Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
- Apollo
- Mueller Time
- Saxon
- Tlaib
- Erica
- Harris
- Coral
- Birthrates
- Apollo. Last week was the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first landing on the moon. Coverage for the most part was decent, with all the Usual Suspects doing all the usual expected political things. The NYT went after Apollo for being insufficiently woke, it was after all, the Soviet Union who first flew a woman, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. That mission went so well it was decades before the Soviets flew another woman. Heard a talk by NASA human sciences scientist BJ Bluth in the early 1980s in Cocoa Beach where she claimed Tereshkova didn’t know she was going to fly. She was drugged, launched, and when she came to, she freaked and made a mess in the capsule, which was why the Soviets didn’t fly another woman for a long time. Never heard corroboration of that story though it was told in front of a crowd at a conference. As it stands today, we are on our way back to the moon. Probably a tossup at this time whether the first one back will be a US commercial lander or a ChiCom government lander. But we are going back. And this time we will stay a while.
- Mueller Time. Russia Collusion Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller spent six hours in front of two democrat led House committees last Wednesday. He was supposed to give the democrats a sound bite or three that they could use to keep the collusion hoax alive through November 2020. Didn’t quite work out that way, as Mueller came across as old, infirm, and not very knowledgeable of the 400+ page report. He did not provide any sound bites either, having to walk back a response to Rep. Ted Lieu (D, CA) that the only reason he didn’t indict Trump was because of DoJ internal guidance on impeaching a president. Lieu got his sound bite initially but lost it when Mueller corrected himself in front of the House Intelligence Committee. It looks like Mueller was simply a figurehead and a Hillary lawyer, the guy who presided over the physical destruction of blackberry phones and the despicable Andrew Weissman running the show. Like the Blasey-Ford testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I think most of his doddering act was just a show, boob bait for Bubbas.
- Saxon. I am not a poetry kind of guy, but in recent years have come to really like some things by Rudyard Kipling. As you make the rounds of the conservative blogs, you run across Kipling from time to time. The Gods of the Copybook Headings shows up on a regular basis in Richard Fernandez’ Belmont Club. It is a chilling cautionary tale on modernity. Chicago Boys wrote a piece entitled When the Saxon Began to Hate. This one was another cautionary tale about conservatives who have been getting beat up and publicly humiliated for decades finally getting tired of the regular beatings. Kurt Schlichter has written things along these lines ever since Trump’s election. Sooner or later, the media, democrats and their paramilitary terrorist arm antifa are going to push too far and someone or a lot of someones are going to push back. Consider the following a cautionary tale.
- Tlaib. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) is one of AOC’s squad members. She is a second-generation American of parents who immigrated from Palestine. Like a lot of second-generation kids, she learned the wrong lesson growing up in her newly adopted country. She learned how to hate her birth nation and identifies as a Palestinian living in America rather than and American of Palestinian descent. It must have been quite a household, as they churned out quite a woman. One nice thing about the modern world is that when you run your mouth in political and other venues, people will notice. Most of us remember the short video of Tlaib in front of her supporters on election night promising to go to Washington to “… impeach the m-f’er.” Turns out that wasn’t the first time she ran her mouth in public. As a Michigan legislator, she attended a Trump rally in Detroit in 2016 and was recorded screaming and interrupting Trump during the rally. A year before, she demanded that Trump leave the country, go home, something she as a “woman of color” claimed was a racist phrase by Trump when he went after the Squad earlier this month. Not to be stopped by any of this, Tlaib and fellow Squad member Ilhan Omar (D, MN) introduced a pro-BDS resolution intended to oppose “…unconstitutional legislative efforts to limit the use of boycotts to further civil rights at home and abroad.” The resolution cloaked nicely in the language of civil rights managed to draw John Lewis (D, GA) in as a co-sponsor. Backing this, both Omar and Tlaib are doing Hamas’ dirty work in the House of Representatives. I am sure their constituents are very proud. Sadly, given the demographics of their districts, I expect they actually are.
- Erica. Sigh. Another week, another fraudulent claim of racism from an elected democrat. This one, Rep. Erica Thomas, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives posted a video of her bawling like a two-year-old over a guy who was mean to her in a checkout line at a Publix grocery store in HotLanta. She claimed to be physically and verbally assaulted during the altercation and that the guy (the proverbial white male), told her to go back to wherever she come from. It’s racism, RACISM, I tell you! As it turns out, Publix has cameras all over the place and they had the actual video of the incident. Thomas, ever the entitled angry black woman, showed up in the express checkout line with more than 10 items, perhaps as many as 20, double the maximum for the express checkout line. The guy who was waiting took exception to her action, said something about it, and hilarity ensued. Note that her first reaction was to scream racism. Here’s the funny part. It turns out that the guy is a Cuban lefty. Of course, he was not quite as dark as Rep. Thomas. I expect she barged into the line with an overflowing basket and attitude oozing out of every pore of her ample body. He said something, which triggered the attitude as she quickly and loudly went after him. She went so far as to chase him down as he tried to leave wagging her finger in face the entire time. When you are entitled, you must demonstrate your entitlement to everyone present whether they care or not or you will lost it. Police decided not to charge either individual. The guy is considering a defamation lawsuit against Thomas. Legal Insurrection posted the following quote from him:
Ms. Thomas has taken an innocuous situation that began on my part to be about being inconsiderate and turned into a national case about race over night. Ms. Thomas accuses me of telling her to go back to wherever. Those words were never spoken. She backtracked slightly and now is changing her story. I am in the process of exploring with attorneys a defamation lawsuit against her.
