Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Patents
2. Censorship
3. TikTok
4. Chauvin
5. FCC
6. Starship
1. Patents. Yet another reminder that the left these days is an early adopter, active practitioner, and unabashed participant in projection, the act of blaming someone else for what you are doing. Typically, they darkly warn that Republicans, if elected, will do what they are currently doing. Over the last couple weeks, the newest focus group tested persuasion term was “dictator”, as in if elected, Trump will become a dictator. Trump, for his part, laughed at it which is an effective counter. But what can be more dictatorial than stealing property from Americans and American corporations by regulatory sleight of hand? Last week’s example of this was a Biden regime threat to use federal powers, known as march-in rights, to steal patents for drugs developed with taxpayer funds and share them with other pharmaceutical corporations if the public cannot “reasonably” access the medications. This attack on property rights is being reported as a Good Thing for all citizens. As usual, it is yet another step (or five) along a road to a very hot place. The proposed framework, blatant obvious election meddling, allows regulatory agencies to factor in drug prices as an excuse to seize active patents. As usual, the feds didn’t do the development or production work, but hope to profit politically from their action in ways other than corporate taxes paid on sales and income. Part of me should enjoy the schadenfreude of the very same pharmaceutical companies who got in bed with the Biden regime over vaxxing being handled somewhat roughly and threatened. But the rest of me knows that the more the feds get their grimy little claws on what drugs are profitable and what drugs aren’t, always making those decisions in election years, the most important and necessary drugs simply won’t be available because they are insufficiently profitable due to the feds. See ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for recent examples.
2. Censorship. Three stories out of the Censorship Industrial Complex this week. One of them includes DoD in the fray. Another names a billionaire who usually supports democrats spending a wad of money on getting Nikki Haley nominated by Republicans. Final piece has The Atlantic, a leftist rag closely tied to CIA, going after Substack. Apparently, Substack is committing Truth in public, and must be stopped.
- Whistleblower information on something called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), something previously thought to be an independent entity, demonstrates that is heavily influenced by government and military personnel. The participation is documented by Slack messages and other internal comm. The CTIL Slack channels tagged with disinformation and law enforcement escalation include FBI, Cyber Command Center personnel, US Defense Digital Service (DDS) and members of at least one European government. As usual, these organizations started during the O’Bama regime and grew like so many weeds during the Trump and Biden regimes. Actions of this group include interference with physical gatherings, social media cancelations and censorship, spreading targeted propaganda. They are spreading their influence as DDS merged with other agencies into the newly formed Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) in 2022. The only organization not participating in this government orchestrated censorship complex is X/Twitter, which is why Biden sent the flying monkeys of his regulatory state after Musk.
- Second censorship story concerns one Reid Hoffman, billionaire former PayPal and co-founder of LinkedIn, and his Good Information Foundation. Good Information paints itself as “… committed to restoring social trust and strengthening democracy by investing in solutions that counter disinformation and increase the flow of good information online.” What they actually do is try to pay people to attack Donald Trump and Trump Republicans, as reported in Breitbart last year. Hoffman is in good company, as Soros also funds Good Information. While nominally a Democrat mega-donor, Hoffman this year has been backing Nikki Haley’s run for Republican presidential nomination with at least a quarter million to the Stand for America PAC which is backing her. Hoffman has been a major participant in the dark money world funding democrat friendly NGOs, campaigns, and always, the Censorship Industrial Complex.
- Matt Taibbi reported last week that Substack is under attack again, this time by The Atlantic, which means the CIA is involved. His piece in Racket News Substack is a pretty decent rant aimed at writers working for the Censorship Industrial Complex. The last attack accused Substack of hosting Nazi-affiliated blogs and demanded their removal. Substack ignored the previous demands and they eventually went away, though at least five writers did walk. Usually, the complainers demand Substack kick someone off or they will walk. Problem is that once Substack starts booting people for what they say, they become mini-me versions of the very thing they were set up as an alternative to. The power to censor Nazis includes the power to censor protesters of all stripes, and prevent the media from publishing content and facts criticizing governments and officials. This is then labeled by those very same governments, officials and the censorship apparat they control and operate as fake news.
