Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Fire Ants
2. Gamestop
3. Rigged
4. Amazon
5. Warning
6. Energy
1. Fire Ants. Now that we’ve made the transition from a constitutional republic to an oligarchy, the question how to fight back becomes increasingly important, especially when the oligarchs are determined to do their best 1984 “boot stamping on the face – forever” routine to conservatives. The answer is to retain one’s optimism and consider the following tidbits from last week.
- First, whatever happens to the newly installed post-constitution government is going to come out of left field, something entirely unexpected by the oligarchs. The recent Gamestop festivities are one such example. More on that later. I tend to think of the oligarchs and the left like I think of fire ants, which infest the southern part of the US. They are nasty, nasty critters, difficult to eradicate. Difficult to control without serious chemical intervention. But on the individual level, you can have some fun with them. For instance, fire ants don’t drown during heavy rains that flood their nests. This is because they are tiny and have figured out how to raft themselves on the water surface and float until the water level falls. Essentially, they ride on the surface tension of the water. Solution? Squirt guns with soapy water. Soap destroys the surface tension on top of the water, and they fall through and drown. Depending how irritated they have made you, this is quite satisfying. If you have a bad infestation, a Super Soaker would be a good alternative technique. And the ants never see it coming. A second solution is an oldie but a goodie I came across many years ago. There is a small cottage industry in the south that melts a quantity of aluminum (though any soft metal will do) over a burner and then pour it down into a fire ant nest. It takes a lot of melted metal. The molten metal kills all the ants on contact. It also fills the chambers and tunnels of the colony. The team then waits until the metal has cooled, digs up the nest, gently washes the sand and dirt from the metal, cleaning it up. The object becomes an abstract art object that is mounted upside down and sold. I find the following video quite satisfying.
- There are a lot of creative Americans out there who have come to despise the oligarchy and its members just as passionately as they despise us. Whatever they are hit with will be just as creative as home-grown methods to take down fire ants. And just as effective. So have fun doing whatever it is you choose to do.
- The oligarchs believe they are the Best and Brightest, but they aren’t. A brilliant analysis by Anthony Codevilla in American Greatness a couple weeks ago analyzed the oligarchy, its members, and the replacement of the constitutional republic by it. One of the points he made is that the old school communist leaders like Brezhnev and Honecker in the 1970s were smart enough not to insult their citizens, their country or their race, leaving Russia and East Germany under less ruling class pressure than Americans are today. Scott Adams makes a similar observation over the last couple weeks, though he describes it in terms of personal flexibility. Though he politically describes himself as left of Bernie, he was a strong supporter of Trump. He notes that he and most Trump supporters have a large amount of flexibility, the willingness to go along to get along, right to the point where they don’t anymore. Think of it as a bit flip or a step function in attitude. Onset of this is completely unpredictable. But one way or the other, it does and WILL take place. At that point, things will get very unpleasant for the oligarchy and its enablers.
2. Gamestop. The best story of the week comes out of Wall Street which had a bunch of private traders inflict tens of billions of dollars of financial damage on the Wall Street oligarchs, taking down at least one hedge fund. The hedge funds exist to short sell stocks, artificially jacking up the per share price, and betting that its value will fall. As long as the price falls, they are golden. If it rises, they are roadkill. This technique makes them billions of dollars yearly, most of which are used to grease the skids of the oligarchy and its political enablers. It also has the unfortunate impact of destroying the business whose stock is targeted. As I understand the festivities, a group of Reddit users noticed that several unremarkable stocks were bubbling up and decided to jack up the stock prices far more than the hedge funds expected. One of them, Gamestop started out at around $5/share and ended up around $486/share before trading was halted. This sort of unexpected increase puts the hedge fund guys at extreme risk as when you sell short, you have to have the entire amount at risk available for a call. And the hedge funds never have this sort of cash lying around. The hedge funds orchestrated a trading halt with the online trader – Robinhood – the Reddit guys were using, halting all future buys but allowing sales. Market Ticker Sunday had a really good piece on what went on and why the trading halt smacks of massive internal corruption in the financial world. There is some speculation that the halt may have even involved the Xiden WH and/or their financial appointees. Note that this sort of market manipulation has never been prosecuted, though it would be very easy to do so, which ought to tell you everything you want to know about how rigged and corrupt the system is. The hedge funds were even shorting more stock than they had control of, a practice known as counterfeiting. The hedge funds and well-connected insiders were just exposed by a bunch of outsiders. This won’t be the last time. Expect them to rewrite the trading rules on the fly once again to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
