Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. TikTok
2. Dutch
3. Indictment
4. Vindman
5. Majority
6. 3D
7. Geopolymer
8. Insects
9. Monuments
1. TikTok. The House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled the TikTok CEO last week. It didn’t go well for TikTok and their CCP masters despite bringing along a rent-a-mob of protesters to support them. Questions were brutal, prepared and pointed. Responsive answers were few and far between. The CEO did his best FBI Director obfuscation routine, bobbing and weaving like outclassed fighter hoping not to be utterly destroyed by the next inbound. Clearly, the CCP chose the right guy. It looks like there is growing bipartisan support in congress for legislation to ban TikTok nationwide. My guess is that the legislation will pass and that Biden, financially in the pockets of the CCP will veto it and that veto will be overridden. The problem with a TikTok ban is not the estimated mostly young users, rather it is its power as a persuasion tool aimed squarely at the US operated by the CCP. There is a tool in the application called the heat button that will cause something, anything to instantly go viral. Data about users is collected, analyzed, and used by anyone connected to or controlling the company. And the way business operates in China these days, everything belongs to the CCP, and they operate at the discretion and in full cooperation and support of the CCP. Whatever goes into TikTok from their users can, will and is used by the CCP to further their geopolitical goals, making this persuasion tool an existential national threat to our young. In response to the hearing, we started hearing congressional opposition, all of it from democrats starting with Jamaal Brown (D, NY). AOC herself weighed in support of TikTok Friday. Even Liz Warren (D, MA) is a defender. None of the defenders mention the use of TikTok as a persuasion tool, which is its most serious national threat. Over the weekend, FNC reported that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance funneled $150,000 each into the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses. TikTok congressional defenders are bought, paid for, and we have the receipts. Did they also donate to Warren’s Indigenous Caucus (should that exist)? ByteDance also contributed to the Asian Pacific Institute for Congressional Studies and the Ripon Society last summer. Nothing like covering all your bases before the fecal matter hits the rotating machinery. As this plays out, we will see quite quickly whose loyalty and support have been purchased by the CCP and who has not.
2. Dutch. Elections in the Netherlands brought what has been described as a stunning surprise when the Boer – Burger Beweging (BBB) or Farmer – Citizen Movement won 16 – 17 seats of the 75 seat Dutch Senate with around 20% of the vote. The party formed four years ago, in response to the Dutch government assault on farming. That assault was in response to harsh EU-inspired limits on nitrogen emissions (think fertilizer). The Dutch green party came in second in the election, which sets up a real interesting organizational discussion. Given that the Netherlands is a parliamentary system, it is entirely possible that the farmers get screwed as the new coalitions are set up. But a political earthquake of this magnitude is hard to ignore, despite the best efforts of the ruling coalition to do so. Congratulations to the Dutch farmers. This is a good start. Please do not let it be a finish.
3. Indictment. Biggest political story of the week was the pending indictment and arrest of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Bragg is a Soros-backed district attorney (same office as the DA in Law and Order), who specifically campaigned on indicting Trump for something, anything. He has been holding Grand Jury sessions in an attempt to get an indictment. Appears that the charge will be a highly creative interpretation of federal election law, claiming that Trump’s payment to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 used campaign money. The charge is a good 7 years past the payment and 4-5 years past the expiration of the statute of limitations for the charge. Rather than let the entire mess fester, Trump announced a week ago that he was going to be indicted and arrested (perp walk and all) allowing himself to get ahead of the news cycle. At that point the political left went into ecstasy while the political right went into DEFCON 1. Interestingly enough, a growing number of legal experts with no love of Trump started weighing in on the weakness of Bragg’s case and the injustice of it all. By midweek, the entire case blew up with release of a document by Michael Cohen’s former lawyer. Cohen was convicted in 2018 on five counts of tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and campaign finance violations. He took a plea bargain. During that journey, Cohen wrote a letter claiming that the payment to Daniels was entirely his own doing without the knowledge or involvement of Trump. It is that letter plus Cohen telling anyone who would bother to listen to him that he would say and do anything to stay out of jail that cratered Bragg’s Grand Jury. And it is Cohen who is Bragg’s star witness. In response to the letter, Bragg called off Grand Jury deliberations for the rest of last week. They are scheduled to meet today. In parallel, House Judiciary demanded Bragg come testify, something he has refused to do. We will see if Merrick Garland treats him the same way he treated Trump people who refused to participate in Pelosi led show trials over the last couple years. My guess is no orchestrated FBI raid broadcast on CNN. Politically, Trump has played this perfectly. The only thing backfiring on him is personal attacks on DeSantis, which did not go over well in Waco over the weekend. Elon Musk noted that if Trump was criminally charged, he would be reelected in a landslide.
4. Vindman. Question of the week: Is there anything associated with Ukraine that is not a democrat money laundering scheme? A few weeks ago, democrat hero Alexander Vindman, the confidential source for information about the Ukraine call Trump was impeached for the first time in 2020 appears to be involved in a scheme pitching a $12 million contract to the Ukrainian government to operate and repair military equipment being used in the war. He proposed to act as a middleman between NATO weapons suppliers and Ukrainian forces. Unsurprisingly, Vindman’s brother is listed as the point of contact for the scheme. During impeachment, Vindman claimed that Trump tried to use $400 million in US military assistance to Ukraine to obtain dirt on Hunter Biden being paid $80,000 / month by Burisma. Have we come to the point where the real reason democrats are so Hell-bent to support the war in Ukraine is because it is their current go-to money laundering operation? If that is true, how many more of these are out there?
