Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Abortion
2. Elections
3. AI
4. Manifesto
5. Wind
1. Abortion. Looks like democrats have seized upon abortion as their go-to issue to sufficiently terrify their voters to show up to the polls and vote democrat. They used abortion and a statewide ballot initiative to flip Michigan in 2020. There was a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Ohio last week that easily passed. Now that they have proven it works, expect them to use that tool early and often right up until the point where Republicans figure out how to talk about abortion at the state level, something they seem incapable of doing today. And I not only want them to figure out how to talk about it, but doit in such a way as to eliminate it as a democrat campaign issue. One way to do this is to simply start paying women not to abort their kids. How do we get from here to there?
- In my lifetime, democrats have been very good about terrifying their voters to ensure turnout. Most of these were flat-out lies, but fear persuasion is the best persuasion, and it worked. For decades, they terrified members of the Greatest Generation, our parents and grandparents with claims that Republicans would cut (gut) Social Security and Medicare. Now that most boomers are transitioning to both of those, having on average, supported Reagan, those claims have mostly disappeared, though they may be dusted off for the 2024 campaign season. Next up on the hit parade were blacks, who overwhelmingly vote for democrats. Ensuring their turnout by whipping up racial sentiment, then VP Biden told a crowd in Danville, VA on Aug 14, 2012 that if Romney won, he and Wall Street would “… put you all back in chains.” It worked. The core of the democrat coalition today are young, single, college educated women, who overwhelmingly vote democrat. Abortion turns them out in droves. TO be fair, Republicans have played this game, using the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. They also used the economic disaster wrought by Jimmy Carter and the democrat majorities in congress during the 1970s to good effect.
- We conservatives, much like Republican cold warriors 30 years ago following the fall of the Soviet Union, are having to pivot on abortion following Dodd. We won at the federal level and the game moved to the states, which is where it should have always resided. Democrats pivoted nicely, deciding to use it to flip governments at state and local levels, which is where their ballot initiatives come in. As a conservative and a Christian, I really like the historic anti-abortion argument for all the right reasons. The problem is that most of the country is today neither Christian nor conservative. Worse, more than half of them view abortion as some sort of Holy Sacrament for the political left, a personal rights / bodily autonomy issue, rejecting out of hand any other religious viewpoint. How do we appeal to those people, or at least enough of them not to fall for democrat scaremongering?
- We need to return to basics, that of saving life. What do we want? Fewer aborted babies. How do we get that? One way would be to pay these young, single women for carrying their babies to term and then adopting them out. Given that over 90% of abortions today are simply for convenience or birth control purposes, a substantial cash payment would buy life for a lot of youngsters. In the 2014 – 2015 Fiscal year, Planned Parenthood gets over $550 million from the feds. Use half of those funds for alternatives to abortion. A $10,000 payment would save the lives of 55,000 kids. Higher or lower dollar amounts would save fewer or more kids. You can purchase a lot of personal convenience for $10,000. Best of all, it completely reframes all personal choice, my body, my choice arguments, leaving the choice entirely in the hands of the woman.
- The national interest in doing this is the cratering birth rate among all wealthy, western nations. The more babies American women have, the fewer illegals we will have to import.
- I first ran across the idea last Thursday during the morning Real Coffee With Scott Adams podcast. It was tossed out as a way to reframe the issue, one that we at least need to start talking about. Given that it is simply an idea, much of the implementation and all the problem solving are yet unaddressed. But it is a way to change the conversation, a reframing of the issue at the state level, when we are getting our brains beat in during campaigns. It is also a way to get what we really want – live kids while simultaneously defenestrating Planned Parenthood and its democrat enablers.
2. Elections. State and local elections took place last week. All in all, at least at first glance, Republicans did poorly. But there were a few interesting results. For example, while Daniel Cameron lost his gubernatorial race in Kentucky to incumbent democrat Andy Beshear, every other statewide race went Republican. In Ohio, a ballot initiative enshrining abortion in the state constitution won a substantial majority. As usual, with these ballot initiatives, it was deceptively written in such a way as to allow abortion up to and including the moment of birth. In VA, where abortion was also an issue, it looks like democrats picked up control of the state house and may have picked up a majority in the senate. There is still one seat in contention afterwards. Not the best results. It is up to us to turn democrat partying over the results into whistling past their political graveyard next year.
3. AI. Last week’s other big story was movement in AI. Like most of these stories, we have bad news and good news. Bad news first.
