other internal business. The new war in Israel by Hama knocked all news of this fight off the news, so this has been pretty quiet over the weekend. The vote to vacate was passed with the support of all democrats and 8 Republican members.
- The reason for the motion to vacate was McCarthy reneged on several promises he made to the conference when he was elected Speaker. McCarthy was not the only one reneging on promises as we will see later. His promises included passage of 12 – 13 appropriations bills rather than a single massive continuing resolution. As of this writing, only two have been passed, another two are ready for House vote, and the rest are in process. The majority strongly wanted to return to regular order, eliminating the continuing resolutions that usually give democrats what they want, leaving Republicans in the dust.
- McCarthy was not the only one reneging on promises, as democrats apparently promised him they would not back a motion to vacate as long as he was speaker. About a nanosecond after it became clear it was in their interest to remove him from the speakership, they flipped. When you make deals with democrats, they operate a lot like the old fable about the frog and the scorpion where the scorpion promises the frog he won’t sting him during the ride across a stream. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog and both drown. On their way down, the frog asks why. Scorpion responds that after all, I am a scorpion. Democrats are just as venal, though happily, they are predictable.
- One of the interesting things that happened immediately after the Speaker pro tempore took the gavel was to kick former Speaker Pelosi and former Majority Leaker Stenny Hoyer out of offices they retained in the House. The offices were offered out of respect for their service, respect they abused. They were both given a couple hours to depart before the locks were changed. Cue the carefully scripted outrage. I didn’t know that Pelosi and Hoyer still retained a presence in the House. This presence goes a long way toward explaining the lockstep discipline by House democrats since Pelosi’s departure, discipline that mirrored democrat discipline under Pelosi as Speaker. It may also explain her announcement a week or two ago that she would be running for her old seat again. I tend to think Pelosi and her team were running things in the House democrat caucus all year long. Her departure should help the Good Guys (and the rest of us) a bit) by increasing democrat incompetence a bit and decreasing democrat discipline a bit.
- Final fun story was former President Trump’s offer to accept a nomination and hold the speakership for a bit until the Republican caucus figured out who they wanted to replace McCarthy with. This stirred up an appropriate amount of outrage from all the Usual Suspects.
- In a related story, squad member Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D, NY), pulled a fire alarm in the Capital in order to delay a vote on the 45-day continuing resolution. It worked, delaying the vote for a time. It also led to some interesting reactions. Bowman claimed he didn’t know it was a fire alarm, rather believing it would open a door out of the building. This claim would be a flat out lie, as Bowman was a Principal in a previous life, knowing full well the difference between fire alarms and doors. Republicans and many other watching the political persecution of Jan 6 people immediately demanded he be arrested, immediately jailed in the DC Gulag for a year or two while awaiting his trial on obstructing an official proceeding of the government. No news on any prosecution of Bowman as yet.
2. Debate. Interesting Republican debate story last week when Ronna McDaniel’s RNC threatened Chris Christy and Vivek Ramaswamy after they floated the idea of a joint FNC appearance. The RNC immediately jumped on it, threatening both with being bounced out of future presidential debates if they went ahead with the joint appearance. In the end, they appeared separately on Bret Baier’s Special Report on FNC. One of the things the RNC enjoys is being in charge. Sadly, this also means they don’t bring anything meaningful to election campaigns, especially winning Republican campaigns. Christy and Ramaswamy should have gone on FNC as scheduled and dared the RNC to kick them out of all future debates. What a great campaign position for both of them, candidates too dangerous for the RNC to allow on the debate stage. They could have scheduled mirror debates simultaneously with RNC scheduled debates and embarrasses both McDaniel and the RNC. Sadly, another opportunity to pick up free money in the political wars needlessly bypassed.
3. Hopper. Funniest story of the week was the male invasion of the Grace Hopper Celebration, which bills itself as the world’s largest conference for women in computing, by men claiming to be women. Grace Hopper was one of the pioneers in computer programming, and the design of programming languages, worthy of respect and praise for her excellence. At the time, there were not a lot of ladies in the business, and she made her mark in the Navy. She and her achievements ought to be celebrated based on what she actually did, as she was really good at what she achieved. Sadly, the feminists glommed on to her name, creating the functional equivalent of an exclusive women only job fair in her name. This year, men had enough of that garbage, and showed up in massive numbers, all claiming to be non-binary which flummoxed the feminists running the show. In response, the Conference decided the non-binary men really weren’t what they claimed to be and did everything possible to kick them out of the job fair. So much for tolerance from feminists and the greater left.
