Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Elon
2. Nationalism
3. Garvey
4. Soros
5. Illegals
6. Space
7. Hoaxes
1. Elon. One of the more heinous, corrupt court opinions in recent memory got worse last weekend, when legal teams who got a Delaware state court to toss Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla compensation package like so much garbage a few weeks ago asked for legal fees. How much worse? They are asking the Court to give them $6 billion in Tesla stock, roughly 1% of the total value of the company, as legal fees. In Delaware, legal action becomes little more than a shakedown operation, theft done at the behest of politically connected insiders. The three law firms involved are Berstein, Litowitz, Berger & Grossman, NY, Frieman, Oster & Tejtel, NY, and Andrews & Springer, Wilmington. Note that the case was brought at the behest of a single shareholder who owned 9, count ‘em, 9 shares at the time, roughly $1,700 in valuation as of this morning. Legal fees in shareholder cases are generally awarded on a sliding scale. When the settlement is less than $500 million, fees range 25 – 33% of the total. $500 million – $1 billion, that drops to less than 18%. For cases over $1 billion, that drops to just over 10%, which makes this request quite reasonable (at least for now). Historically, the largest legal fee total awarded was by a Delaware court, $285 million in 2012. Shareholders then recovered over $2 billion. One of the law firms involved in the Tesla case participated in a billion-dollar settlement against Dell last year, which paid $267 in legal fees. Note that there have been and there will be no shareholder recovery in the Tesla case, as Musk will eventually get paid, probably something near what he earned. Unlike other cases in this world, all shareholders made money. All did well. All are happy. Happiest of all are the three law firms eyeing Tesla like a tick would eye a passing mammal, as something to bleed as long as it remains alive. Finally, note the strategy here. They managed to leverage a $1,700 investment into a $6 billion payoff. Once they own Tesla stock, they have standing, and will be able to bring lawfare against Tesla for every single thing Musk (their current target) wants to do until he divests himself of the company. Musk has used his Tesla investment as a foundation for other startups (Grok AI and Tesla Robots, for instance). Tesla stock owned by Musk was also used to purchase Twitter / X. Attack Tesla and Musk’s compensation for making it a success and you seriously hinder his ability to bring new things to market, as you damage him economically, which is what democrats want. Somehow, I don’t think this will go well for the lawfare left, for if the rules no longer apply to them, they won’t apply to anyone else. Somewhere along the line, there will be a more kinetic response to this sort of foolishness. Given that this particular bout of lawfare is costing Tesla shareholders far more money than Elon’s compensation package in terms of stock valuation and future earnings, one could certainly make the case that the three lawfare firms are by definition guilty of the same sort of damage to the shareholders that they accused Musk of committing. How far could such a lawsuit go in Tesla’s newly registered home in Texas (keep the case out of Austin and San Antonio, though)?
2. Nationalism. Last week’s attempt to reframe Christians as Nazis came out of Politico reporterette Heidi Przybyla, in an interview worrying about the rise of what she called Christian Nationalism among Trump supporters. Christian Nationalism is a very clear attempt to call Christians Nazis, as the term is carefully crafted to invoke parallels with National Socialism, which was contracted to Nazi 90 year ago. Evangelicals are among the strongest of all Trump supporters and it should be expected that the left will attempt to find a way to demonize them, their beliefs and remove them from active participants in the political process. What good are closets if we can’t shove our opposition into them? Not having much else to do with her time, Przybyla prattled on about her dislike for Natural Law and the notion that rights come from God in a condescending way only liberals can do well. Her problem is that if rights don’t come from God, where do they come from? From here, there are only two possibilities. On one hand, rights, whatever you may think they are, can only come from Nature, which eventually ends up being whatever God you believe in, essentially something higher than mankind. Or they come from man, which ends up being whatever your government decides you have. It is important to remember that the old Soviet Union had what they touted for half a century as a very modern, scientifically based constitution with hundreds of carefully detailed rights of the Soviet citizen. Fat lot of good that meant to Soviet Man, as the rights were waived and ignored at the drop of a hat. Przybyla was second to this discussion, as CIA mouthpiece Rob Reiner broached the topic in his God & Country documentary last December. The movie was steaming hot mess and did commensurate box office business. Pretty good pushback at least to begin, with Catholic Bishops loudly returning fire against more anti-Christian bigotry. Przybyla backed down a few days later. This is the first round. There will be more as they learn from their A:B testing.