3. TikTok. Cautionary piece out of Paula Bolyard last week warning that a Republican ban on TikTok will send Gen Z running into the arms of democrats. I think she is short-sighted, though accurate in her concern. She does a pretty good setup, noting that democrat pandering to young voters generally involves something those young voters want – student loans forgiven, cheaper homes, good paying jobs, literally everything handed to them on a silver platter. And the kiddos go for it, not yet knowing that they are handing power to the very fools who created the claimed problems in the first place. This time around, she notes that Republicans are threatening to ban Gen Z’s favorite social media app, TikTok. We all know that TikTok is a national security threat, most recently demonstrated over the weekend by the TikTok mutiny, where Gen Z recruits are taking to TikTok to complain about low pay, crummy food and fitness tests in the military. This is little more than the CCP using the TikTok heat button to destroy the ability to recruit Gen Z soldiers. If everyone knows TikTok is a problem, how do you solve it, especially when you have a political party that will use any Republican promise to ban TikTok like a cudgel against them during the upcoming election cycle? Solution? Several come to mind. One would be to do what the democrats do and lie about it until you get in office. Republicans don’t do that and shouldn’t. OTOH, they can certainly take a more nuanced approach to TikTok during the campaign like Trump and DeSantis are doing today rather than pushing an outright ban like Nikki Haley is publicly calling for. That nuanced approach is to have the public discussion first before a ban rather than the Haley approach of ban first, discussion afterwards (she would make a great Red Queen. Louis Carroll would be proud). Another, better solution would be to sic the intel community and the Censorship Industrial Complex on TikTok and hack it, sever its connection from the CCP and destroy it from within, essentially giving that complex an actual military mission. Will they do it? If they want to remain employed, they will. There are others, but you get the idea. TikTok cannot be allowed to continue to operate unfettered.
4. Chauvin. John Mcwhorter writing in Glenn Loury;’s Substack makes a case that Derek Chauvn did not murder George Floyd. Shelby Steele did a documentary What Killed Michael Brown? In it, he coined the term “Political truth” which he defines as “a distortion of the actual truth that we use to sue for leverage and power in the world.” Essentially, poetic truth “is a partisan version of reality, a storyline that we use to put forward our case.” Anyone who disputes the new narrative is accused of complicity with a racist system that governs the nation. That Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is yet another poetic truth, demonstrating that poetic truth is no truth at all. The video embedded in the Substack piece linked above is NSFW. Chauvin is a martyr to mob “justice.” The trial was held in fear of the mob. Both the jury and judge were in fear of the mob. The Minneapolis police department training officer lied on the stand about the use of the kneeling on the shoulder technique to subdue drugged up perps. He claimed it was never used, taught or supported even though it existed in all training materials. As to Floyd himself, he had lethal levels of multiple drugs in his system including fentanyl. He had underlying heart and circulatory conditions. And nobody seemed to care. None of the appeals courts cared including the SCOTUS who looked the other way when Chauvin’s appeal hit their front door. Chauvin is wrongly convicted and will likely die at the hands of the next jailed FBI informant with a shiv.
5. FCC. Speaking of Biden’s flying monkeys, we have the FCC, which rescinded an $886 million subsidy awarded Starlink Dec 2020 after competing in an auction under the first phase of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), a $6 billion pot of money intended to fund rural broadband connectivity. The FCC vote to rescind was 3-2, with all democrats voting to rescind and all Republicans voting not to. The excuse to rescind was that “… the applicant failed to meet its burden to be entitled to the funds.” Apparently, a satellite constellation currently over 5,000 with global broadband coverage is insufficient for these lying skunks. Note that no other applicant has turnkey broadband available right now, today to the 35 locations the FCC democrats claim to care so much about. The war on all things Musk continues much to the detriment of all the rest of us.
6. Starship. As we await the next launch license approval by the bureaucratic speed bumps infesting USF&WS, it appears that SpaceX has at least four and perhaps five stacks ready for the next series of Starship launch tests. The next time around should complete its suborbital path splashing down on the other side of Hawaii. Things are progressing so well that NASA is starting to talk about orbital refueling tests during the series, perhaps as soon as the next flight. Orbital refueling is necessary for their Artemis lunar landing program using Starship. Last week, SpaceX rolled out Starship prototype #28 to the pad. Superheavy #10 was previously rolled out. The two stages will be mated, checked out and the stack readied for their next test, which will hopefully get a little farther than the last one. Musk posted a photo of the High Bay with ships 28, 29, 30, and 32. Ship 31 is not part of the current flow. These are all Version 1 Starships. Version 2 is under construction There are no confirmed Version 2’s sighted as yet, though they have started using parts of Ship 33. SpaceX has to get the Version 1 tests out of the way before they can start flying Version 2. A recent GAO report calling for more oversight by the FAA into SpaceX operations in Texas claimed the FAA investigations were simply photocopies of SpaceX reports on the launches. This means that the delay between tests is entirely Deb Haaland’s Interior speed bumps at USF&WS. Of course, the greens are doing their level best with new court filings demanding complete Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) between tests, their attempt to delay things. Bureaucratic infighting within the Biden regime has heated up a bit with both DoD and NASA coming down strongly in support of SpaceX and Starship. Both agencies need the new capability. As previously noted, we have over 60 years of space launch at Cape Canaveral over a barrier island in Florida with no untoward impact on wild and plant life next to the complex. We have similar data out of Vandenberg, though not as many flights yearly. Any delay by USF&WS will be intentional and based on little more than bureaucratic harassment. We are about to see who has more bureaucratic heft these days: the flying monkeys of DoD and NASA or the green flying monkeys. My guess is that Starship and Superheavy fly sooner rather than later.
More later –
- AG