Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Concertina
2. SLIM
3. DEI
4. Abortion
5. Trudeau
6. DeWitt
7. Pipe Bombs
8. Hacking
1. Concertina. Big news this week out of Texas, where the SCOTUS removed a Fifth Circuit Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) keeping Border Patrol from cutting razor wire (concertina) protecting the border in the vicinity of Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. Predictably, the fecal matter hit the rotating machinery, led by the democrat cheerleaders in the media pushing for an overreaction / incident in Texas to give the regime an excuse for all they are worth.
- Texas and the Dementia Hitler regime are in an old-fashioned Mexican standoff over the wire after Border Patrol officers cut the wire to allow illegals to cross into Texas where they were released to run wild for a couple weeks. Texas took control of a local park used as a crossing point and ejected the feds. Feds took the mess to federal court where they lost the original case, followed by the Fifth Circuit issuing a TRO against them. Feds appealed to the SCOTUS who quickly issued an opinion lifting the TRO by a 5-4 majority. All women plus Chief Justice Roberts voted for the regime. As of this writing, the wire remains.
- Media spun the SCOTUS opinion as a stunning victory for the regime. This reporting was completely fraudulent, lying about what actually happened. John Lucas writing in Bravo Blue dug into the opinion and what it actually said, noting that nothing in the opinion deprives Texas from the right to protect its property. Lucas notes that the district court made numerous factual findings showing the feds acted improperly. The Fifth Circuit issued the TRO, finding that sovereign immunity did not shield the feds from the claim of trespass. SCOTUS vacated the TRO. The impact of vacating it is what was intentionally misreported. There is no court order prohibiting the feds from removing the wire. There is no court order allowing them to do so. There is no court order saying Texas cannot protect its own property.
- Texas responded with a Constitutional argument allowing Texas to protect its sovereignty when the feds refuse to do so, an argument likely crafted by Ken Paxton, reminding one and all why the dems and Texas RINOs wanted to remove him from office. 25 states quickly signed up to support Texas. The map of those states look an awful lot like the Trump maps of the last two election cycles. Many are expecting the regime to federalize Texas National Guard troops, an action they have not yet taken though may be sufficiently arrogant to do.
- The only punitive action taken by the regime was a “temporary” halt to natural gas exports, a move couched in all the expected environmental climate change language, but a move accurately described as a punitive assault on the economy of Texas by the gangster government of this regime. Nice little economy you have there, would be a shame if anything happened to it. Most natural gas is exported out of Texas and Louisiana.
- Where do we go from here? On one path, the regime and the Senate are pushing hard for an immigration bill that they wrongfully claim will solve the problem, yet another lie. There is significant pushback against that legislation. The House is working an impeachment of Mayorkas himself for refusing to do his job. Our hope is that nobody do anything stupid as the pressure is increasing on all sides. Expect immigration and the open border to be a huge issue for Republicans this election cycle, that is, unless the regime can successfully trigger a shooting war.
2. SLIM. The latest lunar probe, Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) successfully landed on the moon last week. There was a problem when solar panels on the craft weren’t receiving sunlight. Power was shut down a couple hours after landing to conserve battery. My initial guess was that it landed on a rock and tilted over. Mission controllers figured if they waited a few days for the sun angle to shift, they would get power back. They were right, as solar power was restored over the weekend, 9 days after landing. Like Astrobotic’s Peregrine a couple weeks ago, this lander was also a technology demo, carrying an array of small, smart technologies. These sorts of tech demos are important as they are not ends, rather they are means and there will be more to follow. One of those technologies was the ability to land in a precise location, within a few tens of yards, which was successful. Two other technologies were a pair of small rovers, one with wheels and one ball shaped. A rover took a photo of the lander and found why the solar cells weren’t charging. The entire craft was upside down, with thrusters pointed toward the sky. About the same time that photo was received, JAXA, the Japanese version of NASA, released a photo taken during descent showing one of the thruster nozzles detaching, making the final bit of the descent unstable, tumbling the lander. Pretty impressive that it survived what should have been a rough landing. As usual, space is hard, but the more failures we deal with, the more we will be able to deal with. As an aside, one of the reasons SpaceX has been successful is that they came to the conclusion that hardware is cheap while manpower is expensive, meaning they don’t mind breaking stuff as long as they learn from that failure and correct it. This is opposite what NASA has done over the last half century, and one of the reasons NASA is no longer capable of serious manned space exploration.
