Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Recount
2. WWIII
3. Baltic
4. Superheavy
5. Selzer
6. Alaska
7. Black Men
1. Recount. The PA recount ended last week after the PA Supreme Court weighed in once again, specifically ordering undated, misdated ballots to be excluded. Language in the order was fairly blunt. Incumbent US Senator Bob Casey and his lawfare team (this means you, Mark Elias) reconsidered their attempted theft and conceded. At this point, the recounts all ended and Senator Elect Dave McCormick was declared the winner. With this, Republicans end up with a 53 – 47 majority that will stand unless something odd happens in WI. Under state law, a recount is ordered if the margin of victory is less than 0.5%. Festivities in PA re not over, as criminal complaints have been filed against the pair of democrat Bucks County election commissioners who voted to include illegal ballots in their counting. These clowns have taken a lot of very well-deserved public ridicule and anger for their blatantly partisan actions and publicly thumbing their noses at the PA judiciary. You figured they were taking some real heat when the female loudmouth started playing the victim. In other election news, we have a late-night ballot dump in Milwaukee that flipped a Republican win for US Senate by Eric Hovde to a win by incumbent Tammy Baldwin. All the Usual Suspects are claiming that no fraud exists, and most importantly hasn’t been proven (yet). The problem is that the ballots broke strongly for Baldwin, nearly 90%, which is statistically different from absentee ballots returned from that locale for that election on that date. This obviously raises questions of election fraud from a part of the state with similar questions for the 2020 and 2022 elections. If the trick keeps on working, why not continue to use it? Looks like the technique was massive same day voter registration on election day, something democrats used to commit election fraud in Milwaukee two decades ago where members of the Kerry campaign were referred to the Milwaukee County DA on criminal charges. The democrat DA and State Attorney General refused to bring charges. What a surprise (/sarc). Once again, we are back to use of the same trick by democrats to elect democrats again. Given the change in national administration, I would expect this to get a much closer look than it otherwise would, perhaps sufficient to flip yet another US Senate seat.
2. WWIII. Much was made last week of Russia’s launch of an intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) in its war with Ukraine. The Oreshnik (Hazel Tree) missile appears to be a replacement for the solid fuel SS-20 first fielded in 1976. SS-20s were fielded in response to the US Pershing II. All three missiles have ranges over 2,000 km, with the SS-20 / Oreshnik being the longest, well over 5,000 km. All three are also nuclear capable. Pershing II was removed from service in 1991 while the SS-20 removed in 1988 as no longer operationally necessary. As of this writing, Oreshnik is still in development, though the launch last week was described as the first operational launch. However, the launch likely came from one of Russia’s missile development launch sites, Kapustin Yar. Both Russian missiles are in the Mach 10 range, which is defined as hypersonic. Keep that word in mind, as it is being mindlessly used by the media to whip up fears of a wider war in Ukraine. Basically, any IRBM is hypersonic. The longer the range, the more hypersonic it is. As you approach suborbital velocities and intercontinental ranges, the velocity gets in the high hypersonic range, Mach 10 – 25. Orbital velocity Is generally Mach 25. Today, both sides are positioning for peace negotiations as Trump assumes office. Ukraine is conducting attacks into Russia itself. Russia is returning the favor by responding with newer and larger weapons so far unused in the war. As with all things Russia, threats of using their nuclear arsenal are flying early and often. The more NATO decides to participate, the more graphic the threats become. While I may be surprised, and in this world, those unpleasant surprises happen all the time, I am highly skeptical that the WWIII balloon will go up in the next couple months. Both sides have too much to lose. OTOH, idiots on OUR side in Europe, NATO, the Deep State, and the military industrial complex money laundering machine this has become are not so constrained, and fully capable of pushing Putin’s and Zelensky’s buttons to ensure the worst possible outcome as they are ushered out the door to their next careers.
3. Baltic. Chinese ships operating out of Russia are implicated in a pair of cable / pipeline cutting incidents om the Baltic Sea. The most recent of these was Nov 17. The earlier one was Oct 7, 2023. In both incidents, the ship dragged an anchor across known locations of undersea communications cables and pipelines. The first one was committed by the CCP Hong Kong flagged container ship, NewNew Polar Bear, cutting undersea cables and damaging a pipeline near Lithuania – Estonia. CCP finally admitted the damage a year later. A couple weeks ago, a second act of sabotage was apparently committed by another CCP container ship, the Yi Peng 3. It sailed over the cables at the time they were cut. Swedish and Finnish police are investigating while the ship is detained, sitting at anchor offshore between Sweden and Denmark guarded by Swedish Coast Guard. The act took place in Swedish waters. CCP has so far denied any involvement in the sabotage. We will see what the investigations tell us. Difficult to hide a gouge in the sea bottom made by an anchor.
