Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. AK Primary
2. Ship 40
3. Arday
4. Black Pill
5. Flock
6. Tires
7. Surrogate
1. AK Primary. Depending your POV, our statewide primary last Tuesday was either a wakeup call or a death knell. Either way, as there are about 30,000 absentee ballots remaining to be counted, 5% of the total registered voters, 22% of the ballots counted so far, we won’t know the final results until they are counted. That being said, there was a lot not to like Tuesday, including….
- For US Senate, challenger Mary Peltola holds about a 7,000 vote lead over incumbent Dan Sullivan with 133,000 ballots counted so far. Worst, Decoy Dan Sullivan from Sitka managed 3,235 votes, 2.5% of those cast putting hm into the Final 4 RCV count. From an area perspective, Sullivan won the Alaska Railbelt while Peltola took the Bush and Southeast Alaska. Should be an awful runoff.
- For the US House, congress critter Nicke Begich holds a 20,000-vote margin (about 15%) over democrat Bill Hill, of the current votes counted. This lead is wide enough to be comfortably ahead. Note that Hill, a Palmer AK schoolteacher is recipient of a cookie cutter campaign along with millions of funding from Outside democrat billionaires attempting to install his sorry carcass in office.
- Note that we have seen a LOT of democrats file as Republican particularly in legislative races this year, though there are several in the federal and gubernatorial races. How successful will their new trick be? Who knows? Their previous trick was to file as indys, though an analysis of APOC campaign finance filings will tell you instantly which team they are batting for. More about candidates lying about who they are to win elections later.
- The most important (depending on your POV) political race this year is for Alaska Governor to replace two term incumbent Republican Mike Dunleavy. Top 4 candidates before the absentees are Jonathan Kreiss- Tompkins (JKT), 22%, Tom Begich, 20% (both of these guys are democrats), followed by Bernadette Wilson, 10% and Dave Bronson, 8% (Repubicans). There are another 9 candidates who received 7-1% of the vote. Most of them are Republicans. RCV requires the top 4 candidates to be on the November ballot, meaning there will be 1-2 democrats (depending on whether they combine their campaigns – a gambit blessed by the AK Supreme Court in 2014 – and at least two Republicans. Who those Republican are remains to be seen until the absentees are counted.
- Most of the legislative races hold too small vote totals to tell who did what to who at this time.
- Final note is ballot Proposition 1, the union attempt to limit individual campaign donations while increasing union PAC donations passed 70 – 30%,. This is a patently unconstitutional limit of Free Speech via campaign donations that will likely be upheld in state court until being tossed as an unconstitutional limit on free speech in federal court. Pretty sad when the Ninth Circus is more interested in constitutional rights than the AK Supreme Court is.
2. Ship 40. Amidst all the electoral bad news from Alaska, comes equally Good News from SpaceX, which managed to tow Ship 40 which splashed down in the Indian Ocean a month ago, to safe harbor at Christmas Island, 350 km S of Java. While still floating, the upper stage had part of its tile cover rearranged and stripped in places by tow ropes and the action of ocean waves. Still, it made the trip. As of this writing, SpaceX is flying a team down there to inspect the beast and set up a recovery / transport back to south Texas. Given the dire straits this project was in a couple weeks ago in high seas and awful weather, this couldn’t be better news.
The Ship 40 soft landing and failure to explode upon impact with the ocean changes the calculus of Ship recovery to the extent that SpaceX announced last week that it wasn’t going to attempt a Ship catch for Flight 14 and maybe not for a couple flights afterwards. Sadly, nobody outside SpaceX knows what is going on here, so speculation runs rampant. While a Ship catch is relatively high risk, it seems to be not higher than other flight goals. A couple of speculative conclusions present themselves. First is that Flight 14 will do an orbit or two, reenter and splash down a couple kilometers offshore Boca Chica, performing everything required for an orbital flight outside a catch. Say that ship is then recovered from the Gulf and turned to a future mission. That would prove the notion of a rapidly reusable upper stage, though not in the way SpaceX first expected. At worst, water landing and recovery another reusability option. At best, it is another baby step to rapid reusability.
3. Arday. Jason Atta Kwei Arday, 40, was a British academic, author, finally professor of Sociology of Education at University of Cambridge 2023 – 2026. He was self-described as autistic, with a developmental delay, deafness, dyscalculia, non-verbal until age 11. In short, a physical and mental mess. But he soldiered on, becoming the youngest black prof ever appointed at Cambridge in 2023. Sadly, it turned out that many (most?) of his publications were plagiarized. The mob gathered and he was forced to resign Aug 5. He was found dead 9 days later as a suicide. The finger pointing from all sides continue as of this writing. From here, it appears that Arday was a DEI hire, appointed far above his capability. When the fecal matter hit the rotating machinery, his peeps in academia hung him out to dry, which was something he never had to do before. In response, he killed himself being unable to deal with the outcome. I think academia and the DEI world failed him. While mentally ill, he had a lot of things going for him, including being smart and having an overabundance of audacity. You can normally craft or guide that combination of attributes into a highly successful life. Sadly, once academia was embarrassed, they jettisoned him like so much unwanted baggage. Such a waste.
