Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Unhinged
- Noncompliance
- Soccer
- Epstein
- Antifa
- Accident
- Barbarism
- Unhinged. The Resistance, led mostly by Alaska public employee unions and the usual entourage of paid protesters came to Alaska over the last couple weeks. What are they mad about? Governor Dunleavy’s vetoes of $444 million out of the state operating budget. We have been treated to protests outside the Legislative Information Office in Anchorage, outside the capital in Juneau, and outside the middle school in Wasilla where the legislature was supposed to meet. Protesters invaded the meeting space last Wednesday, disrupting the meeting of 22 legislators, attempting to sit in their chairs, and making real fools of themselves. One young lady, a self-described native activist, managed to goad the Wasilla mayor to the point where he grabbed her arm. She was immediately offended, claiming he assaulted her, and all because she was an Alaska Native, so her conclusion was (and is) that the mayor is obviously a racist. Of course, it is. Her attempt at provocation was successful. The Occupy protesters set up shop on the Delaney Park Strip in downtown Anchorage, apparently without a permit at the tacit permission of the mayor. They were supposed to be gone by Sunday evening, a deadline they not unexpectedly blew through. As of this writing, Mayor Berkowitz (democrat) is trying to figure out how to get them to leave without causing too much of a public relations disaster for himself. Maybe it will rain.
- Noncompliance. New Zealand hurriedly passed confiscatory gun control legislation in response to the bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year. The government also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance of the general public. The gun control legislation passed on the expected kneejerk reaction to the attack prohibited semiautomatic weapons. Nobody knows how many of the 1.5 million firearms owned are now illegal and the general public is not saying anything to confirm or deny. The legislation allows firearms to be turned in to law enforcement without fear of prosecution. So far, only 700 have been turned in, a mere 0.05% of everything thought to be privately owned. The problem NZ has is the same as Connecticut had when they tried this, nobody knows how many guns are out there or who owns them. Up until this legislation, NZ did not have firearms registration. And the citizens aren’t complying with that either. Oz tried this in 1996, with compensated confiscation of firearms. It is estimated only 20% of all guns were turned in, leaving 2 – 5 million now illegally retained arms in Oz.
- Soccer. The latest get Trump vehicle for the media was Meagan Rapinoe and the USA Women’s World Cup Soccer Team. The Ladies did a great job, winning the competition for the second time in a row. Not being content to let all good deeds go unpunished, the media quickly found a vehicle to turn the victory into a Trump bashing event. One of the winning soccer players, Meagan Rapinoe was a twofer for the media, a loud and proud LGBTQWTF who refused to visit the WH should the team get invited, but she proudly took up the cause of women soccer players getting paid equal to what male soccer players get paid to do. This newly manufactured controversy was put to bed quickly afterwards, only taking a day or two to get slapped down. As it turns out, men and women are paid differently for playing soccer, mostly because men are better at it. The men’s 2018 World Cup generated $6 billion and paid around 7% to the teams. The women’s 2019 World Cup generated $131 million and paid 20% to the teams. From this, the political left generates an artificial pay disparity that democrats wear like a badge. But sports are entertainment, and you get paid based on the number of tickets you can sell, the number of seats you fill, the number of people you entertain. And the men are clearly doing better at that than the ladies, that is until the Trans community starts placing men on the Women’s World Cup team. In 2016, five members of the women’s team filed an EEOC complaint against the US Soccer Federation, claiming it was sexist. 28 members of the team filed a lawsuit against US Soccer claiming gender discrimination. Looks like they will be going to trial next year. Media cheerleading for this foolishness points out that the women’s team is much more successful than the men’s team yet getting paid far less. What they blithely ignore is the fact that women and men stop playing one another around age 14 – 15, when men’s physical abilities far surpass those of the women and they regularly pound them into the turf. A couple years ago, the women’s national team did a warm up match with a 15 and under team in Dallas (boys) and lost 5 -2.
- Epstein. Democrat financier Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and indicted by federal prosecutors in NY last week on the charge of sex trafficking of minors in NY and Florida. He took a plea deal in Florida in 2008 serving 13 months behind bars with significant work release time included. Federal prosecutor at the time was Alex Acosta, who resigned as Trump’s Secretary of Labor last week. Andy McCarthy believes the NY federal indictments are double jeopardy and will be quickly thrown out by the courts. Epstein has been a large dollar donor and well-connected democrat insider for decades. It is unclear precisely where his money has come from, though it is clear how he spent it. He ran regular flights between the east coast to an island in the Caribbean where the friends were treated to tender ministrations of underage young women. The flights were referred to as the Lolita Express and Bill Clinton flew on over 25 of them. There is massive speculation why the second indictments, likely due to the young women involved growing up and getting lawyered up for their payday in civil court. Someone connected to Epstein or the democrats he consorted with has been cleaning up Wiki pages on him, removing all connections between Epstein and democrat participants in his pedophilia. Among the rumored revenue streams Epstein has is extortion of those very same democrats. Media and democrat reaction to the indictments was to do everything humanly possible to tie Epstein to Trump. For a few days they never said a sentence with Epstein’s name without including Trump’s name in it. Their attention swiftly turned to Acosta, who as the federal prosecutor for the Florida plea bargain and demanded his resignation because of the seemingly lenient plea deal. Last week, they got that resignation, yet another example of shooting off another couple toes. Acosta has taken no small amount of well-deserved conservative heat carrying what is viewed as O’Bama union friendly policies while at Labor. Yeah, the democrats got themselves another Trump scalp, but they turned over Labor to a much less union-friendly Secretary. Be careful what you want. Sometimes you end up getting it.
