Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Transcript
- IG
- Trash
- Drugs
- JACC
- Donlin
- Gluten
- Transcript. Looks like President Trump’s absolute transparency threw a large caliber wrench into the well-oiled and nicely balance machinery of House democrats orchestrated impeachment show. It appears the original plan was to trot out the whistleblower complaint, center the investigation in the House Intel committee, do everything behind closed doors out of the prying eyes of general public, and only leak things supportive to a successful impeachment. They expected him to defend the office of the President and separation of powers, which they could then characterize as obstruction and coverup, creating at least two impeachment counts out of whole cloth. Trump blew that all up when he released the transcript of the phone call between him and the newly elected Ukrainian president. And he did not release the transcript unilaterally, as he asked the Ukraine permission before the release. This release, this transparency, blew the hearsay complaint by the first whistleblower out of the water, as he and the people he claimed to have heard talking did not know anything about the phone call firsthand. This sent the democrat lawyers looking for a second and eventually the next ten whistleblowers in the CIA. Senator Lindsay Graham (R, SC) over the weekend reminded everyone we’ve seen this before, with the attempted character assassination of Bret Kavanaugh by the Senate Judiciary democrats a year ago. Each subsequent whistleblower was less credible, which I expect to happen to those eagerly coming out of the CIA, even though they seem to be working with the same democrat legal team. One tangential question of the readership: Since when did the CIA have a role in monitoring diplomacy? Better yet, why did none of the little leftists get their panties all in a wad when O’Bama sent along a message to Putin that he would have more “flexibility” after the 2012 election? The process chosen by House democrats is instructive, as they are putting into practice lessons learned from mistakes made with the Russia and Kavanaugh hoaxes. They believe they did not push the process quickly enough. They allowed the target to respond to charges, confront accusers at some level, to have a legal team responding point by point. Looks like the plan this time around is to shove this through just as fast as humanly possible, holding the impeachment vote in November, keeping all hearings in secret (this is why they chose the whistleblower statute to abuse this time around), and only leak the carefully selected pieces of testimony to a friendly and compliant media in order to orchestrate a successful impeachment vote. Nice plan, but in the words of retired USMC General Mattis, “the enemy gets a vote.” And not only does Donald Trump get a vote, so do the other 63 million of the rest of us who are the real targets of this. Pelosi and her leadership want to get the impeachment vote out of the way by Christmas, dump it in the laps of the Senate, and worry about retaining her majority all of 2020. This is why she and that majority have decided not to hold a formal vote on starting an impeachment process and set up a select committee with the full force of law to conduct the investigation and write charges. They want to shield the 40+ democrats elected out of congressional districts that voted for Trump. Some have described the current festivities as a cold civil war, most recently Scott Adams over the weekend. If they aren’t careful, it is going to heat up a bit.
- IG. Next up to bat is the Inspector General for the Intel community who told House Intel that the whistleblower displayed “arguable political bias” against Trump and in support of another democrat candidate for president. The IG did not know the contents of the phone call at the time he received the complaint. He also claimed to not know the complainant went to House Intel Committee democrat staff for assistance before contacting the IG, something highly irregular. Yet he found the complaint “credible.” The most interesting thing about this is that the Intel IG unilaterally changed requirements for filing complaints late last summer removing the requirement for direct firsthand knowledge of the act and allowing hearsay. The new form was uploaded to the CIA online system on Sept. 24, just days before the complaint was declassified and released to the public. Markings on the new document indicate it was revised in August but does not have specific revision date included. The basic timing of all this is enough to raise some real doubt about how orchestrated this entire series of events is. Not only do we have a whistleblower working directly with Schiff’s staff on a complaint in mid-August perhaps six weeks before the complaint was filed, participation in the scheme was sufficiently burrowed into the CIA that its IG changed the rules for complaints after the fact so the complaint magically became legal. What a surprise that is. Not. The O’Bama WH corrupted everything they touched during their eight-year infestation of the WH. Now we know that corruption extends beyond the FIB, (In)Justice Department and well into the CIA and the greater Intelligence community including active corruption of the Whistleblower Act for partisan political purposes.
- Trash. The democrat dominated Anchorage Assembly earlier this year passed a ban on plastic bags in local stores. Rationale for the ban was trash in the ocean and we must do our part to clean it up, though nobody was able to state how much of that trash came from the 300,000 residents of Anchorage. The ban went into effect mid-September and has been such a mess that the Assembly is already working on its second tweak of the new law. Fortunately (or unfortunately based on which side of the argument you are on), new research has identified the source of much of the trash tossed into the oceans. And that source is not Anchorage residents. It is not even plastic soda straws from California. Rather, that source is ChiCom merchant ships, which appear to be responsible for up to 75% of all plastic junk tossed into the oceans. The study published Sept. 30, was based on three trips to Inaccessible Island in the South Atlantic. The scientific team visited the island 3 times reviewing trash that ended up on the beaches of the island. The first trip in 1984 had the majority of debris from South America. By 2009, Asia was the leading source of debris, mostly plastic water bottles. The most recent sampling in 2018 found Asian plastic bottles with 73% of the accumulated bottles and 83% of new bottles, with most of them being Chinese in origin. These results question the current notion that the majority of plastic trash in the oceans somehow ends up there via dumping into rivers. Today ships, Asian and primarily Chinese ships are responsible for most of the trash in the oceans, making this yet another international treaty the ChiComs are ignoring. No word yet on any action by the Anchorage Assembly to undo their idiotic ban.
