Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Amazon
2. Terrorists
3. Elon
4. Fence
5. Telco
6. Wharf
1. Amazon. Big story this week was the discovery that Amazon is working hand in hand with the CCP to destroy American small businesses. The problem was popularized by Scott Adams last week over online sales of his new Dilbert calendar. Note that I am using the term “popularize” rather than discovered as the problem is long known at Amazon. If you take a look at any Amazon page, you will find a bunch of products under whatever type you are looking for. If you look at the manufacturers, you will find an inordinate number of obviously Chinese companies. The CCP monitors Amazon for new products. If one looks interesting or seems to be selling, they quickly whip up something similar under a different name and start selling it, basically theft of intellectual property (IP), something they and are very good at and doing for decades. Any complaint by the original vendor goes into the current Amazon process, which seems designed to slow roll complaint resolution in favor of the IP pirates. No small number of products, typically publications, sell best in the first few weeks after they are announced. So, any delay in resolution ensures that initial sales all goes in favor of the CCP. In many cases, Amazon requires the complaining company to purchase the fake(s), compare them, for them to act. There are some indications that bribery is involved in Amazon’s intransigence, as the foot dragging ends up being the corporate response, a feature rather than a bug. Remember that the CCP is very, very good at bribery, as corruption is the core family value of their economic system. Adams long knew about the problem, but it never seriously touched him until he offered up his 2025 Dilbert Calendar. Adams was cancelled in 2023 for supposedly making racist comments. Cancellation was led by the Bezos Washington Post. This was a massive, global cancellation as the political left attempted to clear the decks to reelect Biden. All book contracts were cancelled. All papers dropped his Dilbert comic strip. His other businesses were cancelled. Yet he persisted, even prevailed in the face of cancellation. Happily, when the contracts were cancelled, ownership of all his publications returned back to him. He was able to find new publishers. Some of the republished books started showing back up on Amazon. Once they started hitting Amazon, so did the fraudulent products. His 2025 Dilbert Calendar is only available via the Dilbert web site, yet there were multiple Amazon pages selling knockoff calendars. He finally got sufficiently fed up and publicly complained both in his daily podcast and on Twitter / X. That goaded Amazon into action two days after he went public. They took down all the knockoffs over the weekend. This triggered a number of people to contact him reporting that the problem is not limited to publications but seems to hit everything at the small business level. Someone claiming to be a former Amazon employee reached out via Twitter / X claiming that complaints about this sort of IP theft bubbles up in Amazon every three years or so. A team is assigned to address the problem. Once it triggers complaints by vendors (CCP IP pirates), the project is sidetracked and everyone on the team reassigned. This has been going on for at least a decade, likely a lot longer. It has gotten bad enough that it has risen to the level of Homeland Security. Time for someone to have a heart to heart with Bezos.
2. Terrorists. A pair of terrorist attacks last week. The first in New Orleans, the second in Las Vegas. The NO attack was executed by a former Army member who apparently started hanging with the wrong crowd, allowed himself to get radicalized, and took a Ford F-150 down a street in the French Quarter at high speed 3 AM, killing at least 14, injuring twice that many. Response was as expected, with the wokesters from the corrupt FBI initially claiming it was not a terrorist attack, though that story quickly changed. The perp apparently left backpacks with bombs in the few days before the attack. None of these went off. The second attack was by an Army Master Sgt from Colorado Springs who drove a rented Tesla Truck to Las Vegas (apparently to Las Vegas NM first), loaded the trunk with low grade explosives and blew it up in front of Trump Tower in LSV. Tesla makes a pretty stout machine, as the tires on the truck were still intact and none of the glass in front of Trump Tower was broken afterwards. There is more than a little weirdness associated with the LAS attack, and I would like to wait a while for more analysis. The first guy was a newly minted jihadi, who had a really rough time in the months and years before, so his recruitment is not surprising. Last on the list is our old friends at ESPN, who pointedly refused to air the National Anthem and opening ceremonies at the Sugar Bowl the following evening. They claimed timing issues, an out and out lie. Clay Travis of Outkick and Clay and Buck Show ripped them several new bodily orifices in a column over the weekend. ESPN refused to air the opening ceremonies because they hate America. They intentionally missed a patriotic moment every bit as powerful as the Bush 43 first pitch at Game 3 of the 2001 World Series. That hatred is about to do great damage to their bottom line.
3. Elon. Payback is a b@#$% or revenge is a dish best served cold. When you choose to muck around in American politics as a foreign nation, don’t be surprised with someone decides to muck around in yours. Germany, Great Britain and Canada all decided to go all in with their public support of the Kamala campaign, with the Labor Party in the UK going so far as to send party members overseas to work in her campaign. Both Trump and Elon Musk returned fire last week and may be in the midst of taking down all three governments.
