Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Testimony
2. Assassins
3. Jan 6
4. Dams
5. China
6. Guyana
1. Testimony. In terms of unmitigated disasters, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT were hauled in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee last week to respond to questions about antisemitism on their respective campuses. The three women were singularly unresponsive to direct questions about their support for pro-Hamas protests (allowable) on campus. The questioning quickly moved on to the logical outcome of those protests where the mob targeted individual Jewish students. All three women gave a world class performance on waffling, evading and crawfishing, refusing to give straight answers to straight questions. This is especially humorous in context of their heavy-handed DEI operations. Their testimony was particularly disastrous, complete with smug arrogance by all three women toward Congressional Republicans. I came across at least one report that they had been prepared for the testimony by a legal team for some number of hours to days before the hearing. The number $1,500 was thrown around as the individual hourly rate for members of the legal team. Performance was bad enough that U Penn President Magill resigned over the weekend as did the Chairman of her Board of Regents. Next up is Harvard’s President and affirmative action hire Gay. Over the weekend, it appears that she plagiarized at least some portion of her Doctoral Thesis. Expect her to be gone next. Kornbluth at MIT may hang on the longest, though that remains to be seen. Two lessons from this. First and foremost, when you set up an unaccountable activity (your DEI shop) in your corporate structure and give it absolute control, you have just destroyed your corporation. Everything that is going on is aided, abetted, and celebrated by the DEI racists, fueled by their anti-white racism (it’s still legal to discriminate against whites, and Jews are considered whites these days). And there is nothing that the corporate heads or Regents can do to stop them outside of going Carthage on the DEI shops. The second and more obvious lesson is that when you put affirmative action hires in charge, they will generally act like affirmative action hires. The Ivy League chose. Poorly.
2. Assassins. Hypnosis works because the subject wants to do whatever they are asked to do by the hypnotist. This is why hypnotic success in treating substance abuse, smoking, problematic diet, is spotty at best. One of the things a hypnotist can’t do is get someone hypnotized to commit murder. The key to both of these is the subject actually wanting to do beforehand whatever they are asked to do under hypnosis. Brainwashing is related to hypnosis, in that it takes advantage of motivation, reframing and how the mind works. Matt Gaetz pointed out that the leftist establishment is now in the process of setting the stage for some lunatic leftist to take out President Trump. The proof comes courtesy of swamp mouthpiece The Atlantic which ran a series of articles on all the evil that Trump will commit on a formerly peaceful nation should he be reelected. The most recent one was entitled A Warning, published Nov 4 (paywall) and liberally threw around their favorite new epithet, “dictator.” From a persuasion standpoint, if you have a group of people who literally support Hitler (Trump) and they want to put a dictator (Trump) back into office, what is the logical (illogical) and necessary response? Another way to ask this would be that If you had the ability to go back into history to kill Hitler, would you do it? Most people would answer yes. Similarly, if you had the opportunity to diddle an election (pick one: 2018, 2020, 2022) to keep Hitler or his supporters from gaining political power, would you do it? Absolutely. Today, the leftist organs are starting to bang on the dictator / Hitler drum, in hopes that they will trigger one of their crazies like they did Bernie Bro James Hodgkinson in 2017. Hodgkinson tried to take out the entire Republican congressional leadership at a congressional baseball team practice. He managed to shoot six before being subdued. Scott Adams is of the opinion that the CIA and related agencies have decided to take Trump off the board next year. The Atlantic and similar publications are setting the stage by brainwashing the left. Expect to see more of this.
3. Jan 6. The Jan 6 hoax continued to percolate along last week with multiple smaller stories.
- David Lanza in American Thinker this morning writes that Jan 6 is the democrat roadmap for their 2024 presidential and congressional elections. Don’t expect it to go away anytime soon. He notes that the left talked about Watergate for half a century and used it as a cudgel against any Republican candidate who was silly enough to play their game. Sadly, too many over the years did.
- During the most recent Republican debate, Vivek Ramaswamy went directly after the Jan 6 hoax by calling it an inside job by democrat congressional leadership, DC Police, Capital Police and the Do(In)J. He pointed out that he was the only one on the stage even willing to talk about it. All the Usual Suspects said all the Usual Suspect things about his embrace of the Grand Conspiracy Theory that Jan 6 was an op, which probably tells us he is pretty close to an accurate description.
- House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan launched an investigation into Fulton County DA Fani Willis coordinated with Nancy Pelosi’s Jan 6 Committee in their investigations. Willis asked Jan 6 investigators to share evidence developed with her office. Given the wholesale destruction of all interview records and other investigatory paraphernalia by the Jan 6 Committee, whatever is in Willis’ possession may be all that is left. Expect Willis’ office to slow roll or flat out ignore their responses until the next congress is installed. For her part, Willis went public last week opining about her demand for jail time for those convicted by her witch hunt. Those who she flipped will not go to jail. Pretty convenient, that.
- In a related story, Douglas Mackey, convicted earlier this year for election interference during the 2016 election by posting memes mocking Hillary voters, asking them to avoid the crowds by voting on Election Wednesday, had his imprisonment halted pending appeal. The order was signed by a federal judge in CT. The order is a big deal in that the appellate court overrode the trial court in the belief that an appeal has a reasonable chance of winning. I believe they are right.
- A final reminder when we are talking about all the Jan 6, election foolishness. We here in the US (usually) operate in a regime where an individual is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. This works reasonably well until the prosecutors figure out how to game prosecutions most recently by trying Republican in front of democrat juries (DC, Fulton County, NYC, etc). OTOH, governments do not have that presumption. Worse, whenever any government entity tells you that something is true, especially when they claim they can’t produce the data, records, paperwork, or anything else, our assumption is that they are lying. We have no other choice. After we assume the government lies, it is up to us to do something about it.
