Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Bot Farm
2. AK Gov
3. GenIV
4. Invasion
5. O’Keefe
6. Church
1. Bot Farm. Looks like much (if not all) of the anti-datacenter pushback is artificial, planned, executed and funded by foreign interests, primarily the CCP in China. X identified a bot farm of roughly 200,000 suspected inauthentic Chinese accounts which were posting anti-datacenter content. 200 of the accounts were posting content that could manipulate the debate about American AI, datacenters and energy policy. The accounts claimed that US datacenters were driving up household energy prices and straining the grid. Other posts included AI-generated memes depicting datacenter operators enriching themselves at the public expense. It is ironic that the CCP is using American AI tools to run astroturf campaigns against American AI tech infrastructure and AI, using American tech to destroy public support for the very tech and infrastructure behind US AI. This has already shown up in political campaigns, with democrat James Talarico blasting Republican US Senate candidate Ken Paxton for taking $400,000 in contributions from donors connected to the datacenter industry. It wouldn’t be a normal election campaign if the democrat was accusing the Republican of doing something the democrat had been doing, only worse. It turns out that the Talarico campaign has already taken some $11 million from the same sort of donors. The CCP-connected anti-AI / datacenter campaign echoes CCP and Russian money benefiting the green war on energy in the western world and supporting the move toward renewables. Some things never change. As an addendum, while I support the notion of datacenters on a free-market basis providing they provide their own power, I remain skeptical that they will be necessary. The distributed computing approach pioneered by Jay Valentine and the former Fractal Computing still appears to be the winning play in the marketplace. Fractal Computing no longer exists due to corporate shenanigans, but Valentine and his team still do, and they reportedly retain their patents.
2. AK Governor. Last week was one of the more consequential weeks in Alaska elections for a while, with a gubernatorial candidate, former Attorney General Treg Taylor, reinstated to the November ballot after our public reporting Commission (Alaska Public Offices Commission, APOC) was found to have double standards in their enforcement of state law.
- There are statutory financial disclosure and reporting requirements for running for political office in Alaska. While the law isn’t entirely Byzantine, enforcement has become more so over time. In recent years, democrats tend to get a slap on the wrist while Republicans get hammered with crushing fines over relatively minor errors in reporting. This year’s performance has been pretty bad, with little pushback.
- APOC sent an Aug 27 letter to the LtGov (who is in charge of elections in Alaska) recommending removing Taylor and two others from the Nov ballot based on reporting discrepancies. Note that this letter came 9 days after the Aug 18 primary for errors made on reports submitted before the primary. The LtGov reluctantly removed the three Sept 1. A third-party group intervened a few days later with results of their analysis of a larger group of candidates, finding that most of them made similar mistakes in their reporting but were not singled out for punishment by APOC. AK Law requires people reporting rental income to list full names of their renters, something Taylor failed to do. There are similar provisions for anyone who gets paid to provide services. These provisions have served to remove lots of viable conservative candidates from political races over the years.
- As a result, the LtGov reversed herself Friday, reinstating Taylor and one of the two other candidates. This reinstates Taylor onto the General Election ballot. In her message, LtGov Dahlstrom called out APOC for not applying their claimed standard across all candidates in the race. This episode has no precedent in Alaska elections, as nobody ever had the cojones to go after APOC publicly. Why? Because being the keepers of the election contribution flame, they could always open a new case and go after you with daily fines which compound quickly. In this, democrats never endure their wrath while Republicans often do.
- Appears we are on the verge of putting the taxpayer funded election monitoring and adjudicating democrat-friendly state agency into play. It’s about time.
3. GenIV. This one has multiple positives. The Army signed a $2.2b contract with five vendors to provide at least one micro GenIV reactor on one of five Army posts by Sept 30, 2028, with the ultimate goal of having up to 5 of them on each base within 5 years. Project Janus aims for tiny, factory-built reactors to be easily transportable and capable of generating 20MW of independent power each. The selected vendors and installations are Antares Nuclear, Fort Bragg, BWXT Advanced Technologies, Fort Campbell, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, Fort Hood, Radiant Industries, Fort Bening, and Westinghouse Government Services, Fort Drum. Want uninterruptible power? Start installing GenIV nukes on military installations. Better yet, once nukes get into the mix, all the CCP-sponsored claptrap aimed at datacenters end up being so much well-funded white noise.