- First, Trump went after Canada’s Justin Trudeau early December following Trudeau’s refusal to cooperate with his call for Canada and Mexico to help protect the US border from illegal immigration and fentanyl. Following a Trudeau visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump threatened a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods and services. The tariffs could be bypassed by Canada becoming the 51st state, after which Trump started referring to him as Governor Trudeau. Justin Trudeau resigned as Canadian Prime Minister this morning. To be fair, his party is expected to get hammered in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
- Second, Elon Musk waded into the upcoming German elections with an op-ed in German’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper Dec 28. The piece defended Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party, growing in popularity. The party is universally referred to as far right (both in Europe and in the US).
- Finally, Musk helped resurrect the grooming scandal in Great Britain in which a reported quarter million young girls were recruited into mostly Pakistani rape gangs over decades. The crimes were systematically covered up by British law enforcement and politicians so as not to anger the Pakistanis and trigger political backlash. One of the chief players in the coverup over the last decade was current Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer. Reaction to ongoing concern by non-Muslims by the Starmer regime has been to hammer them with law enforcement for rioting, social media posts and memes. OTOH, they have been remarkably lenient to the gang participants, once again demonstrating a dual standard of justice in Great Britian based on race and religion. One such political prisoner is one Tommy Robinson. Musk with a series of Twitter / X posts took up the Robinson cause and in turn helped to make it more difficult to maintain the coverup. Starmer is in a spot of electoral trouble having received a 3 million signature petition demanding new parliamentary elections a week or two ago.
- Note that both Trudeau and Starmer have a real nasty totalitarian streak that displays itself strongly when their population protests their actions. I don’t think that totalitarian streak will be rewarded by voters.
4. Fence. A South Dakota ranching couple were individually indicted and are facing 10 years in prison over a fence dispute with the USFS. The charges are theft of government property for placing a fence on federal grassland. The couple is not allowed to discuss the case between themselves as they were charged in separate Grand Jury indictments. This also means they must each retain legal counsel, nicely doubling their legal expenses. The dispute began Mar 2024 when they were told to remove a no hunting sign on a fence between their land and the Buffalo Gap national Grassland after an alleged complaint by a hunter. The couple complied though were not shown the complaint. A month later, a USFS district ranger and a special agent met with the couple. They agreed the USFS would survey the land to determine property lines. The ranger said the survey could take up to a year. Five days later, the special agent showed up at the ranch with a survey team. On Jun 24, the agent showed up again, this time with indictments. The couple pursued resolution as soon as the issue was raised to them. They were not notified of any rule violations as they maintained their grazing agreements in good standing. Here’s the funny part. The family had an ongoing grazing agreement with the USFS since 1950 when the fence was built. Both parties consistently acknowledged fence location at each agreement renewal. Like many parts of the west, the various federal agencies have gotten increasingly heavy-handed when dealing with property owners. It is an old story that is at its ugliest near the end of any democrat administration. This one is no different, now having a US Senator and the Secretary of Agriculture involved. Needless to say, local ranchers are nicely spun up and universally backing the couple. Feds need to be real careful doing this, as they cannot predict personal responses to their wanton ugliness.
5. Telco. At least nine US telecom firms have been hit by a massive CCP espionage campaign called Salt Typhoon. The hack gave Beijing access to texts, conversations and location data of an unknown number of Americans. The US wasn’t the only target, as it hit multiple nations. The hack exposed security vulnerabilities in the private sector and demonstrated CCP hacking sophistication. The lying WH claimed hackers only targeted a limited number of individuals. How do they know? How can they tell? What else are they lying about? It does appear that the WH is doing its level best to minimize both the publicity and concern about this hack, pretending the hack was limited to senior officials. The problem is that if the CCP wanted access to anything about anybody, they were able to get it. And geolocation data was available at will. The intel community is pointing the finger at the telco companies for the breach, although they have been slurping all telco data nationwide for decades. Why didn’t they see anything untoward? Why didn’t they lift a figure to stop it? Worse, now that we know about the hack, are there any guarantees that hack has been stopped and all installed back doors removed? My guess would be no.
6. Wharf. When you build things in the ocean, you generally need to maintain them if you want to use them for an extended period of time. There are things like storms, waves, rain, wind, and most of all, salt water that tend to limit useful lifetimes. Generally, the wildlife also gets involved in the festivities. Most recent reminder of this was partial collapse of a historic wharf in Santa Cruz following unusually high waves. Repairs to the 110-year-old structure were delayed after a lawsuit by greens and preservationists shut down maintenance by several years. Nobody was hurt during the collapse, though three workers needed to be rescued at the detached end of the wharf. The city had planned to reinforce the wharf, but the lawsuit caused the project to be abandoned. Preservationists got themselves involved because the repair work would have modified the wharf a bit to make it more able to resist storms and a bit easier to maintain. One of the fun claims made by the greens was repair work would disrupt nesting seagulls, so they got a court order to limit repair work during times of the year when the gulls aren’t nesting, generally the times of the year with the very worst weather and in turn the worst seas. The greens are now claiming that the proposed changes would not have helped. Pretty convenient claim, that.
More later –
- AG