4. Correction. This may be one of the more interesting corrections I’ve come across in a while. Last week, I relayed a story about the S&P 100 hiring only 6% men in jobs created since 2021. It turns out that the report was garbage, based on the reporter’s inability to basic math. Daily Wire took a deeper look into the story written by 5 writers and approved by 4 editors that concluded that corporations were Mau-Mau’ed by BLM into hiring mostly minorities in the years after the riots. Daily Wire analyzed the same numbers and found that demographics of new hires were barely different from what they were prior to 2021. The percentage of new hires given whites were in line with the expected percentage of current demographics, which has changed over the last 50 years as the Baby Boomers entered and are starting to retire from the workplace. Blomberg screwed up by failing to consider the demographics of the workers leaving existing jobs. They then compounded that statistical error comparing new hires without considering changes into current demographics. The new hires closely echoed the new demographics. Essentially, this report could have been easily explained by simple generational turnover in the workforce, something that doesn’t sell clicks in the race-baiting reportage. Tellingly, none of the half dozen companies with the most notable diversity gains wanted to discuss them in detail. Why? Because the incorrect reportage overstated diversity gains by the companies, pumping them up in the national reportage and the overall DEI sweepstakes. Why correct anyone calling you a diversity hero? Nobody did.
5. Tires. Next on the green hit parade on our way of life is vehicle tires. Rationale? Tire emissions post a threat to global health. Stephen Green in PJ Media reported media trotting out stories reporting a number of studies reporting the threat. They go on to claim that “… a whole host of toxic chemicals being shed from tires and brakes that have been largely ignored until now” are harming the environment. The greens have Yale researchers claiming that one of the substances shed (as dust) is highly toxic to multiple fish species. As usual, the report doesn’t mention nor even consider the dosage of the suspected exposure. It is sufficient (as usual) simply to make the claim that something is harmful. The fun part about this is that EVs make the problem worse, as they inject massive tonnages of new and more toxic substances into the environment, likely acceptable because they are, well, green. EVs tend to shed around 20% more from their tires due their increased weight than standard ICE vehicles. As the left is busily regulating all manner of appliances and home heating and cooling out of existence, their first assault on vehicles is to make ICE vehicles illegal, replacing them with EVs. Once they’ve forced EVs on everyone, the next step will be to render tires and brakes illegal. End result? Personal vehicles will end up being what they started out being, playthings of the rich.
6. Antitrust. Real Clear Investigations and the NYP both posted articles on the antitrust lawsuit ongoing against Goolag. The basic question is What is Google Hiding in its Unprecedentedly Secret Antitrust Trial? Normally, antitrust litigation releases a lot of information about business practices aimed at the general public. In this trial, Goolag so far has committed extraordinary resources to ensure nobody knows about their business practices, which based upon what has been leaked already, are highly embarrassing. Goolag execs have bragged about how addictive their services are, comparing them to tobacco and illicit drugs. l fishing in Alaska for decades. Essentially, Goolag created products which by design are so addictive that they believe they can exploit users / customers for economic gain without worrying about what the users actually want or need. So much for avoid evil. While antitrust suits against AT&T, IBM and Microsoft all involved secrecy requests, Goolag’s case are unusually opaque, leading to the question: What are they hiding? And as their answer is “nothing”, why then are they moving heaven and earth to hide it? Antitrust law is at its core about unwarranted power. The American public deserves to know how those companies got that power and how they are using it. Goolag is moving heaven and earth to ensure we don’t.
7. Musk. Elon Musk gave an update on Starship last week at the IAC 2023 Conference. The Q&A also updated listeners on follow-on plans for Mars. Among the other things Musk said was design changes to Starship. It started out with a 3:1 fuel ratio between Booster and Starship. That has shrunk to 2:1. This means that the Booster will only be airborne for about 5 minutes from launch to recovery. Those 5 minutes will go very fast. The Booster will be recovered at the launch site tower, with a pair of beams grabbing it out of a brief hovering flight. The reason for the tower and “chopsticks” recovery technique is that cranes sufficiently large to stack the Booster – Starship and recover them are simply too big and won’t work at all in any sort of wind. Both Booster and Starship are intended to recover at the launch site. SpaceX has been returning boosters back to launch site since they first started operating. And they have been briefly hovering the first stage for a decade. The entire system is designed for rapid reusability, with the emphasis on rapid. SpaceX turns used first stages to subsequent flights in a matter of days. They plan on turning Booster in hours. We already know that they can recover and reuse the first stage and payload fairings / cowlings. They are preparing to turn the entire stack. When asked about the next launch, he believes that should they successfully get off the pad without blowing up, they have a 50:50 chance of making it into orbit. When asked about his prediction for the first test landing on Mars, he suggested it is 4 years out, 2027, that is, if the idiot democrats can stay the Hell outa the way (everything after the comma is mine). Following video is the talk:
More later –
- AG