4. Invasion. The Ceuta migrant crisis was not a migrant crisis at all. Rather, it was a renewal of a millennia old Islamic invasion of Europe, one that went dormant following the expulsion of the Moriscos 1609 – 1614. The remaining Spanish land on the northern coast of Africa had been theirs since 1492 before relinquishing control of some of it in 1956. The appearance of tens of thousands of military aged men at the border of a Spanish enclave wanting in was simply another move in a millennia long war over the land. The problem is that the socialists in charge of Spain didn’t recognize it as an invasion while Morocco who orchestrated the event did. You’re never gonna win a war that you refuse to fight, much less even recognize. An interesting perspective comes from the Catholics who remind us all of the Islamic conquests that swept the Middle East starting in the 8th Century, sweeping Christian majorities away by force. Even as recently as the 20th Century, tens of thousands of Catholics were pushed out of Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Only Ceuta and Melilla, ruled by Spain remain as Catholic cities in northern Africa. The invasion was coordinated online in social media, encouraging young men to cross the border into Ceuta. It is not clear if the Moroccan government (most likely) or some combination of gangs, Islamist opponents to the current Moroccan government or the usual suspects in the NGO community sensing weakness from the Spanish socialist were behind the invasion. In some ways, it doesn’t matter, as tens of thousands invaded without paying for the invasion with their lives. And as they got this far without pain, there will be a second, a third and more until they achieve their goal.
5. O’Keefe. James O’Keefe visited Alaska during summer, always a wise choice, to draw attention to Alaska US Senator Lisa Murkowski’s opposition to the SAVE Act. Lisa claims to base her opposition to the notion that things are just different in Alaska, with Alaska natives in the Bush being pure, simple folk, too far away, and too stupid to figure out how to get the required IDs (condescension). She said as much on the Senate Floor, bloviating about the difficulty of living up here as a child of nature. Think of it as the bigotry of low expatiations and you will be close. One of the places that O’Keefe visited was Unalaska down on the Aleutian chain, Dutch Harbor, some 1,300 km SW Anchorage. Lisa mentioned Unalaska in her floor speech as a place where it would be difficult to get registered to vote. With a permanent population of 4,200, this is one of the largest villages in this part of the world between Anchorage and Kamchatka, with lots of square miles of nothing and not a lot of people. Surprisingly (or not), O’Keefe was able to find three different active voter registration operations, all funded and operated by the State of Alaska. Turns out Lisa never asked the State how to get her voters registered, which was either intentional or forgotten maliciously. O’Keefe demonstrated that Lisa was either lying or was failed by her lazy staff. I suspect the latter, that the staff simply gave her the answer she wanted, feeding into her Orange Man Bad worldview allowing her to make a fool of herself.
6. Church. Fun piece out of Words About Thoughts Substack last week, All the worst Features of Church, describes communism based on the viewpoint of those who lived inside it as a church with no grace. This feeds into something I ran across decades ago which described Islam as an ideology masquerading as a religion and communism as a religion masquerading as an ideology. The young and dumb members of the red – green collation gleefully embracing communism never lived it, never saw the incredible damage it caused,and never had to clean up the mess it created, which is why they are cleaving to the siren call today. The piece starts out with a quote:
“If you stripped out an Anglican service of everything that makes it tolerable and replaced the Bible with one that changed every year, you’d have a Communist Party branch meeting. The children who sat through both are finally saying so.”
The children of Communist Party true believers of the mid-20th Century are now in their 50s, 60s and 70s. They are old enough to have perspective and young enough to still be angry about what their parents dragged them through. And they are talking about what it was like growing up in the movement. And it was just as ugly as you would expect. The children describe a Church with no kindness, no forgiveness, different hymns daily, weekly, monthly, and a Bible that changed every year. At each meeting, there was an opening, readings from the currently approved texts, a sermon (party line on the current situation delivered by whomever held current local authority), confession (self-criticism session), communion (collective affirmation of solidarity, the vote, the resolution), and benediction (the call to action, the assignment of tasks). The structure was that of a church service with the content swapped out. But in this church, there was a lot missing starting with kindness. Social interaction was transactional, interactional and tense. People were performing comradeship rather than experiencing it. There is no redemption. Redemption is the single thing that keeps Christianity running after 2,000 years, the notion that we can be redeemed of our sins. None of this exists in Communism. Self-criticism only serves to establish your subordination into the collective rather than heal. You re retroactively guilty of things that weren’t wrong when you did them a day, week, month or a year before. There is no state of grace. You can never be clean, and you are one doctrinal update away from discovering that your current beliefs are heresy. There is no forgiveness, and finally, the bible changes every year. The craziest part was something the children couldn’t articulate until they were adults – that if you just believed hard enough, the world would change to make those beliefs true. In other words, failure of communism is never failure of the current teaching (theory). Rather it is failure of the faith of the believers, essentially the exact structure of every faith healing service should the afflicted doesn’t get up and walk after the preacher waves his arms for a while. The Soviets applied this on an industrial scale, Lysenkosim being the most obvious example. Mao did it with steel, having peasants melting their own farm tools in backyard furnaces to meet production targets that existed in ideology rather than metallurgy. The new steel was worthless. Tools were gone. Farms collapsed and tens of millions starved. Yet success was reported up the chain to Mao. Failure meant you didn’t believe hard enough, which was a sin. Great piece. Read it. The new adherents haven’t a clue where they are going. And their children are going to get it good and hard generations after it was all tried and failed. Sadly, so will the rest of us.
More later –
- AG