Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Debate
2. Springfield
3. Memes
4. FAA
5. Polaris Dawn
1. Debate. The first and probably (hopefully?) only presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump took place last week. It ended up being a return to Trump’s early days in pro wrestling, where it was him in the ring against the world as the Baby Face, with both moderators going into full and complete Candy Crowley mode, fact checking him often incorrectly, multiple times while ignoring everything Kamala had to say. Kamala’s goal was to get under his skin, something she did well. At the end, it appeared that it was initially scored as a tie, which ends up going Kamala’s way. The Kamala campaign ended their night with a pre-packaged, coordinated Taylor Swift endorsement.
- Before I begin describing the debate, one comment on both campaigns. Their persuasion skills, chops, execution are both superb, perhaps the best ever seen across the board from both sides in a presidential election year. The problem is that the Republicans have an actual candidate. The democrats don’t.
- Kamala’s strategy was to go into hoax overload, something Trump seems to have a difficulty responding to this cycle. He gets irritated and defensive, which allows her to go Brat Pack, Mean Girl, smirking and laughing to play without any pushback. Add to that the pair of biased ABC moderators who continuously cut off Trump and even had the temerity to fact check him at least seven times (they blew a number of the fact checks too), while Kamala was allowed to say and do whatever she wanted to do for the duration of the debate.
- Turns out that there are close family connections between the head of ABC News and the Kamala family. Apparently, the female moderator was one of Kamala’s sorority sisters. It looks like Kamala either had the debate questions in advance or knew what was coming when each question was asked. I won’t chase the Kamala wireless earring conspiracy theory, other than to note that she certainly likes to flaunt her jewelry.
- The first oddity following the end of the debate was a near instant call from the Kamala campaign for another debate, ostensibly to cement in her win. Perhaps something else. One thing about kiddie wars (which is what Kamala is playing with her Junior High brat pack / mean girl persona) is that the winner never, ever calls for a rematch. And if she won such a convincing victory, why the immediate call for a rematch? Trump dithered a bit before flatly turning down a second debate over the weekend.
- Hoax overload is a version of flooding the zone, used in football, sending more receivers into a zone than the defense has people available to cover them. Hoax overload also works because the Kamala campaign knows the media will never fact check them. Trump has been effectively neutered in response because he has been framed for nearly a decade as a liar, so if he identifies something as a lie, he is by definition non credible having been framed as a liar. In this, we are all effectively siloed, with neither side able to break out of their silo. Finally, Trump is the only one who can break the silo.
- What to do? One approach would be to set up a resource that anyone can use to debunk the hoaxes. The media’s weakness in all this is that the only thing they care about is someone who does something in a whole new way or uses a completely new process. They simply can’t help themselves to report it. One such solution is The American Debunk. The secret sauce here is not calling out the hoaxes as being hoaxes but going the next step and showing the reader how these hoaxes were created, how they were built. It is that secret sauce that will force the media to cover this. An example graphic from the site is embedded below.
- Once you get some percentage of the public looking at the hoax list (which has been around for a while) but most importantly, how those hoaxes were created, we are in the persuasion realm of thinking past the sale, a powerful technique about to be used by the Trump side of the argument.
- As of this writing, it appears that the Kamala campaign dropped the Taylor Swift endorsement as an act of desperation. It came whistling in after the debate was over, with the clear intention of closing the deal. Trump’s eventual response was to tweet that he hated Taylor Swift.
- From here, this looks a lot like a turnout election, where there just aren’t all that many people left to decide. Whichever side turns out their supporters will win in November. So, get busy guys, as you know what to do.
2. Springfield. The most interesting part of the debate was the discussion of the problems of dumping 20,000 Haitians in a small midwestern town of 60,000, Springfield, OH. Over the last few weeks, we have been treated to all manner of wild stories about the Haitians hunting, killing and eating dogs, cats, ducks and geese on local lakes. At least one photo made the rounds of a Haitian carrying a dead Canadia Goose apparently killed on a local lake. A lot us with negative real life experiences with Canadian Geese (1995 AWACS crash at Elmendorf) would view this as a positive lifestyle choice, but that is a topic for another discussion. Hunting local wildlife by newcomers is not all that uncommon, as we had a group of Great White Hunters take down a bull moose just off a parking lot at Flattop above Anchorage a decade or so ago. The moose was in an area closed to hunting and these bozos got out of their vehicle and shot it. Fish and Game was called and they had to dress it after getting their firearms confiscated. The problem as always is that the white guy idiots go to jail while the Haitians don’t. I don’t think there is a wholesale hunting of cats and dogs going on, but I do believe there is some. It is the birds that are at much greater risk overall. OTOH, when you import 20,000 Haitians, you will import a non-zero number of them who practice voodoo, a relatively common religion in Haiti which does require animal sacrifice. Another way to look at this would be to note that we here in the US don’t typically eat pets, something that is relatively common practice in other parts of the world, like Haiti. Not only do they eat dogs and cats in Haiti, but they also eat the occasional human. Take a look at the recent antics of a Haitian Warlord who calls himself Barbeque. Usually, in these sorts of events, the follow the money filter is generally the most useful. Not a lot of explanation as yet about who is getting the federal money to take the Haitians in. Linked ThreadReader stream may be the first of many additional stories. This one isn’t all that charitable to either the Springfield Mayor or Governor DeWine.