4. Dams. This one fell out of a discussion with a pair of valued correspondents last week. It concerns one of the current green shiny objects, that of removing dams in the Pacific NW ostensibly to return salmon and steelhead populations to their numbers of a century ago. The discussion was triggered by a piece in the Spokane Spokesman – Review, describing a secret agreement between the feds, local tribes and green NGOs over removing dams on the Snake River. The Snake River is an important tributary of the Columbia River, draining part of the basin. The most important part of this is that the feds are pursuing the policy change via their old standby, sue and settle, where a green NGO sues the feds, and the feds negotiate exactly what the greens want as a court-ordered settlement and no elected politician has to get their hands dirty in the process. In this case, it is removing up to four dams on the Snake River. The endangered species excuse for this foolishness is that salmon and steelhead (ocean going rainbow trout) numbers in the watershed have crashed over the years, and the solution is to remove the dams. Note that Pacific salmon have lifespans ranging from 2 (pink) to 5-7 years (king). The first Snake River dam was built in 1962, and the fourth in 1975. A proposed fifth never was built, killed by greens and steelhead fishermen. I do not deny that dams harm salmon runs, mostly by changing spawning grounds. Some salmon spawn in lakes, some in rivers and tributaries. Depends on the species. But these dams have been in place 5-6 decades. If they were wholesale murdering salmon, all of them would have been wiped out within a decade. They weren’t, which is why half a century later, they are still around and need to be saved. Consider this the first of several Big Lies. A better question would be what has changed over the last half century, something everyone involved seems to be ignoring. The second Big Lie is the involvement of native tribes in secret negotiations with greens and the feds. Stories from the fly-fishing community in Wash State in recent decades blame the crash of salmon runs on unregulated fishing by local natives who have unrestricted access to the resource. One of the things we know about humans, it is that we are really, really good killing animals we want to kill. The third Big Lie is the action of Oregon and Wash State commfish, whose chosen lifestyle and business success is completely based on their ability to kill fish. The fourth Big Lie is the action of the USF&WS. The Snake River is a tributary of the Columbia River whose first dam is located 192 miles upstream from its mouth. Pinnipeds (sea lions) have figured out how to chase salmon 192 miles upriver to the Columbia River Dam and feast on them milling below the dam. As the animals are on the endangered list, USF&WS will not allow anyone to do anything but watch them destroy the salmon milling below the dam. Final Big Lie is what and how to replace all the hydro that you are taking offline. Given this crowd (greens and Biden regime), I expect the solution will be some combination of wind and solar, where it ought to be nukes or natural gas. Depending on whose BS numbers you believe, the 4 Lower Snake River dams generate 1,000 MW of clean, carbon free, constant, reliable electricity. The whole basin has 17 hydro dams generating up to 2,400 MW, essentially 1-2 large sized light water (old tech) nuke plants.
5. The CCP continues to demonstrate its intentional behavior as an international Bad Actor. Latest example of this is a Chinese container ship, Newnew Polar Bear, believed to have dragged its anchor across the bottom of the Baltic Sea for hundreds of kilometers, intentionally damaging a natural gas pipeline and two telcom cables. The 77 km long pipeline connects Finland and Estonia. The telcom cables connect Estonia, Finland and Sweeden. An investigation of the Oct 7 – 8 damage recovered the anchor a few meters from the site of the damage. The ship is currently enroute back to China. The CCP is very good at a passive-aggressive approach to warfare and as we are seeing the South China Sea, there is no such thing as a non-military vessel or plane. We would do well to remember this.
6. Guyana. When you are a dictator and you and your predecessor have managed to destroy what was once a thriving and profitable oil industry, what are your options? Do you undo all the things you have done for a couple decades and return to profitability? Hardly. You take the course Venezuela seems to be taking, invade and steal your neighbor’s land. The region in question is called Essequibo, all of Guyana W of the Essequibo River, two thirds of the current area of Guyana. The territorial dispute stretches back all the way to the end of Spanish colonial rule in Venezuela in 1811 when it declared its independence from Spain. The declaration included the Essequibo region. At the time Great Britian occupied Guyana and was especially interested in Essequibo due to gold finds in the region. Grover Cleveland under the Monroe Doctrine supported the British Guyana border as drawn by the UK. An international arbitration court ruled Essequibo was part of Guyana in 1899 and the issue was settled until 1966 when Guyana gained its independence. The Geneva Agreement signed by the UK, Venezuela and British Guiana urged the nations to agree to a peaceful resolution. Guyana didn’t want to talk and went the International Court of Justice instead. Earlier this year, the court declared itself competent to settle the dispute in April, giving Maduro everything he needed to take a more aggressive stance. Maduro is up for reelection next year. What better way to paint yourself as a champion of Venezuelan nationalism than to orchestrate a theft of most of Guyana? With this in mind, Maduro had a vote on the subject Dec 3. 10.5 votes were cast on 5 questions, though it is unclear if there were 10.5 million ballots voted or 10.5 million separate votes cast (one on each question). Maduro may have created a problem for himself. First, the vote may have backfired, with a remarkably low turnout for the election. This would mean little enthusiasm for the takeover. As usual, the Maduro government is accused of falsifying results. Second, Guyana is having none of it, taking a defensive stance. Finally, the UN is involved and not on Maduro’s side. This might be a failed gambit. But never underestimate a dictator after a self-serving gambit fails.
More later –
- AG