4. Black Pill. Ran across a piece out of The Scuttlebutt entitled Don’t Take the Black Pill. This is a play on The Matrix, where the wizard offers the hero a pair of pills. The blue pill takes him home, and he wakes up in his own world with no memory of what he has just lived through. The red pill allows him to stay here and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. In recent years, we have managed to add a third, the black pill, which is some version of it’s all over, the game is lost, and we are wasting our time to even try. Democrats do this a lot to Republicans during election season, mostly with junk polls and friendly media, to suppress conservative turnout. Conservatives stay home. Democrats win. They’ve been doing it forever and it has been sufficiently successful to keep doing at some level every election. This year’s black pill is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the red – green alignment between Marxists and Muslims. The Marxists come out of the universities, and the Muslims were imported via democrat opening the border. Both are externally funded. The black pill is that this new alliance is a juggernaut, unstoppable, the young are behind it, fired up, with its successful installation as governance all but ordained. But it’s not. The entire DSA construct is astroturf, top down funded by leftist billionaires or America’s enemies like the CCP (China) or international Muslim nations. CCP money is found everywhere in the political world, paying reporters, hiring an unknown number of retired flag officers as pro-China influencers (apologists), funding the current environmental and anti-datacenter movement. The combination of pro-CCP money pumping up China and trashing the US with billionaire money enabling the Constitution hating DSA is a formidable, well-funded movement, one that we shouldn’t ignore. OTOH, it is also a movement that will be fun to defeat and consign once again to the dustbin of history before it crawls out next time in its next iteration hoping for a different result. Sadly, there will always be a next time for Marxism, for it is founded on one of the basic sins – envy. We defeat it by not taking the black pill.
5. Flock. Remember the quaint old days when law enforcement needed an actual warrant to put you under surveillance. Today, thanks to Flock Safety, we have cameras going up nationwide, all commercially funded, usually via a local government grant, taking video of vehicles, occupants and license plates. Yes, they work that well. The video is stored in a database that can be accessed as far back into the past as the camera stores data. Note that surveillance does not start at the time the warrant is approved by a judge. The ability to legally access what exists starts then. The problem comes when law enforcement accesses the database without a warrant. Access is supposed to be exclusively tied to an ongoing investigation (case number), which usually works. Sadly, access has also been used by individual officers to stalk present and past significant others, leading to the question of who watches the watchers? The public is not real happy with being under continuous surveillance and has reacted poorly by destroying Flock camera poles. There is even a website Have I Been Flocked? that lets you check if police searched for you using the Flock camera system. The deflock site allows you to search to Flock installations in your locale. We are about to have a knockdown, drag out argument over surveillance in this country. I don’t think it is going to go well for anyone involved. The most important thing out of the discussion will be the realization that privacy is gone and has been for a long, long time. Rather than railing against that loss, I would suggest time be spent on figuring out how to live well in that world. It’s not the one we want. Sadly, it seems to be the one we have today.
6. Tires. There they go again. Not being content with destroying the First Amendment via the Stop Nick Shirley Act (more on that next week), Cali environmental regulators approved new rules that will restrict what replacement tires can be sold in state. Rationale? Energy efficiency standards. As usual, the new standards remove most existing options from the marketplace starting in 2029. The Cali Energy Commission sells this as consumer protection, that will save vehicle owners money in the long run. Yeah, right. The standards address something called rolling resistance, with factory tires on vehicles being replaced with cheaper, less efficient tires. This wasn’t my experience, as I had to replace a set of tires at 30,000 tires after vehicle purchase because the original tires wore out quickly. The dealership recommended a set of Michelin, which have a lot of miles left on them after 40,000 miles of use.
7. Surrogate. A surrogate mother from Alaska carrying a baby for a Cali couple fled the state and gave birth in Texas. The couple found the baby had a serious but correctable heart defect as the result of a scan at 20 weeks and decided to abort. The surrogate did not agree with the abortion. Couple went to court in AK to force the abortion. Doctors in AK refused to perform the late term abortion. Couple went to court in Alaska and Cali to force the surrogate to Seattle where doctors would perform abortion. A $250,000 breach of contract lawsuits was threatened by the couple. The surrogate fled the state to Texas and sought legal protection there, which she got. Couple then tried to force the surrogate to Cali to give birth. Surrogate suspected that was ploy to give birth, withhold treatment for the heart condition after birth and allow the baby to quickly die. Baby was born and appears to be alive meaning that the heart condition was treated. Both Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Trump administration got themselves involved in this one.
More later –
- AG