Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Kamala
2. Hezbollah
3. Smoke
4. Motor
5. Insurance
6. Parts
7. Israel
8. McDonalds
9. Lujan
1. Kamala. Yet another pivot out of the Kamala campaign as they rounded the last turn into the straight away to the final week of the campaign.
- This pivot went into full Hitler, as Trump is Hitler and all his supporters are Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. So much for joy. This is incitement of the first order, as they are literally inviting their brainwashed supporters to put a bullet in Trump and anyone associated with him or supporting him. This will continue following the election whether Trump wins or loses. And should they successfully remove Trump from the playing field, the response will be unpredictable. There will be a response, but nobody has a clue what that response will be other than there will be one.
- The big question is what happened to the Kamala campaign, the one that was about as good as you can get from a persuasion standpoint for the first month. This brainwashing also required lockstep support from the media, which they got. The second thing they did was hide Kamala and Walz from the media to the maximum extent possible. This was a mistake, as neither one of them are good with the media or speaking extemporaneously. Kamala is particularly awful at simply explaining things. Walz lies about everything. Neither spent any time in front of anything other than a completely fawning media, so they have zero experience with anything adversarial. Third thing they did was go for all hoax all the time. This was firmly in place during the DNC convention, about a month after the coup handpicked Kamala as the nominee.
- The great plan was to do a reprise of the Biden COVID basement campaign of 2020. This time around, that all fell apart starting after the convention. Pushback was tentative and gentle but built over time. Over time, it appeared that the basement campaign was a wrong choice, especially with Trump bouncing around the nation 24/7. Two weeks ago, the campaign was sufficiently worried that they trotted Kamala and Walz out to every camera they could get in front of. Because they were out of practice, this didn’t go well and seemed to exacerbate their tactical and strategic problems.
- The collapse of the Kamala campaign will be a fascinating post-mortem, especially if the democrat fraud machine is not successful in winning the election for Kamala and the democrats. How does something that starts out as a world class persuasion (brainwashing) operation crash, burn and die this quickly? Perhaps installing a presidential ticket via coup isn’t a positive lifestyle choice if you want to win an election.
2. Hezbollah. In yet another brilliant military move, Israel targeted Hezbollah’s financial arm. They went so far as to send enterprising Lebanese after $500 million in gold and cash in a bunker under the Al-Sahel Hospital in Beirut. The bunker was a staging area for money imported from Iran used to purchase weapons and war materiel. Of course, much of it went into the pockets of Hezbollah leadership and other insiders. With the announcement, Israel sent the ravening mob after their former masters. In a related story, Israel targeted the Hezbollah financial arm, Al Qard Al Hassan. The attack was military with airstrikes on branches. It was also done electronically, interdicting the ability to transfer and otherwise deal with money from one hand to the other. Hezbollah is now a cash-only business, with Israel sending the population of Lebanon after the cash repository.
3. Smoke. From the land of Things We’ve Always Known comes a story that reinforces the notion that second hand smoke, hyped as deadly by the Clinton EPA during their payoff to trial lawyers who supported them in 1992 is not deadly at all. What a surprise (/sarc). Reason published an extended piece We Were Wrong to Panic About Secondhand Smoke by Geoffrey Kabat last week. Kabat and UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom published as study of environmental tobacco smoke (secondhand smoke) in 2003 that concluded secondhand smoke exposure was not associated with increased mortality. The piece directly contradicted conventional wisdom and was attacked from all sides of the public health community (the same thing they did to COVID skeptics). The attack was intense but as usual failed to provide any specifics as to why it had fatal errors. Twenty years later, the American Cancer Society published a new study that found the actual health risk of secondhand smoke is likely negligible. As the anti-secondhand smoke reaction is completely political, so are reactions to it. The author goes on to note that humans are not good at understanding either the very large or very small risks. This is why the public health community and greens get away with inflating tiny possibilities of personal harm into real world certainty. Keep this in mind when the Public Health apparat demands all sorts of awful responses to the next Global Pandemic. Those demands will be for power over our personal lives and spaces rather than any attempt to give us what we need to make informed decisions.
4. Motor. Interesting boomlet last week about something called an electrostatic motor, an idea first suggested by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. He built a demo version that he called the “electric wheel” that rotated, but with not much power. Nearly 300 years later, a small startup has proposed a version of the electrostatic motor that could potentially improve electric motor efficiencies by up to 80%. As with everything else in the tech world, the promised improvements are rarely the actual ones. Still, in a world with robots (lots of electric motors, though they are called servos) and EV (my guess is that Tesla is going to be around for a while), any improvement in electric motor efficiency is a big deal and not to be ignored. But in perspective, current efficiency for electric motors are in the 15 – 98% range, with 75% being the sweet spot. If you do the math, an 80% improvement in efficiency for a 75% efficient electric motor will pick up 6%, taking you to 81% efficiency, a decent improvement. This is the way we solve all things energy, via incremental improvements over an extended period of time. And it requires absolutely no government intervention at all.
