Interesting Items 06/14

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

1.  Abuela
2.  Nigeria
3.  North Face
4.  Merit
5.  Lab Leak
6.  Yale
7.  Perchlorate

1.  Abuela.  Several fun things this week, pure comedy gold.  As the tone of this weekly has been moderately grumpy (or worse), I thought I would start with some fun news that demonstrates that we indeed are winning over the leftist Borg.  First up is abuela, which translates as Grandma in Spanish.  On Jan 2, AOC released a Tweet bashing Trump for blocking relief money for Puerto Rico.  The Tweet had a couple photos of what she claimed to be the interior of her abuela’s apartment, showing water damage to the ceiling and buckets on the floor catching water from the leaks.  The Trump bashing was supposed to be fun for one and all.  Funny thing happened to the Trump bashing, though, as Matt Walsh set up a Go Fund Me page, seeded it with $499 of his own money, and quickly ended up with over $104,000 in donations to help repair the apartment.  The family let it be known that the donations wouldn’t be accepted and Go Fund Me shut down the page and refunded all the donations.  This illustrates so many things in today’s world, most importantly the difference between the left and the right.  For leftists like AOC, the issue is everything, and will be used as a weapon against the Other Side for as long as they are in possession of that weapon.  Conservatives, simply got to work to solve the problem.  Grandma has a leaky roof due to the hurricane?  No problemo.  Set up a page.  Raise the money and solve the problem.  Do not forget that AOC has mad persuasion skills.  She won an internal democrat contest to run for her current House seat based on those skills.  That is why she got the makeover and has access to professional makeup and clothing.  They have big things planned for her.  What she doesn’t have yet is experience, which is why she blundered into this.  Never, ever discount AOC’s persuasion skills, as they may make her president someday.  Second takeaway is the near instantaneous response by Matt Walsh.  We don’t often see this sort of thing on the political right, though far more often after Trump than before him.  We on the right are learning how to fight back like Trump did.  We are doing it with precision, with panache, with humor, and with ridicule.  This is how we defeat the left.  Walsh’s choice of $499 in seed money as the original donation was based on the monthly payment on AOC’s shiny new Tesla 3.  If she can afford a Tesla 3, she can afford to take care of granny like many extended families take care of their family members.  Want to defeat the left on the persuasion battlefield?  Here is a great example. 

2.  Nigeria.  Second piece of comedy gold last week comes courtesy Jack Dorsey’s Twitter which has become quite cavalier blocking users mainly on the political right who post things their content administrators don’t agree with.  A week or so ago, Nigeria’s President posted a flaming tweet aimed at violent separatists in the SW part of the country.  Twitter deleted the tweet and banned the President.  In response, the government of Nigeria banned Twitter from Nigeria.  Twitter’s response

“We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria,” Twitter’s Public Policy division tweeted in response. “Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society. We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world. #KeepitOn.”

This is pure comedy gold, as the very people who have been banning political speech from the right for years, banned President Trump, censored all discussion on therapeutic approaches to the Wuhan Flu like HCQ, are now whining that access to Twitter is a basic human right in modern society.  I wonder how quickly that language is going to show up in a lawsuit from someone banned by Twitter.  One of the things that Big Tech and their apologists have said during their travels down the monopoly censorship road is some variation of the notion that if you don’t like it, build your own.  That used to work until Big Tech started colluding to shut down those new competitors like they did with Parler in February.  Comments on the stories about this were hilarious.  The best I ran across was someone pointing out that if Twitter didn’t like it, they could always just build their own Nigeria.

3.  North Face.  Final exercise in humor was an oilfield services company trolling high end outdoors clothing business The North Face.  The North Face has made a fetish about of being friendly with nature and environmentally sensitive.  This also involves political support of anti-oil, natural gas, coal and other fossil fuel energy companies.  Their problem is that much of their clothing is manufactured from petroleum products, polar fleece for instance.  Liberty Oilfield Services launched a “Thank You North Face” campaign aimed at The North Face after North Face refused to sell specially branded jackets to Innovex Downhole Solutions last year.  The campaign includes a web site, You Tube message from the CEO, and billboards near the corporate offices in Denver.  This is called fighting back.  This is how we do it.  We are seeing more of it.  I don’t expect this to end any time soon.  Nor should it.