- Harris. Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D, CA) fills two positions in the intersectionality sweepstakes for democrats. The is a woman and she is a “person of color” in the same way O’Bama was. At this point, there are those like Scott Adams who believes she will be the democrat presidential nominee. One of the things Harris did before running for US Senate was a stint as California’s Attorney General, where she made a name for herself with some pretty nasty prosecution of people who couldn’t fight back (parents of truant children, firearms owners), and cutting very friendly deals with those who could (which is why the Silicon Valley oligarchs support her). As a woman, she played the #MeToo card early and often at the Kavanaugh hearings, taking the side of multiple women who lied about Kavanaugh’s nonexistent sexual advances and assaults 30 years ago that nobody was ever able to corroborate. It turns out that while Attorney General, Harris cut a very friendly plea bargain with the former democrat mayor of San Diego who was chased out of office after at least 20 women accused him of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Three of them accused him of false imprisonment and battery, charges he pled guilty to in return for a light sentence. He could have gotten up to five years in prison but ended up with three months of house arrest and three years’ probation. Harris’ office was proud of the plea bargain, something her campaign spokesman still touts.
- Coral. One of the manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions data points is coral bleaching, the death of coral reefs in the tropics. As the years have gone by, this ends up being a relatively normal, if uncommon event. Problem comes when bleaching has a manmade cause, and there might just be one, the use of high nitrogen fertilizers and its runoff. Science Alert published results of 30 years of research into corals downstream of the Florida Everglades may tie pollution and agricultural runoff through the Everglades into the Gulf of Mexico into a decline in coral coverage south of Florida from 33% in 1984 to less than 6% in 2008. The article makes all the expected (and fraudulent) paeans to climate change (aka manmade global warming due to CO2 emissions) as the cause but does throw in pollution and agricultural runoff as newly discovered causes. General waterflow down the peninsula is from north to south down the center of the state. The Orlando and surrounding towns are the most heavily populated parts of the center of the state. They have been incrementally improving water treatment capabilities and requirements for decades so water treatment should be a decreasing problem. Nitrogen runoff is something else entirely, as the center of the state supports a robust agricultural sector. And agriculture uses fertilizers. These are not completely used by the plants they are applied to, persist, and in turn run off with the water as it moves south over time. The Everglades appears to love the additional plant food; corals on the other hand, not so much. Solutions are relatively easy and moderately simple. Costs of course are another thing entirely. At first glance, a simple solution would be to apply only as much fertilizer as you need, something much easier said than done because it is always easier to keep piling the stuff on when the crops aren’t doing well. A second and potentially more expensive solution would be to only apply fertilizers that decompose, break down over time in the soil, and do not persist long enough to make the trip to the ocean. On balance, there ought not to be additional cost moving this direction.
- Birthrates. Ran across a couple articles on low birthrates. The first was in The Atlantic, the second in the Chicago Tribune. The Derek Thompson article entitled “The Future of the City is Childless” describes urban renaissance cleaning up the blight of the 1970s to the clean and safe cities of the 1990s. As an aside, it has taken democrat mayors, city councils and one-party rule in blue cities a mere 20 years to take them back to Third World conditions, but that is food for future discussion. Young families in NY are not having babies anymore. Since 2011, the number of babies in NYC have declined by 9% in the five boroughs and 15% in Manhattan. At the same time, the number of NYC residents has more than doubled. The fastest growing demographic in the blue cities are rich, college-educated whites without children, up 22% 2000 – 2017. The richest 25 metro areas now account for more than half of the US economy. Rich cities specialize in new tech economy. Half of US internet and web jobs are located in just five counties. When you concentrate on making all that money, there is not a lot of time left for kids. Childless affluence is a national trend concentrated in the blue cities,. SF has the lowest share of children of the largest 100 cities in the US. The future belongs to those who show up. If the babies are being made in rural America, it is no wonder that the democrats are trying to import a whole new underclass to vote for them, because in the long run, they are self-selecting out of the gene pool.
More later –
– AG