5. Insurance. One of the questions about natural disasters is that of insurance. Specifically, what happens to homeowners’ insurance in a disaster zone. Florida, for instance has grown over the last half century from 6.8 million to over 23 million people, tripling its population. As a result, populated areas which would be hit by a hurricane once a century are now hit once every 20 years or so. This isn’t because there are more hurricanes. Rather, it is because there is far less undeveloped area in the state. Somewhere along the line, the insurance companies will be unable to make enough money to cover rebuilding. Historically, there are only a couple ways to deal with the problem. The most common of these was simply to cancel or refuse to renew insurance, forcing customers to go elsewhere. Sometimes this is covered by governments in the form of subsidized insurance. Flood insurance is one example. Sometimes, as in Cali with the wildfire threat over the last couple decades, they don’t. A second approach is being tried in Florida, by modifying building codes. Babcock Ranch is a new community some 15 NE of Fort Meyers. It wrote building codes that address the problem of the occasional Cat 5 passing through. The building codes require construction to be able to withstand 150 knot winds. Electric lines are buried. They make a big deal about high tech solar farms, which I believe to be a mistake. Flooding is mitigated by building on wetlands which collect excess rainwater. The town was opened in 2018 and is currently planned for just under 20,000 homes, to be completed in 2035. Of course this increases construction costs, but you end up saving in insurance costs. It is possible to harden communities from the elements. The new communities will be easier to do than the older ones. This is an approach to consider.
6. Parts. The Washington Examiner reported last week that an audit of the FBI and DEA found that insiders lifted gun parts intended for destruction from the process, sold them, with the parts ending up in third party manufactured ghost guns. Both agencies were accused of poorly securing pistol parts at the FBI / DEA Training Academy at Quantico. The problem was discovered in 2019 when a barrel and slide from a gun to be destroyed three years earlier ended up as part of a manufactured firearm. The parts came from unsecured barrels of parts destined for destruction in the gun cleaning rooms. That room was accessible to thousands of students, employees and contractors. Both agencies reportedly tightened their security procedures in response. We will see.
7. Israel. In addition to the previously mentioned attack on Hezbollah’s financial infrastructure, Israel had themselves a pretty good week. The only downside was a Hezbollah drone attack on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s home. Nobody was home. Nobody got hurt. There will be more attacks. And there will be return fire. Second piece of good news was the elimination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. He and a group of Hamas leaders were moving from tunnel to tunnel. They came across an Israeli patrol in Rafah. The group scattered, with Sinwar ending up in a damaged second story flat. The patrol sent a drone through a window. Sinwar threw something at the drone. The drone was quickly followed by a tank round which finished him. Sinwar was an unusually effective and bloody leader. Final story out of the Middle East was the US leaking what were described as Israeli war plans for a retaliatory strike on Iran. The leak came out of the US defense / intel community. All the Usual Suspects said things you would expect the Usual Suspects to say. It is unclear if these were Israeli or US work products. My guess is that it could be either. If it was created by the US side, I would expect the papers were intended to do everything humanly possible to keep an Israeli strike on Iran from happening. If it was Israeli work product (Mossad), I would expect the intel workup anticipated a US leak, and was intended for public consumption (little connection to the real world). Either is possible.
8. McDonalds. Funniest photo op of the week was Donald Trump working at McDonalds for a little while on a weekend. Everyone involved had a great time with many photos taken. The franchise tried for equal access, offering Kamala the same opportunity. She declined the honor. The left, as usual following public embarrassment, started reporting an e-coli outbreak at several McDonalds due to bad onions. Payback, thy name is democrat. There is so much of the Trump McDonalds visit that was fun to watch, him working the fry machine, him working the carry out window, photos inside and outside, the smiles all around, and the massive crowd outside. From here, a brilliant PR move. The same weekend, Trump visited a black barbershop in Philly. He did not get a haircut, which would have been fun. Trump also showed up at a Steelers game, much to the delight of fans. His appearance triggered an argument among former Steelers players with several of the remaining 1970s Steelers hating him and more recent Super Bowl winning Steelers loving him.
9. Lujan. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s Executive Order on gun control expired over the weekend and will not be renewed. Her office claims that parts of it will remain active via various memorandums of understanding. At this point, everyone is saying all the expected things about its necessity and public safety and yada, yada, yada. I expect she chose not to extend the EO due to the election being next week. No need to inflame gun owners unnecessarily before a tight election in NM. If she continues true to form, I expect the EO to be renewed later this week depending on how the election in NM goes for democrats.
More later –
- AG