Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Riot
2. Redistricting
3. Chagos
4. Ilhan
5. Microplastics
6. Sewage
7. Board
8. Adult Ed
1. Riot. Minneapolis rioters claimed another life Jan 24 with the shooting of a former ER nurse. The guy showed up at the riot armed with a Sig P320, confronted law enforcement, was disarmed, and shot after the firearm discharged. This particular location was in the street in front of another Somali “business” targeted by ICE. Congratulations, guys, you got yourself a second martyr. Turns out that this was his second encounter with federal agents during a riot, as 10 days earlier, he was arrested, tackled, after spitting into an ICE vehicle and kicking out its taillight. The takedown apparently resulted in a broken rib, which wasn’t enough of a message. DoJ is investigating the shoot.
- He was committed to protesting, having quit his job for at least a little while. His parents counseled him not to do anything stupid, a message that was likewise ignored. The brainwashing on the political left is incredibly strong and continually reinforced.
- The cyberwar associated with this blew up nicely, with multiple riot coordination groups, ICE doxxing groups, and SIGNAL chat groups hacked with their membership and conversations reportedly sent to the feds. Data Republican, which is a good follow on X participated. The cyber war on this is fairly serious, as I triggered a Google alert researching articles for this Item. Duck Duck Go did not trigger a similar alert.
- The feds claim they are tracing the money and C3I chains funding and coordinating the riots. We will see how that all works out.
- Much was made of the choice of weapons, as the SIG P320 has been tied to accidental discharges for several years. The weapon has only two safeties and the trigger is relatively light, which are different to other semi-autos, even those manufactured by Sig. Training with this weapon is very important, as it can bite you if you are not careful. Sig claims the weapon is safe. The buying public disagrees. Firearms vendors are having some difficulty moving the weapons, meaning the public has made up its mind.
- While it is not illegal (depending on your local laws) to bring a weapon to a protest, it is illegal almost everywhere to bring a loaded weapon to a riot or while resisting arrest / refusing to follow instructions by law enforcement. Most instruction time in concealed carry classes is spent on the law and dealing with law enforcement. Most of the instruction on law enforcement tells the new Concealed Carry applicant not to do anything the Minneapolis nurse did. SciFi / Fantasy author and committed firearms guy Larry Correia was particularly blunt in his criticism of the nurse for doing multiple dumb things which quickly escalated to the point of getting him dead.
- The race for MN governor may be lots of fun, as it appears that democrats are simply going to run against Trump who is hated in MN. Walz was pulled from the ticket because he was underwater in approval, with a 55-45% disapproval in polling. Trump is more hated, at 60-40% disapproval. Logically, this should equate to an easy Klobuchar win, though I wouldn’t count those chickens before they are hatched. We still have the ongoing ICE arrests, turning over the streets of MN to the mob, and the ongoing Somali fraud to explore. Any of those three in any normal election year should be remarkably corrosive to an anti-Trump democrat (is there any other type?) campaign, which every single democrat in the state will try to run.
2. Redistricting. The Abigail Spanberger / democrat legislature legislative crazy train ran into a smallish delay last week when a state judge found the democrat redistricting legislation was illegal because the legislature failed to follow state law for constitutional amendments. The amendment was intended to redraw congressional (and I am guessing legislative) districts to favor democrats in future elections. If successful, it would have changed the current 6=5 democrat split in congressional seats into a 10-1 advantage. Democrats failed to approve the amendment before voting began in 2024, failed to publish the amendment three months before the election, and failed to follow their own legislative rules for adding the amendment to a special session of the legislature. If successful, the +4-seat democrat redistricting pickup would be enough to flip control of the US House to democrat, likely by using hate Trump democrat strength in northern VA to dilute Republican strength downstate.
3. Chagos. The Starmer regime in Great Britain (GB) negotiated an agreement to hand the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius. Implementing legislation for the treaty was pulled following growing criticism in Parliament and a blast from the WH. The Chagos Islands are located in the Indian Ocean between India and Africa. Among the islands is Diego Garcia, one of the more important US regional naval and air bases in that part of the world. The US and GB negotiated a treaty in 1966 for use of the island. The US was not consulted over the new treaty, which is a violation of the current US – GB treaty. Normally, this sort of thing would be sorted quietly. The problem is (as always) growing influence of China via its Belt and Road program in Africa and the rest of the region. The CCP should be salivating at the thought of the possibility to bounce the US out of that part of the world, similar to their creative way of gaining control of the Panama Canal until Trump 47 kicked them out. The question of what is going on with the Starmer government arises. Is it normal Labor fecklessness? Is it incompetence? Something else? I would suggest yes to all three, usually the wrong response to an “or” question. We know the fecklessness and incompetence comes by definition. The other comes via the 75 foreign influence outposts China has established in the UK.
4. Ilhan. Someone squirted an unknown liquid on Ilhan Omar at an event in Minneapolis last week. The liquid turned out to be apple cider vinegar. The perp was immediately arrested and will be charged and tried. Given the other mysteries associated with Omar (sudden appearance of her $30 million net worth and the disappearance of her husband’s multi-million dollar winery), more than a few of us are looking at this as a false flag operation. We will see what happens to this guy after he is tried, convicted and jailed, particularly what happens to his bank account before, during and after and how long he stays in Club Fed.
