Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. BBB
2 DST
3. Jaguar
4. Pride
5. Thomas
6. Denver
7. Zohran
8. Starship
1. BBB. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) was voted out of the Senate 51-50 this time last week and passed the House 218 – 214 Thursday. President Trump signed it into law Friday, July 4. On one hand, the legislation is yet another congressional porkfest. On the other, it is another notch toward defunding the left, particular the democrat – NGO money laundering operation put into place during the O’Bama years. Best of all, it forced retirement of one of the more frustrating (infuriating?) RINOS in the senate, Thom Tillis (R, NC). Details will continue to leak out as people actually start reading it. At the top line, it locked in the 2017 Trump tax cuts. It also cut taxes for tips, overtime and social security, though none were completely eliminated. Details of the last three remain to be seen, and I expect a certain amount of stupidity in the actual language, as tax law is always stupid, which is why some of us pay Turbo Tax to figure out how to compute it each spring. Alaska did quite well, with a move toward a return to 90 – 10% spit in royalties for oil and natural gas promised in the 1958 Alaska Statehood Act. Over the years, this was ratcheted down to a 50 – 50% split for leases on most federal lands. The BBB now requires annual lease sales for both ANWR and NPR-A along with Cook Inlet. Yanking leases and lease sales was one of the cute little tricks used by both the O’Bama and Biden flying monkeys to obstruct oil and natural gas development in the state. A WSJ piece last week praising Alaska’s wayward senior US Senator Lisa Murkowski attempted to slime her with all manner of payoffs she received in return for her yes vote in support of the bill. This prompted a flood of comments by readers sick and tired of federal money being sent to Alaska. The response to that was that Alaska is a resource state. We have been trying to develop those resources ever since statehood and have been obstructed at every turn by the democrats, their NGO cohorts in crime in Big Green and the federal courts who put up with the obstruction. A resource state not allowed to develop its own resources quickly becomes an economic basket case as the stupidity of whatever the feds are doing compounds the stupidity of whatever we here in Alaska are doing to ourselves. We can generally survive one of these. Surviving both is difficult. There will be a lot more on this in the upcoming months. Expect stories about moving responsibility for Medicaid back to the states, taxing university endowments, and further defunding the left. What’s next? I would expect Trump to go after the Fed, starting with its Chairman, who is almost begging to be replaced. Powell has two problems. The first and most important is artificially keeping interest rates high in a time with very little inflation. This was the same guy who artificially kept them low during the inflationary Biden regime. Powell’s second problem is a gold-plated $2.5 billion white elephant he wants to build for fed headquarters in DC. This will quickly be followed by the rescission legislation mid-August and then the FY 2026 budget in September.
2. DST. The BBB wasn’t the only excitement in DC last week, as the Trudeau-era Canadian Digital Services Tax (DST) was set to kick in with the first payments due June 30. As we approached that date, Trump announced all negotiation on tariffs would stop until the tax was repealed. It took the Canadian Prime Minister less than two days to suspend the tax and announce it would be repealed. The DST went into force Jun 2024, a 3% levy on Canadia services applying to all firms that provide digital services with annual revenue over €750 million annual revenue worldwide with annual revenue on Canadian services over $20 million. It is an international (think EU) effort to gouge Big Tech / Social Media for free money, over $7 billion estimated 2023 – 2027 in Canada alone. Perhaps 70% of $13.5 billion Canadian ad expenditures in 2022 were paid to foreign-owned digital media. The liberals under Trudeau passed the DST to get their grubby little hands on the free money. At the time it was passed. the US Trade Representative disputed the new tax as a violation of the USMCA because it discriminates against American firms. Appears the new Canadia PM agrees. Note that there are other DSTs currently in effect in 11 European nations, all of which are being disputed and are topics in current tariff negotiations. Note that the trade negotiators have their work cut out for them as the voluntary EU censorship regime went mandatory last week. This holds content providers responsible for the actual content with massive fines threatened should the EU Mandarins attempt to fine the companies.
3. Jaguar. One of the persuasion lessons Scott Adams teaches is the notion of two movies on the same screen. This describes how two different people can see or experience the same thing and come to completely different conclusions about what they saw. Last week’s exercise in two movies comes courtesy of Jaguar, whose sales in Europe dropped over 97% over the last year. Those of us on the political right instantly went to their idiotic attempt to rebrand their vehicles as trans-friendly, making the same mistake that Bud Light did with Dylan Mulvaney a couple years ago. The other movie comes courtesy of Jaguar, saying the sales drop was not only expected, but planned for as they transitioned from internal combustion engines (ICE) to an exclusive EV fleet. In order to make the transition, they all but shut down production of their ICE powered vehicles. Tough to sell your cars when they aren’t coming out of the factory anymore. Which of these do I think is true? Both. I tend to believe they had to figure out how to switch their manufacturing line. I don’t think they did it well, as one way or another you must keep sales going, which Toyota managed to do with their Sienna vans as they transitioned from an ICE powered fleet to a pure hybrid (large battery with 4-cylinder ICE). Second mistake is EVs aren’t selling all that well these days, and their decision may very well be coming at the very time when the marketplace is moving away from EVs. Finally, their rebranding leaves a lot to be desired, if for no other reason than they seem to have forgotten who their customer base really is. Are they trans and furry loving gender confused people like their new commercial suggests, or are they 40 – 50-year-old men who remember Jaguar as decent sports cars? Somehow, I don’t think the trans / furry contingent is going to purchase enough vehicles.
