Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. DOGE
2. Polling
3. Canada
4. Blackout
5. RFK Jr
6. Explosion
1. DOGE. We spoke of the supposed failure of DOGE to find their trillion dollars in savings a couple weeks ago, something that made the media and democrats whose water they are carrying well pleased. Most recent savings is in the vicinity of $160 billion / year. Happily, that’s not the only outcome. DOGE is uncovering massive fraud in how the feds spend and are setting up systems to identify that fraud so that the various cabinet secretaries and agency heads can do something about it. This may end up being far more powerful and long-lasting than a simple budget cut as it significantly cuts the upward pressure to spend more and defunds the left. The other positive outcome is Trump is currently freezing just over $436 billion in spending. Add that to the DOGE number and you are well over half a trillion, quite the start for the first 100 days. Of course, congress is going to have to lock in this in their spending bill, which the House is currently working on. Senate Majority Leader Thune wants a vote on the bill by July 4. Given that Trump has picked a number of fights with congress and the courts over his first 100 days (birthright citizenship, for instance), I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he weren’t teeing up the recission fight that led to congress’s effort to impeach Nixon in 1973. The courts have never ruled on this. Perhaps it is time they do. Trump may force the issue.
2. Polling. Just in time for Trump’s first 100 days in office comes a round of national polls showing his support cratering, another little report that made the Usual Suspects positively giddy. Problem is, they were unable to find any Trump supporters who were disgusted with his efforts. While we can make a good case for irritation with stock market problems (we are well into the bear market the Elliot Wave guys have been predicting for a couple years) and concern about tariffs, I am not seeing a wholesale shift against Trump. What is really going on? As of this writing, nobody knows, though my guess is that the media is up to their old tricks with polling again. This is mitigated by pollsters on Our Side of the aisle, Mark Halpern is one example, who claim that the poll results are real. Halpern gave that analysis on Hannity’s radio show Monday. Best I can find is a report that the polls were conducted the old-fashioned way, by refusing to poll Republicans / Trump supporters. In what is essentially a 50 – 50% electorate, they reportedly polled only 27% Republicans in one poll. Its results were decidedly negative. No surprise, that. Democrats are playing their long game, going harshly negative, using the federal courts to block, obstruct, delay and undermine everything Trump is trying to do in hopes that this obstruction will successfully keep anything concrete from getting done until the 2026 congressional elections where they hope to regain control of the House. This is all they’ve got. Trump has a lot of tools at his fingertips. In no particular order the tools include tariffs, trade deals, deregulation, reindustrialization, and budget cuts. The tariffs and trade deals are linked. Trump has 18 months to solve the tariff issue and start getting new trade deals signed. His process does not start each new agreement from scratch. Rather, there is an overall framework that each agreement will be modeled after, which will accelerate the ability of both sides to arrive at an agreement. Who do I think will be first? Likely India followed by our trading partners around the Pacific Rim. The EU, Canada and Mexico will be somewhere down the line, with China last, though China is reportedly talking. Start bringing these in, and all the consternation about trade wars disappears completely. Deregulation is intimately tied to energy policy, and we are in complete drill baby drill mode. That is already kicking in with a drop in oil and natural gas prices. As we open up federal lands for exploration and production, gasoline will once again fall under $2/gallon. To me, reindustrialization is the most interesting piece, as of all this, as I did not expect the rest of the world to come flocking to the door, hat in hand, with promises of trillions to move manufacturing back to the US. Part of this is due to the tariff threats. The other part is China, which the CCP has managed to turn into one of the most predatory trading partners on the entire planet. The CCP is a self-made pariah. And they are about to be treated as one. Depending on whose bogus numbers you believe, somewhere between $2 – 8 trillion in investment has been promised. This investment will provide an economic shot in the arm while the tariff negotiations and the stock market does whatever they will do. Things move pretty quickly in the world today, and time is not on the side of the democrats. Too bad for them (not really)
3. Canada. Canadian parliamentary elections did not go as hoped for last week, with the liberal party maintaining a majority, electing another liberal Prime Minister, and defeating the sinister conservatives. The Conservative Party leader even lost his local election, much to the rejoicing of the Usual Suspects who gleefully blamed Trump’s 51st State rhetoric for the results. Indeed, this was the conventional wisdom. What really happened, is that Canada ended up with a status quo election, electing a Liberal-led minority government. Conservatives ended up with 34% of the total vote, winning 119 seats in Parliament. Liberals ended up with 33%, and 160 seats (Gerrymandering works just as well in Canada as it does down here). Four other parties split the remaining 28% of the vote and 59 seats. Since the last election, Conservatives increased their seat total by +24. The four left wing parties collectively lost 19 seats (-19). Essentially, the conservative party is growing while the minor left wing parties collapse. And somehow this is Trump’s fault. One of the major issues was disgust with former Prime Minister Trudeau, an issue eliminated when he announced in Jan he was stepping down. All is not wine and roses in Canada, as at least three western provinces are floating petitions to leave the Commonwealth, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. BC is the most liberal of these three. Apparently, the Canadian constitution allows this sort of thing to take place, likely an artifact remaining from Bloc Quebecois separatist efforts. Trump may not end up with Canada as a 51st state. He might end up with 53, adding two red and one blue state. Elections have consequences. This one will also, though not the one those currently doing their Snoopy dance may expect.
