Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Felon
2. DEI
3. Dock
4. Fauci
5. Probing
6. Flag
7. Bioprocessor
1. Felon. To nobody’s surprise, former President Trump was found guilty by a Manhattan jury of all 34 felony counts arrayed against him. Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention. I expect Judge Merchan’s election interference to continue with a sentence of either house arrest or actual jail. When jailed, Trump will join other famous felons like Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandella and Dr Martin Luther King. A few observations and predictions for your consideration:
- Expect the verdict to be immediately appealed. Depending on which group of judges Trump draws (and I expect the appeal to be gamed by NY courts just as badly as judicial selection for his trials was), this may take a while. The more women, less successful his appeal will be. The more black women, even worse. Depending on whose list you believe, there may be as many as 20 reversible errors intentionally made by Merchan. Most egregious was his failure to tell Trump what crime he was being charged with for the entire six-week trial. This lasted right up to the prosecution’s closing where they claimed the underlying crime was a federal campaign finance violation. This leads directly to the second, which is that states do not have jurisdiction to try federal crimes. The felonies were committed in 2017 for an election held in 2016. Merchan did not allow the defense to present witnesses, yet they allowed prejudicial testimony from Stormy Daniels who opined at length and in lurid detail about sexual trysts with Trump that she denied in writing at least five times. There are more, but you get the idea.
- Over the weekend, Alan Dershowitz was critical of the Trump legal team for failing to preserve actions in the trial record that would be useful upon appeal. We will see how important this is.
- In the interest of an early round of messenger shooting, Judge Merchan is an immigrant from Columbia. His father was a military intelligence officer. I always note any connections with the intel community on these sorts of things. Merchan, supposedly randomly selected presided over three Trump-related trials. He orchestrated guilty convictions on all three trials. The first of these was the Trump Organization CFO trial in 2022. The second was Steve Bannon fraud and money laundering last year. Finally, the 2024 trial of Trump himself. The odds of him being randomly selected to all three trials is something over 15,000:1.
- Reaction in Trump world was swift, with a record bump in fund raising, nearly $35 million in the first 6 hours after the verdict. This tailed off to $78 million after 48 hours. The traffic was so great it crashed the fundraising website for a while Thursday. Trump seems to relish wearing the outlaw, felon, bad boy label. It is playing very well among the young, particularly among young minority men.
- For his part, Dementia Hitler made remarks Friday, demanding the will of the jury be respected. In response to a shouted question about Trump being a political prisoner. Biden said nothing but did turn and respond with one of the nastier grins I’ve seen in a while. It is the occasional response like this that makes me wonder how much of the dementia presentation is an act, as he can occasionally dredge up his inner nastiness at precisely the right time and right place. Biden has always been a nasty piece of work. Dementia is stripping all the outside layers, the layers that softened the interior, the carefully constructed Grandpa Joe / Scranton Joe / Amtrack Joe persona, laying the underlying, fundamental petty ugliness at his core bare for all to see. And it’s not a pretty picture.
- What does this mean for the next 6 months? Expect one of the nastiest political seasons since Grover Cleveland’s third campaign in 1892 where Republicans ran on Cleveland’s illegitimate child “Maw, Maw, where’s my paw?” Democrats responded with “Gone to the White House, haw, haw, haw.” So much for reasoned discussion of the issues (/sarc). Trump looks pretty good at this point. Republican congressional and senate candidates, not so much. Steve Bannon ripped the Trump campaign last week for not being active in a large number of states. If true, this is a problem. We will be in the fog of war part of the election for the rest of the year. Time to buck up and get to work.
- Final thought is what sort of payback do we on the political right need to inflict on those involved in this? There are many possibilities, but whatever happens needs to be so brutal and complete that the left will never again consider walking this path for decades. Democrats are taking this nation down a deadly path. One of the stories floating around describes the fall of the Roman Republic after Ceasar crossed the Rubicon 49 BC. Politics devolved at the time to the point where governors, generals and other high officials were regularly tried after they left office. Sometimes they were executed. Most times, they were stripped of their property and sent into exile, great thanks for decades of public service. Ceasar was next in line. Unfortunately for the Roman Senate, he had an army with him, not unlike what Andrew Jackson built behind him after the 1824 election. Where would I start? Massive criminal RICO cases against every single democrat, NGO and lawfare participant over the last decade. Failure to do so will only encourage the Bad Actors to act worse. Failure to punish democrats for doing this will end up with the return of the Vigilance Committees. Do we really want to go there?
2. DEI. Given the breathtaking incompetence of both the Dementia Hitler administration and his reelection campaign, one might wonder how or if they can get their act together. Better yet, why the incompetence? I would submit that the explanation is simple: DEI. When you hire exclusively based on race, sex and related qualities while ignoring simple competence, you end up with incompetence, breathtaking, stunning, teeth rotting incompetence. And those incompetents like their gravy train. A lot. Should Biden get reelected, this won’t reverse itself. It will get worse. And yes, it can get worse.