4. Pride. At the risk of writing positive things about pride, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, I will simply note the logical disconnect: Why or how is celebrating one of the Seven Deadly Sins a Good Thing? This story comes out of Legal Insurrection last week which described results of a Gallup Survey asking about pride in America. It turns out that pride in the nation has a political component, with democrats very gloomy these days, 36% extremely or very proud to be an American, down from 62% a year ago. Indys are not much better, at 53% extremely or very proud. Republicans riding the Trump wave are happiest, at 92% this year, up from 86% last year. Looking back at similar surveys, democrat pride in America fell off a cliff 2013 – 2014. What happened then to make pride fall off a cliff? You need to look no farther than the Trayvon Martin shooting in 2013 and the Michael Brown shooting in 2014. These were both met with the orchestrated street theater riots of BLM at the time, aided and abetted by the O’Bama administration and its media cheerleaders. If you want these sorts of riots, you encourage more of them, which is what O’Bama and his minions most certainly did. Fundamental transformation, indeed. Democrat leadership managed to convert their cadre into an active group of haters.
5. Thomas. University of Pennsylvania came to an agreement with the Trump DoJ to strip trans swimmer (man pretending to be a woman) Lia Thomas of all wins during his time swimming competitively as a woman. This was in response to the Trump administration freezing $175 million in federal funds for its violation of Title IX by allowing him to swim. At the time, they enjoyed the wins and the notoriety. Penn will also “… restore to female athletes all individual UPenn Division I swimming records, titles and similar recognitions which were misappropriated by male athletes allowed to compete in female categories.” They will issue a public statement to the greater community explaining how they plan to comply with Title IX by not allowing this to happen again. They will also issue individual letters of apology to every female athlete touched by this fraud.
6. Denver. Speaking of democrats and the fledgling Confederacy, the Denver city council voted unanimously to shut down an anti-theft auto license plate tracking system because ICE could use the data to deport illegals. In May, the council voted not to renew a $660,000 contract launched about a year ago to operate a camera system that monitors 70 intersections in Denver to screen for auto theft. The system scans perhaps two million cars monthly and recovered 170 vehicles and helped with 300 arrests. The data also helped Denver police investigate hit and run and murder cases. The council was worried that the data is available for use by a wide array of enforcement agencies in addition to Denver police. Council spokes-liars supported the goal of protecting illegals above all other law enforcement goals. The system will continue until the end of the contract in February. Nice to see Denver has its priorities intact.
7. Zohran. The reaction to the campaign of NYC City Council member Zohran Mamdani for mayor continued last week, with the candidate doubling and tripling down on his communist bonafides. The description of him as a communist is accurate because he wants NYC to control the means of production, a fundamental tenant of communism. Pushback is beginning with Scott Adams describing his smile as a “creepy smile,” a powerful persuasion kill shot. An attempt to bring up his Columbia application where he self-identified as black ought to be ignored under the logic that nobody’s actions as a student ought to be held against them because branes aren’t fully developed until age 25. Yeah, it was stupid. And yeah, we ought to pay attention to it, but only if he did it again when he got older, like Lizzie Warren did claiming to be Native American well into her professional career. Jockeying for the Mayoral race through election day in November began with calls for Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate nominee to drop out so votes can coalesce around current mayor Eric Adams.
8. Starship. Turns out that the explosion of Starship 36 on the test stand at their Massey’s test site was pretty serious, not only destroying the ship but causing significant damage to the test stand itself. The problem with an increased launch cadence is how to conduct a ground test firing of the engines on the two remaining Block 2 Starships so they can be quickly flown? The problem SpaceX has is that they have managed to break the last four Starships in unsuccessful tests and test flights. Two are left and the Block 3 ships are already under construction, with at least one of them finished and ready for testing. The problem is twofold. First, the Ship 36 failure damaged the test stand. Second, it will take some amount of time to repair the test stand, by some accounts 3 – 6 months, after which it will have to be taken out of service once again, refurbished, and modified to handle the new Block 3 ships, adding another few months to the test program. Add the months, and you all but guarantee SpaceX misses the Dec 2026 Mars launch window which Musk wants to send 2-5 Starships to Mars. How to compress that schedule? Looks like the solution is to temporarily modify the Pad A launch stand with a stand to allow Starship engine tests while at the same time they finish the repair of the Massey’s test stand and modify it to handle Block 3 Ship engine tests. SpaceX does its Booster prelaunch live fire tests on that launch stand. Flexibility has always been said to be the key to airpower. Appears it is also the key to spaceflight
More later –
- AG