- The Biden regime released its Executive Order (EO) on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was written with substantial involvement by O’Bama and reads a lot like an attempt to make any AI which is not actively democrat illegal, something we have come to know and love from O’Bama and his ’Oids running the Biden regime. Early goals from the EO are to use their preferred AI solution to enforce censorship of everything published they don’t like or agree with, all in the name of controlling misinformation. Note that in this context, misinformation is anything less than completely supportive of the regime or the Deep State that controls it. Second, AI will be “regulated” to advance the goals of civil rights, equity, and other facets of the DEI framework. The security state will be massively expanded, all in the name of protecting freedom. Orwell would be proud of that one. The EO sets up a public – private partnership on AI, the sort of partnership so successful operating the censorship operation where government censorship has been outsourced to academia, NGOs and Big Tech, all under the watchful eye and control of various Executive Branch agencies (DHS, Do(In)J, Intel community, etc). Vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy are bought and paid for by Big Tech, not unlike what we’ve come to see with Big Pharma ownership of the public health apparat. And Big Tech will use whatever influence they can to ensure that ownership is never challenged. AI is simply their latest tool.
- As for the good news, Elon Musk is getting into the AI business. xAI, the Musk tech company pursuing AI announced its first AI offering, Grok. The way you train AI is to expose it to written and video work. This exposure trains the tool based on its programming. Once trained up, it is exposed to an array of additional information. This sort of training is the reason that many of the complaints of early AI describe them as markedly leftist to out and out racist. Those responses are based mostly on how the tool was trained and partly on actual programming. Musk’s Grok isn’t going to be trained that way. For written material, it was first exposed to the works of Douglas Adams, the writer of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Musk suggested that Grok will also have full access to everything on X/Twitter). I expect Musk’s competitors in Big Tech and the Biden regime will try to do everything humanly possible to render this offering illegal. And I expect they are already too late. We are fast approaching a time where the two AI models will be either the CCP / Big Tech model of the Biden regime or the libertarian / Musk model. As they are software, there will be more than one copy of each system.
4. Manifesto. One of the outstanding issues following the 27 Mar school shooting at the Covenant School, the Nashville parochial elementary school, was release oof a manifesto left by the trans man (originally a girl) who turned murderous. Her writings were seized shortly after the shooting and buried under multiple layers of “investigation” by law enforcement at all levels. Yes, the FBI was involved in and likely leading the coverup. Last week, three pages of that manifesto were leaked to Steven Crowder and posted to X/Twitter. Usually, these sorts of manifestos are withheld from the public on the excuse that distribution will inspire future murders. OTOH, manifestos from the few on the political right are always released simultaneous with public condemnation of Trump and all things right wing. The released pages show a young woman oozing hatred for whites, Christians, and crackers out of every pore of her body, hoping for a maximum body count at her carefully selected targets attending the elementary school. Her writings are being withheld to hide her mental illness and the complete failure of the trans cheerleaders to deal with it. Transitioning is generally sold as a solution to mental illness, something we must go along with because the alternative, suicide, is so very much worse. From these writings, transitioning appears to make whatever she was undergoing very much worse than a simple suicide. Worse, it was all marinated in a toxic stew of the very worst anti-white hatred we see from the education establishment and teachers’ unions.
5. Wind. Danish wind company Orsted announced cancellation of two major offshore wind projects in NJ, Ocean Wind I and II. They blamed the poor state of the American economy. Seismic surveys for the projects has been blamed for a spike in whale and dolphin deaths off the NJ, Mid-Atlantic and New England shorelines over the last couple years. This, along with political opposition from commercial fishermen and environmental protests made the projects very unpopular with the state. The cancellations are painted as a blow to the Biden regime attempt to force renewable electrical generation down the collective throats of a skeptical American public. Of particular interest in this was the denial by federal agencies that the sonar surveys were harming wildlife, something they would never do in connection to an oil or natural gas rig. Last year, Bloomberg unearthed a NOAA report that concluded offshore wind would cause added stress to local populations of right whales that could result in additional population consequences. Undeterred with local opposition to wind, the Biden regime approved the largest offshore wind project in the nation on 31 Oct. This one is off the VA coast, the same coastline democrats moved heaven and earth in opposition to a Trump era proposal to open for oil and natural gas leases. In a related story, German turbine manufacturer Siemens is having financial trouble as their customers cancel wind projects worldwide. The difficulty is moving them to start asking for bonds by customers to cover Siemens financial losses in the event a project gets cancelled. They would have been the supplier for the Orsted offshore wind projects discussed earlier. Siemens cancelled plans to build their first US manufacturing facility for offshore wind turbine blades in Virginia. The reason was given as development milestones could not be met. They promised complete support for the newly approved, $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project 27 mi off Virginia Beach.
More later –
- AG