3. Garvey. There was bit of a boomlet last week in hope that former baseball legend Steve Garvey’s run for US Senate as a Republican might actually get him elected. He is polling pretty well so far. Before our hopes are dashed once again in Cali, perhaps a reminder is in order. Today, the polls of likely voters have Garvey at 13%, while democrats Adam Schiff and Katie Porter poll at 21% and 17% respectively. Democrat Barbara Lee polls at 9%. Another 40% are closely divided between all others and undecided. Note that Cali runs a jungle primary, with the top two making the runoff. As of today, that pair is likely to be Schiff and Porter. Garvey is doing well so far. My guess is that if he makes the runoff, he will lose in the 60 – 40% to 70 – 30% range. Don’t like it. But do expect it.
4. Soros. One of the awful things over the last decade has been the rise of the Soros prosecutor, an elected official whose election campaign was funded by billionaire George Soros. These people are invariably soft on crime, political in their prosecutions (leftys walk while they throw the book at Republicans and other conservatives), generally corrupt (Letitia James and Fani Willis living high on campaign and public money) and leading the anti-Republican lawfare fight. While I am not condoning what they are doing, indeed, as I believe them to be terribly destructive of the Rule of Law, I can understand what they are doing at some level. If you think of their actions as a normal response to their environment, they do make a certain amount of sense. These people are products of constant media brainwashing. Their information flow is siloed. They never, ever hear anything from the Other Side. They have been told every single second of their lives over the last decade or two that Trump is Hitler and his supporters are Nazis, racists and worse. And if you have access to the tools of power (the legal system) with the ability to take out Hitler, would you not use those tools? There are few people who wouldn’t. For this reason alone, every single Soros prosecutor must be politically destroyed and removed from office, because they are like the Terminator. They will not stop. They will not show mercy. They will do everything humanly possible to complete their assigned mission of killing Hitler and Hitler’s supporters which am us.
5. Illegals. Interesting turn last week as the problem of Venezuelan gang violence became nationwide news, much to the distress of Biden’s media gatekeepers. Trigger for this was the murder of Georgia student Laken Riley out for a run on campus. Turns out that Venezuelan dictator Maduro took a page out of Castro’s Mariel boatlift days by emptying his prisons of all criminals other than political prisoners, sending the criminals to the US where they set up shop. The first national story on these new gangs took place in NYC where a Venezuelan gang beat a pair of NY police officers. Soros DA Alvin Bragg had released them back onto the streets after initial arrests. After the beating, they fled the state, ending up in Arizona, where some of them were arrested. The local DA refused to extradite them back to NYC citing Bragg’s earlier release. This criminal activity is going to grow and end up being too ugly for the media to cover up. National democrats will have no answer to the problem as it worsens.
6. Space. It was a good week in space, with two lunar probes and return of a commercial capsule to earth. I have long thought that we are entering a really fun time in space, as costs are under attack and many, many non-governmental entities are starting to do interesting things off planet. The more of these we get, the more capable we will be off planet and the quicker it all goes.
- Intuitive Machines IM-1 Odysseus lander which successfully landed on the moon Feb 22. This is the first American landing on the moon since Apollo 17 50 years ago. The $116 million tech demo was another commercial bus carrying an array of smaller commercial payloads. There was some problems with its radar altimeter during landing and it ended up landing harder than it should have, with a sideways drift. The landing partly collapsed a leg, tilting it 30° from the vertical which led to communications difficulties after landing. All five active payloads returned data. IM-1 is the first of what will be several landers from Intuitive Machines.
- Varda space capsule returned to earth Feb 21. This capsule was a first attempt by Varda to get into the business of manufacturing pharmaceuticals in space. The mission was over months ago, but they could get no agreement from the feds on the use of a landing site. They were denied permission by both DoD and the FAA due to so-called safety concerns. My guess was that the pharmaceutical corporations who completely own the FDA these days dropped a dime and asked for obstruction. The capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range west of Salt Lake City. Once again, this is Varda’s first attempt. If they can figure out how to make money from their efforts, there will be more of them. The capsule recorded its descent and landing on video with sound. An edited version of the entire 0+27 ride can be found below.
7. In order to appreciate the enormity of what the Deep State, democrats and their mouthpieces in the media have subjected us to, a review of the various Russia hoaxes is in order. The following list comes from Chronicle, Feb 23. You don’t do this many Russia hoaxes unless they work, which is why they are ramping them up for the 2024 campaign year once again. Note that everything in 2016 has the Hilly campaign, FBI and Intel community fingerprints on them.
More later –
- AG