4. Blackout. Nothing like celebrating a claim of total reliance on renewables by holding your very own day long national blackout. This happened to the electric grid in Spain, Portugal and part of southern France last Monday. Just minutes before the collapse at 1230 L, renewables supplied 78% of all generation, with solar alone contributing 60%. Naturla gas and nuclear generation were 15% of the total supply. This configuration is not unusual in Spain and Portugal on sunny and windy days. The system suffered two consecutive generation losses likely at large solar stations. Causes are still unknown. Not enough conventional backup was available and the system crashed, losing 15 gig of electricity (60%) in 5 seconds. Remaining generation was not sufficient to keep the lights on and the cascade took down the entire grid forcing a cold restart. Power started being restored by 1700 L that same day, with the system being mostly back up by 1800 the next day. As usual, there was insufficient rotating backup to keep the system up. The grid on the Iberian Peninsula is using inverters to address the grid instability issue common with systems using high percentages of renewables. The grid did get some electricity from Morocco and France that afternoon to help restore service. The media, complicit in destabilizing the grid over the years via their incessant cheerleading in support of renewables did their level best to blame everything other than reliance on renewables. As I have written previously, there is an operational limit to the amount of renewable energy any electrical grid can tolerate, as renewables rarely come installed with storage. That number is generally less than 10 – 20% of installed generation capability. Those who ignore this are going to have the lights go out, just like they April 28.
5. RFK, Jr. I approach RFK Jr as HHS secretary with a skeptical viewpoint, though being skeptical of a skeptic tends to approach circular reasoning.
- One of the things he brings to the table is a strong, clear call to actually follow the stated protocol for health recommendations. This means that vax recommendations need to be based on actual testing on actual people who are destined to take the vax. For far too long, we have lived in a world where the government forces mass vaccinations to address the most recent deadly infection, something we saw most recently with COVID. Note that vaccinations have been around for a long time, dating all the way back to the very first smallpox vax in 1796. The COVID experience taught everyone that the government and its functionaries were perfectly comfortable lying to the general public about everything. Not some things, everything. As a result, we don’t trust them anymore. Nor should we, as they have neither earned nor deserve our trust today.
- RFK Jr proposes to look into things long suspected in the skeptic community but never publicly discussed. These include but are not limited to a connection between the autism outbreak and the large number of required / recommended vax / inoculations for children below age 18. The graphic included below lists an eye-popping 93 shots, though the actual number is probably closer to 50. The actual number is less important than the explosion of shots over the last half century. Does all this stuff play well together? Nobody knows, though everybody should, which is what RFK Jr is looking at.
- Other discussions of verboten topics include unreported side effects of the morning after induced abortion pills. Looks like we’re going to have some of those.
- That’s all the good news. But with RFK Jr, there is also bad news. If you are skeptical of everything, you are actually skeptical of everything. Last week’s example is his promise to look into the crime of chemtrails. Chemtrails is an old conspiracy theory that holds that high altitude jets are spraying poisons into the upper atmosphere when they fly. These are called chemical trails, or chemtrails. The conspiracy theory is based on the spraying of agent orange defoliant over the jungles of Vietnam, something roundly denied at the time, which puts us smartly back where we were at the end of COVID – if you are lying about that, what makes me believe you aren’t lying about everything else? After all, your lips are moving.
- Chemtrails has long been a topic of humor in the aviation community, with gag gifts available that look like on/off switches to be installed on instrument panels. What are contrails actually? Think cirrus clouds, which are ice crystals that can persist for minutes to hours after passage of a jet at the right altitude. Fly a jet through an air mass that is cold enough with a sufficiently high humidity, and the exhaust from the jet engines and disturbance from the wingtip vortices will trigger cloud formation. We have seen contrails as far back as WWII behind allied bombers over Europe.
- I think the notion of chemtrails is bogus, though I really appreciate having the discussion in public, a discussion we should have been having about a variety of public health concerns over the last half century. If you want people to believe you, the very first thing you need to do is open up public discussion, regardless of where that discussion will end up going. Free speech is never the problem. Free speech is always the solution, regardless of how crazy that discussion might make you or I. Those who hide behind The Science or any other logical fallacy like argument from authority deserve little more than the derision and public humiliation they so richly deserve.
6. Explosion. Final story comes out of Iran, which suffered a massive explosion at a southern port. The accident killed 40 – 70 people. They were reportedly taking delivery of perchlorate from China, essentially solid rocket fuel. Anything that damages their ability to sow terror on their neighbors is generally a positive. The question here is who or what is responsible? If the explosion destroyed a shipment of solid rocket fuel, who then uses those rockets? That’s a long list these days that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russia and any other terrorist group so ordered. Who would be interested in those entities no longer firing Iranian manufactured missiles? Israel, the US, Ukraine. Of course, we always have the normal incompetence we see in that part of the world. Who did this? Nobody knows as yet, though it is sufficient as of this writing to simply enjoy the damage to their ability to wreak havoc on their neighbors and enemies for a time.
More later –
- AG