Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue:
1. Keystone
2. Trump
3. Disinfectant
4. CRT
5. UNC
6. Airlines
7. BLM
1. Keystone. Let the lawsuits begin. The backers of the Keystone XL Pipeline joined the 21 states suing the Harris – Xiden regime over cancellation of the pipeline. The states announced their lawsuit mid-March. Last week, the commercial backers of Keystone XL, TransCanada Energy, sued the US government for $15 billion. They already invested tens of billions of dollars into the pipeline and would like their money back. This is yet another argument against presidents issuing flurries of Executive Orders upon assuming office. Xiden’s excuse for cancelling the pipeline was:
“… to promote and protect our public health and the environment and conserve out national treasures and monuments, places that secure our national memory…”
The thing is that the oil that was supposed to flow thru Keystone XL is flowing into the US anyway. Only it is coming via rail, in tank cars, onboard trains powered by diesel engines, AKA refined crude oil. Like all things Harris – Xiden, this ends up being little more than virtue signaling, producing negative results, but employing hundreds of lawyers for what will end up being years. And all this virtue signaling will end up costing US taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
2. Trump. President Trump filed an anti-censorship lawsuit against Fakebook, Twitter and Goolag last week. This is a class-action lawsuit accusing Big Tech of being “… enforcers of illegal, unconstitutional censorship.” Legal observers quoted by fake news media immediately opined that the lawsuit is unlikely to gain traction in federal courts. The lawsuit was filed in US District Court in southern Florida, accusing Big Tech of censoring, blacklisting, and what he called cancelling people who share his political views. Expect Big Tech to use Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to argue that they have the right to censor anyone, at any time, and for any reason. This is an argument the federal courts have accepted. Florida and Texas have passed similar legislation prohibiting Big Tech from doing their censorship routine. A federal judge already blocked the Florida law from going into effect. Defenders of Big Tech may have a problem, as Big Tech increasingly has become an arm of the federal government, particularly congressional democrats who demand censorship of conservatives. And when the vast majority of all censorship, takedowns and shadow banning are aimed at conservatives Trump supporters, and Trump himself, disparate impact, a favorite term of the race hustlers used by democrats, quickly comes into effect. There are at least two recent SCOTUS opinions based on the notion that it is “… axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” And there is more than sufficient video of bellicose demands out of congressional democrats making these sorts of demands over the last half decade to prove precisely that. And those demands are coupled with congressional threats to strip the companies of their Section 230 immunity if they refuse. The complaint cites over a dozen similar remarks from congressional democrats. Section 230 has an immunity provision that allows Big Tech to pull content they don’t like. Trump is arguing that Section 230 means that Big Tech is acting as a state actor when it censors content. The lawsuit follows closely arguments made by a pair of lawyers in a WSJ op-ed in January. The other avenue to pursue it the notion of the Big Tech platforms being public accommodations, that ought not to be censoring any content, not unlike how telecom companies operate today. Just to demonstrate that they fail to understand what is about to happen, Goolag’s YouTube censored all content from last weekend’s CPAC conference, deleting Trump’s video. They think they are too big to fail. They aren’t.
3. Disinfectant. Clean water ends up being one of the most important sanitation goals in any community, particularly in the poorer parts of the world and the nation. Last week, a paper announced a new water disinfectant that used a catalyst and hydrogen gas that would successfully and efficiently remove bacteria and viruses from water. The technique uses a gold – palladium catalyst with hydrogen and oxygen. This turns the gasses into hydrogen peroxide, a powerful disinfectant. Hydrogen peroxide has a short shelf life and is stabilized with additives. These additives in turn limit commercial hydrogen peroxide’s ability to disinfect. Commercial purification systems generally supplement this with addition of some quantity of chlorine, which in large quantities can react with naturally occurring compounds in water to produce toxins. The new process operates on site, produces hydrogen peroxide which is immediately available and does not need storage. In other words, it works RIGHT NOW. The process also produces highly reactive, short-lived oxygenated compounds which also work to disinfect water. Bottom line is that the new process eliminates hydrogen peroxide storage, the use of chlorine, and is millions of times more effective cleaning water, making dirty water potable. From the writeup, it appears the new process is cheap and effective, making it a candidate for widespread use. Word of warning. As always, we are bombarded daily with promises of some new shiny process, technique, technology. Sometimes they work. Often, they do not. Worse, most are not commercially scalable. This one is worth watching for a while. If these guys have come up with something that can be cheaply and efficiently scaled up and deployed, this may be very, very good news, indeed.
4. CRT. A busy week for the race baiting CRT. A few shorts for your consideration:
- Scott Adams expertise is in the persuasion business. His view is that calling CRT Marxism is a losing persuasion play, as few these days know or care what Marxism really is (thanks to the teacher’s unions). A better play to be to describe it as a philosophy of losers and a#%holes.