5. Majority. One of the problems with getting old, is you get to see changes in the way things operate over time. For example, in order to quickly change a lot of things in a significant way, you had to have one-party control at your level of government (state, local or federal), and the willpower to shove whatever you want through the process. Historically, that took veto-proof majorities and agreeable executives Democrats had that during the first couple years of O’Bama. Today, democrats shove really radical stuff through the system with bare majorities, most recently a 5-7 seat majority in the House and a 50-50 split in the US Senate. It has been done at the state level in VA during the reign of Ralph Northam and is currently underway in MN. If these are the new rules, I really don’t think democrats are going to enjoy playing by them as they will shortly be on the receiving end where they can get what they voted for, good and hard.
6. 3D. While the political world futzes around soiling their collective nest, some of the rest of the country works, at least a bit. Last week we saw news about an advance with 3D printing using metals. 3D printing works pretty well with plastics and other relatively soft media. This includes soft metals. But metals, especially harder metals present some real problems with printing. Typically, 3D printing of metals uses powdered metals, essentially welding pools of powdered metals with lasers. Metals are added layer by layer into the desired shape. But metal strength relies on crystal formation which is only recently appreciated. At the crystal level, the metal alloy is rapidly heated, and quickly cools into ordered, crystalline shapes. The crystals determine its properties (strength, corrosion resistance, hardness, etc). Different crystalline shape structures can occur, with varying properties. Controlling these formations become the real problem with printing using metals. Of the thousands of alloys in use today, only a few are able to be used for additive (3D) manufacturing. The key to all of this seems to be what figuring out what happens (crystal formation) during cooling after deposition, which is very rapid. Last week’s announcement was another step along that path, good news, indeed.
7. Geopolymers. We use a lot of different materials for construction, concretes, glasses, metals, plastics, and recently composites. Concretes are particularly interesting as there are at least a few different recipes with differing performances between recipes and after the mix has cured. The most obvious of these is the difference between modern-day concrete and Roman concretes. In some ways, Roman concretes are stronger, especially in water. This is due to the use of volcanic ash instead of sand and a different recipe that cures at a higher temperature. There is a growing field investigating these materials called geopolymers. While there is a technical description, simply calling geopolymers differing concrete recipes will get you close enough for today’s discussion. If we are going to go out into the solar system (moons, planets, asteroids and comets), we are going to have to figure out how to use what is there for construction materials. One way would be to heat whatever we find, mold it, and let it cool and harden into its new shape (sintering). The drawback to that approach is that it takes a LOT of energy. Another would be to figure out how to use whatever we find as a locally sourced concrete (geopolymer). A simulation last week aimed at using Martian soils as a concrete had some encouraging results, with something the experimenters are calling Starcrete showing pretty good performance. Doing this on Mars would be a bit easier than on the moon, as Mars has a lot of water locked up in the form of ices. Chemistry of the soils and water (perchlorates) will be an obvious obstacle. Doing this on the moon is a bit more problematic, on the one hand, water supplies are limited (ice at the southern lunar pole), though the soil is a lot like volcanic ash, frothed glass with lots of sharp, jagged edges to strengthen the mix.
8. Insects. One of the oddities about the modern world is the notion of punishment. Most of us are familiar with the Murphy-ism that no good deed goes unpunished. With the advent of Soros-backed prosecutors and politicized federal law enforcement, an increasing number of actual bad deeds aren’t punished either, though party affiliation matters a lot to the targets. With that in mind, one of the newer pushes from the New World Order crowd is to move from consuming meat, replacing that protein with insects, generally for climate change mitigation purposes. Of course, the proponents want everyone else to make the change while they continue to enjoy their Wagyu. Unexpected pushback to this came courtesy Wired Magazine, running a piece entitled Insect Farming is Booming. But is it Cruel? The author goes to great lengths to explore insect sentience with all the baggage that sentience would imply, demanding humanity err on the side of caution. Expect similar pieces about plants and fungus in the not-so-distant future.
9. Monuments. When you are having to defend yourself from your green supporters after approving a new oilfield in a century-old Alaskan National Petroleum Reserve (NPR-A), what better way to do that than getting out your pen and designating three new National Monuments, locking up over 500,000 acres in NV, 6,700 acres in the mountains north of El Paso, and a whopping 770,000 square miles in the Pacific Ocean, SW of Hawaii. Simultaneously, the WH also released their climate action plan that Biden promised would bring “healthy, abundant salmon runs back to the Colorado River system.” I think I know a lot about salmon, and really don’t think there were ever any salmon in the Colorado River. Trout on the other hand… Looks like the NV land was specially selected to block rare earth and lithium mining. It is well past time for congress to repeal the Antiquities Act that allows this sort of foolishness to continue.
More later –
- AG