- Drugs. In light of the current hysteria into the great health threat of vaping, particularly that of vaping off-market THC / anything with oils in it (less than 20 deaths and counting), comes a report that puberty-blocking drugs used in gender transitions is responsible for tens of thousands of “adverse reactions” in patients and over 6,000 deaths. The drug in question is Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron) and administered to transgender children to prevent their normal sexual development. FDA data 2012 – June 2019 reported over 40,000 adverse reactions, over 25,000 of them serious, including 6,370 deaths. The report quickly rattled around conservative media at week’s end, particularly Christian media. It prompted furious response by the leftist media and the LGBTQWTF Mafia calling it a viral fake news. The pushback pointed out that the drug was also used to treat some cancers and the adverse reaction and death statistics include those patients. The problem with all of this is that the new form of child abuse that calls itself transgenderism really doesn’t want any investigation of the accuracy of these claims. Their problem is the use of the drug off label on transgender children. It would occur to me that this is at least as bad a problem as vaping THC, yet we see no orchestrated national panic to ban this particular drug instantly until they can figure out what is going on. No surprise, that.
- JACC. The most recent expensive boondoggle in Juneau was an attempt to bond for a very large and very expensive Juneau Arts and Convention Center (JACC). All the usual suspects in Juneau (a very leftist town) were in lockstep support of the proposed 44,500 ft2, two story, $26 million facility. Original proposal was smaller and privately funded. That grew a bit prompting public pushback. Local media in Juneau, always in support of these sorts of things, ran a series of ads by its supporters. One of those ads was a full-page ad in the Juneau Empire with a list of names of all the important people who support the idea. Like all things democrat, this one diddled the support for the JACC a bit, including the names of at least six people who have been dead (but apparently still voting democrat) for some time. There were several other names listed who were people who didn’t live in Juneau, can’t vote on the initiative, and won’t be paying the increased property taxes for the bonds. The initiative failed, but the vote was closer than it should have been.
- Donlin. Nothing like withdrawing support for a mine you have been supporting for the last 13 years. The Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) voted to support the Donlin Creek mine in 2006. A couple weeks ago, they changed their minds and voted 34 – 4 to withdraw support for the mine that is scheduled to start hiring in January. The group represents 56 tribes, 41 of which actually voted. No explanation of the 3 whose votes that weren’t counted or the 22 who either did not bother to attend or vote. The Native Village Council of Bethel and Kwinhagak led the charge to oppose the mine, scheduled to be developed on land owned by the Kuskokwim Corporation, a consortium of individual village corporations on the upper Kuskokwim River. First round of hiring is scheduled to start in January with 434 of an estimated 1,000 to be hired a year from January. The project is expected to cost $6.7 billion and include regional infrastructure including a 315-mile natural gas pipeline to the west side of Cook Inlet and fuel storage. The natural gas pipeline is a future option to bring lower cost natural gas to remote villages. The discussion in Must Read Alaska after the linked article made it sound like this was a money grab by the villages aimed at Calista, the Regional Native Corporation that owns the mineral rights. There was not a lot of sympathy for that position.
- Gluten. I am at best, a (however poorly) recovering fat man. After 50+ years of decreasingly successful yo-yo dieting, I ran across Gary Taubes, a science writer who published a couple books on nutrition that made the case that a low carb – high fat diet was the proper solution to dietary issues. One of the things his books makes the case for is the notion that high levels of carbs in a diet are behind what is commonly referred to as the Western Diseases – heart disease, Diabetes Type II, high blood pressure, various cancers, stomach and bowel issues, even Alzheimer’s which in some places is referred to as Diabetes Type III. Other dietary diseases are discussed in his books, among them Celiac Disease, which is generally treated as a problem with gluten ingestion. Problem is, it isn’t. NY Post ran an article last week describing new science supporting the notion that a gluten-free diet was a crock, a singularly expensive and unhealthy one. A study published in this month’s Gastroenterology Journal published the first ever double randomized controlled trial that found that gluten-containing flour was safe for consuming. This busts what has grown to be a $2.7 billion (2018) business in manufacturing and selling gluten free foods. We do a lot of weird stuff with our diets. And this all began in the early 1960s when the US adopted what ended up being not only a failed but destructive to personal and dietary health food pyramid that maximized the consumption of carbs. Gluten free isn’t working. Carb free will.
More later –
– AG