3. Dock. Speaking of incompetence, we have DoD’s resupply floating dock constructed on the Gaza shore with the Mediterranean. The dock lasted a whole week before breaking apart, sinking and beaching itself on the sand during high seas and winds. Perhaps it will be easier next time to air drop the $320 million it cost to build it instead. During its useful lifetime, the only thing the dock did was make it easier for Hamas to steal aid shipments into Gaza. I expect the loggies in the Pentagon told the regime the dock was a bad idea. I also expect they were told to sit down and shut up, which they did. The Perfumed Princes running things got the outcome they created. Congratulations to yet another example of American military incompetence. In a related story, we may have the reason that the regime didn’t want Israel to invade Rafah and clean out the remaining Hamas forces. They reportedly discovered at least 50 tunnels under the Egypt – Gaza border, some of them large enough to drive trucks through. They also found US weapons stockpiled on the Gaza side. That part of Egypt is run by a family member of Egyptian President El Sisi. That family member figured out how to make himself a lot of money trading with Hamas. He is also trading American-supplied military aid to Egypt with Hamas. Unknown at this time is the level of involvement with El Sisi himself. My guess is that it is a non-zero number. This is a disappointment as El Sisi was painted at least for a time as one of the reasonable local players.
4. Fauci. As of this writing, former NIAID head Anthony Fauci is testifying in front of a House committee on his actions during COVID. It is not going well for him. Part of the questioning will be based on testimony by senior NIH advisor Dr David Morens 10 days ago, who acknowledged deleting e-mails, records on the origins of COVID, setting up and using an illegal back channel to dodge FOIA records requests. NIH counsel was involved, ordering the FOIA office to not release anything having to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The internal coverup started almost as soon as COVID broke out and was well established by June 2020. Fauci was in the middle of this as was former NIH head Dr Francis Collins. Morens spent a lot of time claiming he didn’t know what was in the deleted e-mails, no involvement in grants, generally claiming that nothing untoward happened. What remains paints a picture of a government-orchestrated coverup which fed directly into the Censorship Industrial Complex censorship of all criticism aimed at COVID. The leadership of all federal public health created this problem and actively conspired to cover that fact up. At the same time, they simply made up recommended responses (masking, 6-foot separation, closing schools, 2-week time out, etc) out of thin air as they went. They then labeled all pushback as misinformation and actively conspired to destroy anyone with the temerity to push back or suggest another approach.
5. Probing. Much has been made of the large number of single military age men crossing the border over the last few years. The estimated 30,000 Chinese is particularly concerning. If you were a Bad Actor, what would those people be doing? One thing would be to start probing defenses at US military bases. Last weeks’ news that US Navy base security is catching and evicting an increasing number of foreign nationals, particularly Chinese citizens at the rate of 2-3 times/week. The Chinese are all illegals, who appear to have marching orders. Suspicious drone overflights are also an increasing problem and will continue to worsen as drone costs fall. In a related story, a Special Ops Colonel shot a Chechen on his rural property outside of Fort Bragg (Liberty) on May 3. The first guy was photographing his kids. A second Chechen was detained and released. They were both dressed as utility workers. Neither had tools, authorization or ID. The first guy started acting aggressively. On the same day, a pair of Jordanians tried to breach Quantico. The Colonel saw the guys on his property several times before and set up cameras to video them. The utility company has several eastern Europeans working for them. Sleeper cell?
6. Flag. We spoke about the orchestrated hit aimed at SCOTUS Justice Alito over flags flown by his wife last week. Fallout of these stories is occasionally entertaining. The second flag flown over Alito’s vacation home was a Revolutionary War Appeal to Heaven pine tree flag. Media fell all over themselves reporting it as a far right, fascist, awful thing. As it turns out, the flag was popular among a wide swath of Americans. We discover last week that the city of San Francisco had been flying it in front of City Hall for at least 60 years. They quietly removed it following the Alito controversy. The flag was flown over a small fleet outfitted by George Washington in 1775 and flew as the maritime flag of Massachusetts 1776 – 1971.
7. Bioprocessor. Anyone else remember when dystopian movies and stories were supposed to be cautionary tales rather than guidebooks? Last week, a Swiss startup launched an online platform that provides remote access to 16 human brain organoids. The platform is described as wetware, a combination of hardware, software and biology. Each chip houses chunks of living brain tissue, organoids, 3D masses of cellular brain tissue. The good news is adding the wetware seems to significantly decrease power requirements to power the processor. Claims of a millionth the amount of power for similarly powered chips are tossed around like so much confetti. The bad news is that the wetware wears out after a few hours and has to be replaced. The company believes that will grow to 100 days. One of the great concerns about massive computing is the requirement for even greater for amounts of new power. Cutting these new requirements by multiple orders of magnitude is a really big deal. Whether we can do this without growing a modern version of the Matrix is something else entirely. Color me wary.
More later –
- AG