5. Microplastics. Greens and their enforcers in the legal world are ramping up to go after the petrochemical industry, specifically plastics for the so-called debilitating problem of microplastics. The most recent gambit is to whip up international concern among coffee drinkers claiming that coffee drinking increases exposure to microplastics via the use of polystyrene cups. The vehicle being that microplastics are being consumed on a regular basis impacting brain and other organ tissues. The problem with this claim is the same as the COVID-istas had, as all the data appears to be garbage along with techniques for measuring presence, impact, and recommendations. One of the big problems with the claims of rising microplastics in the brain is that fat makes false positives for microplastics. The brain is 60% fat. Rising obesity levels could just as easily be an explanation. The skeptics on this point out that over half of what they call “high impact” papers on the topic may be garbage. Why? Methods are insufficient to support the conclusions. Important data quality metrics were never reported. No details about how the source tissues were handled were present. In short, there was a lot of arm waving for precious little actual data or conclusions. Once again, the latest environmental scare goes down in flames. As it should.
6. Sewage. Nothing like a massive sewage spill in the Potomac River upstream of the Beltway to keep the locals on their toes and into the bottled water. A 6’ diameter sewage line collapsed under the Potomac River Jan 19 spilling millions of gallons of sewage into the river. Pumps and pipes were used to collect up and reroute contaminated water into other intact sewage lines. Spillage rate was 40 million gallons/day before the water was rerouted six days later. Cause? As usual, lack of timely maintenance. Like we saw with the New Orleans flood control system, Maintenance in the blue world is always deferred until something big breaks. And it is deferred because it becomes an easy pot of money to pay the democrat fraud machine.
7. Board. In one of his more ambitious foreign policy efforts, President Trump is growing his new Board of Peace, originally proposed to lead the reconstruction of Gaza, into a De Facto replacement for the United Nations. Granted, this is significant mission creep, which in any normal world would be worrisome. In Trump World, it usually means that A:B testing is complete and he is ready to proceed to whatever goal he has in mind. The Board of Peace came up in his visit to speak to the WEF a week or two ago as he uninvited Canada based on being jerks and sidling up to the CCP. While the invitation only organization is initially focused on Gaza, the larger focus gets a lot more interesting. Membership ante is a billion dollars. So far, several European nations have opted out including France, Germany, Italy, Greece, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, UK (GB), and of course Ukraine. OTOH, current membership includes much of the Middle East, Argentina (Milei), a sizable eastern Europe contingent, Mongolia, Indonesia, Paraguay and Pakistan. And that group is only going to expand not unlike signatories to the Abraham Accords.
8. Adult Ed. Fun piece out of Words about Thoughts entitled How the Lawyers Killed Practical Adult Education. The piece can be summed up in the second paragraph’s complaint that:
Then compare that to most “training” made today. It is either infantilized entertainment, compliance theater, or vendor marketing in a lab coat. It tells you what to click, not what to understand. It teaches substitution, not diagnosis. It gives you a vibe, not a skill. It is worse than useless because it produces the confident incompetent.
How did this happen? It happened because the legal system made truthful instruction illegal. The moment you treat instruction as a liability vector, you stop teaching and start hiding behind lawyers. This is all tied to product liability. Prior barriers allowed manufacturers to hide behind the immediate seller. This began to crack in 1916. At the same time, industrial injury law was rerouted into worker’s compensation starting in a WI workmen’s compensation act. The consumer and products world started moving toward broader manufacturer exposure, with warranty disclaimers and fine print losing in the 1950s. By the mid-19060s, the pivot that changed “defect” from bad manufacturing to bad words. At that instant, it became impossible for manufacturers to train their maintenance people. In response, companies adapted, not to educate, but to survive the onslaught of lawsuits. Today, with lawyers in the education loop, the goal is not to make the reader competent. Rather, it is to make the corporate record defensible in court, something that flips every incentive. As a result, the safest instruction is non-instruction. The best manual says nothing. And the best training is the one that proves the company “provided training” rather than the one that actually transferred knowledge. Worse, it doesn’t stop at training or warnings. Rather, it changes design and business models. If you teach repair, you implicitly admit that repair is foreseeable. And if repair is foreseeable, the injury from repair becomes foreseeable. All this comes with legal duties. Reaction to this entire mess is to stop teaching repair, stop selling parts, serialize components, lock diagnostics behind lockouts and NDAs, withhold service documentation, essentially turning everything into model swaps, not because the new stuff is technically superior but because it is legally defensible. When the legal system punishes legibility, the industry responds with opacity. A blizzard of corporate, lawyer driven CYA crowds out the one paragraph you need to troubleshoot the actual failure mode. End result is training films 50 – 80 years old are more instructive than current ones and practical adult education dies in exactly the places it matters the most – where judgment meets hazard. The consumer gets trained into passivity and the worker gets trained into compliance, institutional self-protection packaged as safety.
More later –
- AG