4.  Merit.  A sobering piece in Real Clear Investigations last week documented the widespread attack on color-blind merit standards swept into office with the Harris – Xiden regime and congressional majorities.  Entitled Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society, the Bernstein piece was published on June 9.  This is all tied with the notion of equity, CRT, and cultural Marxism.  The goal is no longer equal opportunity under the law.  Rather, the goal is to use the law to ensure equal outcomes, even if the government, government supporting corporations, NGOs and other entities have to discriminate against whites and Asians to get from here to there.  Somehow, I don’t think this is going to turn out all that well for the political left.  One indicator has been the proliferation of stories on FNC with women, blacks and Asians strongly speaking out against CRT in the public schools.  These stories simply don’t exist on other networks.  Yet the parents and teachers seem to be making some progress.  The other place this will proceed is in the federal courts following the installation of a bunch of Trump judges.  It’s going to take a while until the Harris – Xiden judicial nominees make it into the system to muck things up like the O’Bama judges did.  And if the Republicans take the Senate next year or if a democrat senator or two is no longer able to serve (Leahy and Feinstein have been mentioned) that judicial turnover may not happen at all.  We already had one bit of success with a federal judge late last week overturning an attempt to dole out farm debt relief funds based on race.  The provision was included in the COVID-19 Relief legislation.  It won’t be the last.  The injunction was issued based on blatant racial discrimination against whites. 

5.  Lab Leak.  Vanity Fair ran an extensive investigatory story on the origins of the COVID-19 virus.  It is a massive read, but well worth your time.  As of today, it looks like the virus was manufactured in the Wuhan lab.  Last week, a couple genetic experts claimed that there is genetic sequencing in the COVID-19 virus that is not found naturally in any known coronavirus.  OTOH, the sequence is a well-known and widely used sequence used for tracking insertion location of foreign genetic material in modified genes.  Blowback on this claim has been as expected, with Goolag hiding all references.  It is findable via Duck Duck Go.  The public health apparat was quick to dismiss the possibility, much like they were quick to dismiss and censor the notion that the virus made it into the wild via a lab leak.  I would watch this one closely, as it might be yet another smoking gun.  It might also end up being yet another dead end. 

6.  Yale.  What is it with the Ivy League these days?  First Yale changes its election procedures on the fly to remove the ability of non-approved candidates for its governing board elections to get nominated, and the same week we have reports of an invited psychiatrist’s talk delivered at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center who opines about”

“… unloading a revolver into the head of any white person who got in my way, burying the body, and wiping my bloody hand as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f$%^ing favor.”

 She lectured as part of an ongoing program which clinicians and others in the field lecture students and faculty. One of the learning objectives listed is “… understand how white people are psychologically dependent on black rage.”  Quite the learning objective that.  These guys are busily making the case that whites and Asians better never agree to receive medical care from any Yale graduate older than 50.  Yale’s alumni are supposed to elect its governing board.  They get a ballot with two candidates for each open slot.  Those candidates are chosen by the board.  Candidates are prohibited from taking positions and biographical information is scant.  Used to be a safety valve, with any candidate able to gather petitions to have their name placed on the ballot.  The last time this happened was 1965.  This year, a former graduate is running a campaign to bring open governance to the secretive board and questions about the $31 billion endowment, which is not performing as well as it should.  He was defeated after the board met in secret and abolished the petition process.  Glenn Reynolds wrote a piece about the festivities in the NYP last week.  He ends with the observation that “Our elites’ eagerness to escape accountability reveals a bitter truth.”

7.  Perchlorate.  Two of impediments to long-term residence in space are lack of experience in extended low gravity ‘G’ environments and radiation.  Unhealthy things tend to happen to the human body over the course of months to years in zero-G.  These didn’t start being observed until long-duration ISS stays.  Solution to the first is to supply some sort of artificial gravity, generally by spinning the structure, which has not been done for any extended period of time.  We have no idea at what G level the deterioration starts – 1/6 G?  1/3 G?  Earth Gravity 1 G?  Interestingly, all the habitable bodies in the solar system are one of those 3 levels.  The second big problem with long trip times out of earth orbit is exposure to high levels of radiation, levels that are deadly over the course of a months-long trip to Mars or an asteroid.  Most obvious solution would be a radiation shield of ice or water around 3 m thick.  These are heavy but at least we have experience with radiation shielding.  Should we end up going to Mars like Elon Musk wants to do, that trip will most likely be a one-way, go to stay mission.  Mars has a lot positive going for it, as it has a lot of water locked up in ice.  Its problem is a really funky soil chemistry with widespread perchlorates, heavily oxidized chlorine (one chlorine atom, four oxygen atoms).  Perchlorates at the levels found in Martian soils are toxic to humans.  So, to go to stay, there must be some way to clean up the soils.  One way would be to bring microbes to do the job.  These exist on earth and can be transported.  We’re going to need fungus and microbes to grow anything.  Why not use microbes to clean the soil?  Another approach would be to use molybdenum with a catalyst to reduce perchlorates and harvest the oxygen for other use.  This is the same technique the microbes use and works quickly, powerfully, and safely.  When we go to stay, mostly we will be finding new and more interesting ways to die, not unlike what settlers in the Americas found.  But we are already working on solutions, which is a real positive.  This is going to happen. 

More later –

  • AG

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