3. DEI. Ran across rationale for the massive DEI shops in academia and industry. These operations are completely outsized in relation to anything associated with the core mission of businesses and academia. One could logically come to the conclusion that DEI has been ensconced as the top-level goal / mission for businesses and academia. And the way the DEI shops are swinging their weight around would tend to support that conclusion. There is another reason for them being outsized. That reason is the nature of DEI bean counting itself. DEI is predicated on the notion that racial / sexual numbers everywhere must reflect what they are society-wide. Yes, I know the basic fallacy with that, but please play along for a bit. If your rationale is to pump up the newly important numbers artificially, what better place to do that than the DEI shop where you can hire unqualified minorities and give them nothing to do. The DEI shop numbers count against the overall totals without infecting the rest of your operation with the DEI cancer. Problem with this approach is that the DEI shops have been given authority far in excess to the value they bring to any organization, which is ultimately death to future success.
4. Abortion. More confirmation that the Dementia Hitler reelection campaign will campaign on abortion as one of the primary issues came last week in two ways. The first Dementia Hitler campaign ad was about abortion and his first campaign speech last week was about abortion. Republicans at all levels best be ready for it and have a decent response. This isn’t that hard.
5. Trudeau. A Canadian court found that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act, their anti-terrorism law against the trucker protest in 2022 was unconstitutional, which is too little and too late a mere two years after Trudeau used the law to blow up the protest, personally and financially attacking the participants and their supporters. Trudeau was urged to use the Act by the Dementia Hitler regime, likely as a test run for what they are currently doing and plan to do to Trump supporters, Catholics and conservatives during this election cycle. Note that both the Canadian media and the Trudeau controlled government served as cheerleaders for his action during the protest and defending it to the hilt afterwards. It took two solid years for a single judge to stick his head above the water. As with dirty elections here in the US, the courts aren’t the place to fight this, which is yet another reason we have guns.
6. DeWitt. Arizona GOP Party Chairman Jeff DeWitt resigned last week following release of audio in which he tried to get Kari Lake to drop out of the US Senate race in Arizona offering her a high paying job or pure cash. Lake recorded the conversation and released it to the media. DeWitt resigned shortly after the audio was released. The audio was made Mar 2023, 10 months ago. Lake, reprising her reporter-ette background illegally recorded and then dropped the audio at a time and place of her own choosing where it would do her the most good, likely hoping it would give her a leg up in her campaign for the US Senate against Krysten Sinema. But a funny thing happened on her way to a surefire win on this. Support for her following the resignation ended up being pretty soft, with a county sheriff with experience in border issues gaining unexpected strength among party regulars.
7. Pipe Bombs. One of the continuing mysteries out of Jan 6 is the pair of inoperative pipe bombs placed at RNC and DNC headquarters. The very same FBI that has hunted down protesters in the crowd but never in the building, showing up with SWAT teams at their homes, making arrests, and spiriting them to solitary in the DC Gulag have been singularly unable to hunt down and arrest the bozo who placed the bombs, though they’ve had video in hand for the past three years. To reiterate, they have this bozo on video. They also have video of the guy who “found” the weapons notifying Capital Police who don’t do anything for a minute or two before moving to investigate. The FBI has so far been entirely silent on the case, as have the Capitol Police, though they claim it has top priority. Tucker Carlson did an interview with someone claiming it was an inside job, with both the FBI and Capitol Police in on it. From here, it looks like the pipe bombs were Plan B (or C) in case of what they were orchestrating on Capitol Hill didn’t work as hoped for. The lack of overwhelming law enforcement response to placement of the devices once they were notified is also damning.
8. Hacking. U of Michigan Computer Science prof JA Halderman demonstrated how easy it is to hack a Dominion voting machine in federal court in Atlanta last week. He borrowed a pen, rebooted the machine, pressed the side of the machine, put it into safe mode, and was able to change the vote totals on the machine. It was a powerful demonstration in an election integrity trial by election integrity activists against Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger. Halderman wrote a 96-page Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices that the Federal District Court unsealed in Jun 2023, after Raffensberger hid it from the public for two solid years. The presiding judge played along and sealed the results of the investigation until last week. The report concluded that vote totals can be altered on Dominion voting machines. Raffensberger has long opposed all Trump claims of shady elections in Georgia. I had thought that it was some combination of old-fashioned bureaucratic backside covering and Trump hatred. But with this demonstration, there may be something else going on, and Raffensberger might be one of the dirtiest politicians on Our Side of the political divide. Perhaps it is time to follow the money and find out who is paying him. Two final thoughts: First is that these results ought to worry Dominion a bit, as they are still out there with multiple defamation lawsuits aimed at silencing and punishing critics. Second is an observation on voting machines. Why do we have them? Why were they developed, as their adoption seems to bring more election integrity issues into play than any positive fallout of their ability to improve election efficiency. A cynic would suggest that voting machines were developed to assist the CIA in overturning foreign governments when we needed to do so by diddling their elections. And now that technology has been aimed squarely at us here in the US.
More later –
- AG