- One way to publicly argue against anything like this is not to argue against it. Rather, it is to embrace it, eventually embracing it to death. How so? First action is to agree that it needs to be taught in schools. Then also demand that the teachers’ unions apply the same ideological fervor to institutional discrimination practiced by them against conservatives, Republicans and Trump supporters. This can probably also be applied to Big Tech. Most certainly apply it to the teachers’ unions, which have managed to institutionalize racism by fighting school choice for decades. Embrace the argument. Embrace it to death. The pro-CRT side is prepared for a fight against what they want to do. They are completely unprepared for any sort of agreement and expansion of what they want directed against where they want to go, who they are, pointing the entire apparatus a different direction.
- Final persuasion point is that the pro-CRT people, those actually out there pushing this, like other race-baiting activists, never ever are interested in a solution. Why? Any solution puts them out of business. And as we have seen with the BLM founders, this is a lucrative business. Why solve a problem that will pay their personal freight for the next couple decades?
- At least 5,000 teachers signed a pledge to keep teaching CRT in their classrooms regardless of what the state, local community, school district, or school board has ordered them to do. Art Chance writing in Must Read Alaska over the weekend notes that they can all summarily be fired. Chance is a former labor negotiator for the State of Alaska and has been through the wars with unions up here for decades. Any district negotiating with any teacher over CRT has already screwed up by opening negotiations rather than summarily firing the teacher on the spot. Appears to me that 5,000 nationwide have self-identified for a future in the food service industry. At the very least, they have volunteered for cameras in their classrooms, a change that may be coming a lot quicker than anyone expected or the unions wanted.
5. UNC. It is always nice with the craven leadership of a university gets hoisted with their own petard, a phrase that means getting blown up by their own explosive. In this case, the University of North Carolina (UNC) which denied tenure to 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones in May reversed itself a week or so ago, with the Trustees voting 9-4 to approve tenure. Initial approval of tenure was denied amid backlash over her unfactual and biased work on the race baiting 1619 Project. The vote came a day before she was to start working as the Chair of Race and Investigative Journalism at the UNC School of Journalism. Her response? I don’t need your stinking tenure. In fact, I don’t plan on teaching my racial bile at UNC at all. Instead, she will be spreading her bile and lies at Howard University as a chaired professor. She then went to bash UNC’s actions during the festivities. I am reminded of the Aesop’s Fable of the frog and scorpion. After the scorpion stings the frog, the now paralyzed frog starts to sink beneath the water, the frog asks the scorpion why. Response? “It’s in my nature.” Another viewpoint is that grifters gonna grift. Too bad about the Howard students under her tutelage.
6. Airlines. So much for the days of “fly the friendly skies.” Now that the airlines, following their payoff with CARES Act cash last year, no longer give a rat’s rear end about their passengers, this last week has been particularly instructive. Our largest carrier, Alaska Airlines is doing its level best to join Southwest, United, Delta and American Airlines in gratuitous ugliness toward their passengers. Last week, Suzanne Downing on the local morning talk show described flying with Alaska as a terribly tense, awful affair, with the cabin crew at war with their passengers. And they won’t stop unless forced to stop. A lot of the problems have been over masking, with some crews using failure to have a mask fully in place as an excuse to eject people from flying. One Alaska passenger was tossed on June 24 for wearing a Trump mask. She was asked to change, which she eventually did after arguing about it for a while. Yet her and her husband, an active-duty military member were both tossed off the flight. In response, the couple started a web site intended to gather stories about Alaska Airlines discriminating against their passengers. I hope it hurts Alaska Airlines a LOT.
7. BLM. No, not that BLM. This is the old one, Bureau of Land Management, whom the O’Bamaoids running the nomination process have managed to nominate an ecoterrorist to head. Tracy Stone-Manning was nominated on April 27. In her past life, she was involved with Earth First! She worked with Earth First! while attending University of Montana in Missoula. While there, she was involved in a tree spiking case. In 1989, she mailed a threatening letter the US Forst Service on behalf on one John P Blount, warning the USFS that trees in the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho scheduled for cutting had been sabotaged with a quarter ton of spikes. Tree spiking is particularly nasty as it tends to make saws explode, mutilating the operators. This was a really popular group among the radical environmentalists, with public support from Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber himself. The letter led to a Grand Jury and eventual prosecution of Blount. Stone-Manning testified in Blount’s 1993 trial in return for immunity from further prosecution for her involvement. She has worked for the MT democrat governor and Senator John Tester (D, MT). She limited access to her thesis summer 2020, indicating she knew she was on the fast track should democrats win in November.
More later –
- AG