- Antifa. Chiefio posted several items about Antifa over the last couple weeks. The ensuing discussion has been most enlightening. Now that Antifa inspired anarchists are starting to go after ICE facilities with firearms and Molotov cocktails, a discussion of tactics is probably appropriate. Most of the following was first written in comments to the Chiefio post linked here. The first thing to remember when in proximity to an Antifa group is to be in full self-protection mode. Your life is at risk. If you are singled out, you will be hurt, likely seriously, with intentional head shots likely combined with some sort of incapacitating agent so that the head shot is undefended. Do not play. Do not be there. Your life is at risk. Their tactics seem to start out with someone creating a face to face confrontation, likely intended to force the target to get tunnel vision and lose situational awareness. Often the provocateur is an untouchable like a woman, intentionally blunting normal defensive responses. While this is going on, several others will slowly converge on the target, cutting off support and an escape path. Then they have enough direct-action people on hand, one will initiate an attack to get a response from the target. When the target responds, he will be swarmed. Learn to deal with a group attack, positioning yourself so that one thug blocks or interferes with the path of another. Be aware of those with long reach weapons (flag poles). Either stay out of the reach of them or close to a distance where they can’t be used. Be aware of innocent appearing items like umbrellas, milkshakes, coffee, or gloves with rocks in them. If someone reaches to pull down their mask, they are likely to spit at you or use something else as a blinding / incapacitating attack. Do not be there. Do not make yourself a target. Exit quickly and unobtrusively. There appear to be 4 levels of people in an Antifa group. Greens are the useful idiots who dress similarly, carry signs, chant and make aggressive noises. Yellows are the battle coordinators; they select targets and are responsible to blind or disorient them. Reds are the guys who do the physical assault concentrating on head shots. Finally, there are “the arrestables”, who volunteer to be arrested knowing their expenses will be covered. And they all dress alike so sorting out who is doing what to whom is difficult. Stopping this is going to be difficult, not unlike the wave of bombings of the 1960s – 1970s. And a lot of people are going to get hurt before it ends. The sooner we choose to stop this, the fewer people on both sides are going to get badly hurt. Let it continue for an appreciable time longer, and there are going to be dead people.
- Accident. Interesting story out of Russia a week or so ago as a fire onboard a Russian nuclear research vessel killed 14 Russians deep under the surface of the Barents Sea. The accident took place on July 1 and smoke inhalation killed the crew. The Losharik is designed for deep sea military missions, such as tapping into deep sea communications cables. The submarine is capable of diving to 20,000’. Among the dead were 7 senior navy captains and two “Heroes of Russia.” You don’t put that sort of senior leadership onboard an operational mission, leading to no small amount of speculation that the mission was either a demonstration of final test of some sort of new military capability, perhaps an underwater high-speed drone. There were some follow-on stories that claimed the crew controlled a reactor accident. None to some of all this could be true. The most important part at least to me is the number of senior people onboard.
- Barbarism. Neo wrote an piece entitled Lickers: among the enemies of civilization, discussing the outbreak of people who lick or drink liquids at stores and put the item back on the shelf for an unsuspecting customer to purchase afterwards. One mother took a video of her daughter licking a wooden tongue depressor at a Doctor’s office and was busted shortly after posting the video. This candidate for Mother of the Year (/sarc) certainly taught her daughter well, aka the acorn not falling very far from the tree. Sarah Hoyt and Neo wrote last week describing these people as enemies of civilization, people who willingly and gleefully taint food and water (and sanitary medical gear) and then celebrating their actions on social media afterwards. She reminds us that even cats don’t crap where they eat. Yet these young humans, the product of the most expensive civilizing process in human history, modern day public schools are just fine with befouling their nest, and the nests of others. This is the modern-day equivalent of poisoning the well, something that invading armies sometimes did to the conquered. It is the sort of thing that Jews have been accused of in order to enflame hatred against them. How destructive and nihilistic have these people become? How did they come to the solution that this was civilized behavior? And most importantly, what do we do about them?
More later –
– AG