3. Rigged. The best way to start this discussion is a 1988 Leonard Cohen song, Everybody Knows.
Lyrics for the first stanza of the song are as follows:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Pretty good for an old Canadian. Multiple examples of how the game is rigged against the middle class this week starting with Gamestop v the hedge funds. Apparently, the members of the oligarchy can make instant millions but nobody else can. Got it. Second example comes out of the sentencing hearing for ex FIB lawyer Kevin Clinesmith who altered an e-mail presented to the FISA Court to justify the Russia hoax. Clinesmith took a plea bargain earlier in 2020. The FISA judge sentenced him to a year probation, 400 hours community service, and a small fine. Apparently lying to the FISA Court is ok these days, especially when doing your best Ahab routine trying to remove Trump from office. In contrast, accused “rioters” from the Jan 6 incursion into the Capitol are still in jail, being denied bail by federal judges. Two schemes of justice now exist in the US, one for the political right and one for the political left. Everybody knows.
4. Amazon. Yet another example of two sets of rules comes from Amazon, which is embroiled in a unionization fight. This one took a humorous turn when Amazon, whose Washington Post mouthpiece has extolled the necessity of mail-in voting for the last election cycle, appealed a NLRB decision to allow mail-in voting for an unionization election at an Amazon facility in Alabama. Amazon uses all the same arguments the Trump campaign and Republicans used to fight mail-in voting in the 2020 presidential election. This election is important to Amazon, as it would represent the first successful unionization election at an Amazon facility. No wonder they are fighting it.
5. Warning. A blunt warning by Rush to Republicans last week regarding the 2022 elections. In a normal political flow, an unpopular democrat president will lose control of the House and Senate two years after his election, just like Bill Clinton did in 1994 and O’Bama did in 2010. But this was not a normal election year, especially with the successful propaganda impact of lockstep media support for democrats and lockstep censorship of everything unapproved by their Big Tech enablers. Granted the Senate is tied 50-50 and Pelosi’s majority is less than 10 representatives. One of the newly elected GA democrat senators is up in 2022. And there are at least 10 Republican House members who will be removed in a primary challenge in 2022, so you are looking at having to win at least 20 Republican House seats in 2022 to take control of the House. Rush’s warning pointed out the tens of millions of votes for Harris – Xiden that we will have to do something about. The Codevilla piece noted that Trump picked up 11 million more votes than he received in 2016, nearly doubling his support among blacks. OTOH, Xiden picked up 15 million new votes, exclusively from mail-in voting. And unless the state legislatures do something about mail-in voting, that technique will be used again, again and again.
6. Energy. Senate Majority Leader Chuckie Schumer was asked last week on one of the talking head shows to encapsulate his goals for the next two years in a word or two. Schumer used “climate.” This means that the Harris – Xiden regime and democrat majorities in both houses of congress are going to use climate change as their excuse to gut the energy industry, turning the rest of the US into California or Germany, both of whom have turned over all energy independence to the greens. The Day One destruction of the Keystone XL pipeline was just the opening round across the bow. The fun part of all this is the notion that democrats position themselves as the party of science (the process rather than the goal), and the Republicans as the anti-science party. PowerLine does a couple image-based posts weekly. The weekend Week in Pictures is mostly humorous. The midweek Geek in Pictures usually has graphics illustrating interesting information. I usually look at the economic and energy-related graphics more than anything else. A couple of these are provided for your information.
First is a comparison of the Terawatt-hours of nuclear energy being shut down in 2021 compared with various renewable energy installations.
Second and sadder is the precipitous fall in annual CO2 emissions 1983 – 2020.Under President Trump, when we are producing more energy than ever before in the US, we are close to producing less CO2 than the entire nation did in 1983. This is entirely due to fracking and adoption of natural gas as a primary generation fuel for electricity. If the problem is so bad, why are we a third better than we were in 2008?
More later –
- AG