3. Memes. Now that Trump accused illegals of hunting cats, dogs, ducks and geese during the debate, the media went into complete defensive mode, doing their level best to slap down all Trumpian claims. Their problem is that the claims quickly morphed into Trump defending your pets, ducks and geese, powerful visual persuasion. Why? Because Haitians actually eat dogs, cats and other wildlife in their daily lives in Haiti, along with the occasional human (long pig). If you import tens to hundreds of thousands of them into the US without acculturation, what could you possibly expect them to do after they get here? This, in turn unleashed a veritable tsunami of memes with Trump protecting and defending pets, ducks, geese, all manner of fuzzy, cuddly critters. That tsunami was fueled by a creative explosion that still continues, infuriating the left, mostly because they have been completely unable to blunt the flow. The memes are funny, and all paint Trump as the savior and protector of small, furry (and feathery) creatures nationwide. It’s almost like those on the Trump side of the conversation made a decision, a choice. They used to want Trump to win. After the choice, they are going to whatever they need to do to make him win, even if they have to drag him over the finish line in November. Note the negative feedback loop here, where every single time the left claims that Springfield Haitians are not eating household pets, they instantly trigger a Trump response saying yes, they are, forcing a prove it round. And the left is particularly awful in the prove-it game, relying on lockstep media reportage to kill off all opposition responses.
4. FAA. We are about to regulate our way into losing all competitive advantage we formerly held as Americans. Example today, is the FAA, which was empowered by congress to come up with a regulatory / licensing regime that would allow commercial companies to develop space hardware that would allow NASA / DoD / Intel community to reach national goals set by congress. What they came up with instead, was a regulatory regime that all but guarantees nothing will get done. This is similar to what we’ve seen out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), given the authority to license reactors for commercial and other uses in the late 1950s. They very quickly got it in their heads that licensing was their reason for existence, and the longer they could draw out the licensing process, the longer they could stay in business, which is one of the reasons we don’t have power reactors in every single county in the nation. The FAA was given licensing authority in FAR Part 450. This was supposed to streamline licensing of flight hardware during development. Instead, they have interpreted the licensing regime they were told to create as a hard shackle on the aerospace companies (particularly SpaceX), where any change in the terms of a previously issued license for a subsequent flight requires a reopening of the original license complete with all the environmental yammering that goes along with that. For instance, in response to SpaceX desire to bring Booster back to the launch site and recover it for the fifth test flight, they decided they want to study the environmental impact of sonic booms as Booster approaches the launch and recovery tower. This is despite everyone’s knowledge from Day One that SpaceX was going to do precisely that quickly in their development. Result? A test that has been on the pad, ready to go since the first week in August will have to wait until late November, four solid months from its planned launch date. FAA was blasted in a House hearing Tuesday. The only testimony in defense was the FAA deputy administrator responsible for the new process blaming the delay on SpaceX changing the test profile. Initial response to the bureaucratic speed bump was to blame it on WH animus and hatred for Elon Musk. I started there but have come to believe it is simple bureaucratic inertia, where it is always easier to say no than yes, because the former ensures you retain your job while the latter will get you fired if anything untoward happens. In Al Kelly’s (Pogo cartoonist) words: We have met the enemy and he is us.
5. Polaris Dawn. All is not lost in commercial space, as when the FAA can manage to keep its sorry carcass out of the way, SpaceX is capable of doing some quite impressive things. The most recent of these was the Polaris Dawn mission, a commercial manned flight in a Dragon. The flight was planned as a 5-day affair with four astronauts. The launch put them in an elliptical orbit. Dragon increased its apogee to 1,400 km the following day. This was the farthest people had been from earth since Apollo 17 half a century ago. The Dragon lowered its orbit the following day, depressurized the capsule and put two of the astronauts outside of the capsule on an EVA. As there is no airlock, all four astronauts were protected from space by their suits. The capsule returned to earth on Day 5 of the mission, Sept 15. The Polaris set of commercial missions is intended to cross the dividing line between manned missions on the Falcon 9 and manned missions with Starship. The final Polaris mission is intended to be the first manned Starship mission. The middle mission is much less well defined, aimed at expanding the boundaries of human spaceflight, inflight communications (which Polaris Dawn did) and scientific research.
More later –
- AG