4. Superheavy. My favorite story of the week was SpaceX Integrated Flight Test (IFT) of their Superheavy Starship stack. This took place on Tuesday. President Trump was in attendance. Unlike previous tests, this one was in late afternoon so they could get daylight video of the Starship soft landing in the Indian Ocean. Flight profile this time around was similar to that of the previous flight. The only obvious difference was failure to recover the Superheavy Booster (Booster) with the chopsticks on the launch tower. Recovery requires a number of criteria to be met by both the tower and the booster, otherwise the recovery is waved off and it soft lands offshore. The later the wave off, the closer to the tower it ends up. This one took place shortly after the staging, much to the disappointment of most observers. It turns out that there was some damage to the tower during launch. Apparently, there is a GPS antenna mounted on one of the lightning rod arrays on top. A crew as seen a couple days following the test working on the lightning rod. As GPS is used to position Booster for a catch, I would expect that antenna to be moved to a more sheltered location. The test went remarkably well, with both pieces performing as expected. There were a number of experimental changes done with the heat shielding on Ship, most of which seem to have worked, though some locations were described as a bit toasty afterwards. This was the last test for this particular configuration, as all future tests will use upgraded Booster and Ship pieces, essentially Block 2 followed by Block 3 systems. Next flight (IFT 7) will attempt to recover Booster and put Ship back into the ocean. At this time, don’t know which ocean that will be. Ship successfully tested an inflight relight of one of its onboard engines. IFT8 will attempt a catch of both reusable parts, something that may use both launch towers. The second one is not yet ready for operations, though that work continues. The FAA last week also updated its environmental impact statement (EIS) for Superheavy flights out of Boca Chica, approving up to 25 flights out of the facility for 2025. I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX did an appreciable percentage of that flight rate as they crank up operations. Note that they will also start flying out of the Cape and perhaps Vandenberg in a couple years as they move to an operational Superheavy.
5. Selzer. One of the odder stories toward the end of the campaign was an outlier poll reported by the Des Moines Register the weekend before Election Day that had Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa by 3%. Trump eventually won Iowa by 13%. The poll was done by Ann Selzer of Selzer and Associates, who had been doing the Des Moines Register poll since 1997. She was formerly well respected, and her poll results were usually pretty accurate. This one wasn’t. The question was why? It took only a week to find out why, as she published an op-ed in the paper over the weekend announcing her retirement from all future polling. Why publish a bogus poll and retire a week later? Because someone purchased the results in order to tweak the election outcome nationwide. Someone wrote a check sufficiently large so that she could afford to do something else. She got her payday and then announced her retirement. Convenient.
6. Alaska. Final count for the election in Alaska were announced last week. There is some good news and a couple pieces of not so good news. The good news is that we replaced our democrat congress critter, Mary Peltola with a Republican one, Nick Begich. It took a long time to count the votes as Division of Elections needed to wait for overseas absentee ballots to return. Peltola did not pick up any help via the Ranked Choice Voting system Team Lisa Murkowski helped install four years ago. In less good news, the Alaska House split 21 – 19 Republican / democrat, which should have been enough to put Republicans in charge. Unfortunately, two Republicans crossed the aisle, caucusing with democrats to form a 21 – 19 majority. One of these has been a problem for years. We managed to get rid of the other one six years ago after he did the same thing. We will do it again in two years. This is a very small, weak majority that will be difficult to manage. Worse for them and better for Republicans, it will make it difficult to override vetoes by the governor, so it could have been worse. The worst news out of the election was the failure to repeal our Ranked Choice Voting scheme. The ballot initiative failed by a mere 664 votes. I think that number will hold, even though Harmeet Dillon’s law firm is going to take a look into it in the weeks to come. What happened during the campaign? There was over $14 million of Outside Money dumped into the state to defend RCV. It paid for some of the most fraudulent ads I have seen up here in over 30 years of fighting local political wars, and we were carpet bombed by those ads. They reprised Goebbels Big Lie, when you tell a lie long enough without any pushback, that lie eventually becomes the truth. The people who floated the ballot initiative thought all they had to do was get it on the ballot and never raised any meaningful money to fight the campaign. This is an important lesson for anyone who wants to play in the ballot initiative world. Ballot initiatives are a two-step dance. First, you have to get it on the ballot. Second, you have to win the political campaign, something the pro-repeal crowd blithely ignored.
7. Black Men. One of the great hopes of Republicans was that the Trump pirate ship would make significant inroads into black support for democrats. The opening seemed to be among black men, particularly the younger ones, as Trump became cool while Kamala became your hectoring ex wife / former girlfriend. As it turned out, Harris won 80% of the black vote, down 10% from 2020. This was the highest level of support by black voters for any Republican since Bush 43 in 2000. On the one hand, this would seem to be very good news, as it shows progress. OTOH, it is very bad news, as it shows blacks remain remarkably solid democrat voters. Are Republicans wasting their time going after these voters? Should that effort be directed toward more fertile groups of voters like Latinos and Asians? My response would be No to the first and yes to the second, if for no other reason than we ought not to write off any group of Americans. There is nothing to indicate the black population of this nation are brainwashed or mentally ill like the Karens, AWFLs core constituency of the democrat party. Better, we did actually see some movement toward Republicans by those who rejected the hectoring, feminist democrats. My sense it that we need to keep the pirate ship afloat and sailing, exploiting the ongoing changes, and continually inviting more onboard.
More later –
- AG