Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Peltola
2. Houthis
3. Media
4. Greenland
5. Single
6. Canada
7. Conspiracy
8. Patent
9. Firefighter
1. Peltola. Everyone’s favorite Indian Maiden, Smiling Mary Peltola, democrat candidate for US Senate from Alaska had a rough week. Finally. After nearly a year of slobbering media tongue bath, Peltola was finally held to an account in a NYT hit piece detailing her ugliness to her staff, a problem she has had for decades in elective office conveniently ignored up by state and national media. The NYT was just the first to report it. Interestingly enough, the allegations were not reported in the Anchorage Daily News, the largest fish wrapper in the state. Peltola’s persona during this and her previous two campaigns has been the kindly grandmother, beautiful Indian Maiden who is always smiling in her ads and public appearances. While there have been rumors of her ugliness to those who work for her, primarily the high turnover of staffers, this is the first piece to quote staffers and SMS text messages from Herself to the Little People who work for her. I a lot of ways, she is similar to Hilly and Kamala, another democrat feminist who presents a public face while having a remarkably nasty private disposition. The piece also demonstrates that Peltola is an arrogant idiot. How so? When Don Young died summer of 2022, Peltola won a temporary seat to replace him. She walked into the US House with all of Young’s staff, grizzled veterans who had been there for years intact. Young was no raving MAGA guy. Rather, he was a union-friendly moderate. Not good enough for Peltola. After being elected 2022, she also had the opportunity to take on a few members of Mark Begich’s staff, democrats who were still in DC or went back to Alaska after his defeat in 2014. None of those guys (or gals) stayed. Much like rumors of the Kamala Harris staff, those guys ran for the hills as soon as they could. As a result, there was nobody left to inject the smallest modicum of discipline into Peltola’s behavior in office. Worse, there was nobody on staff who could encourage her to actually go to work. As a result, she bagged roughly 20% of all votes during her 2023 – 2025 term in the House. While she is still Smiling Mary, her Indian Maiden persona has taken a bit of a hit. How big that hit is anyone’s guess. Peltola is still protected on the ballot by a pair of democrat shill candidates in the general election, Decoy Dan, who is also listed as Dan Sullivan and Gerald Heikes, funded by a millionaire from MA. Both are listed as Republicans. Both made the Ranked Choice Voting final four. Neither would have made the ballot under a normal primary system. As a final note, senior Alaska US Senator Lisa Murkowski, a close personal friend with Peltola made all sorts of excuses for Peltola’s ugliness to her staff last week, demonstrating that there is no forgiveness for anything Orange Man Bad does while her friends and political fellow travelers get endless forgiveness.
2. Houthis. The Houthis are Iran’s last remaining proxy army and they have decided to stir up some brown stuff in recent weeks attacking the Saudi E-W pipeline and attacking Riyad, both with drones. While Iran’s IRGC claims to be behind planning and executing the strikes, I remain skeptical. The Houthis exist only due to the corruption of Yemen, the failed state whose carcass they are feasting upon. Today, the Saudis, Yemenis and Houthis are locked into a war of attrition that seems to be going against the Houthis who at this point are reasonably well armed, capable and outnumbered, deploying children on the front lines in increasing numbers. The pipeline strike managed to cut 4 million bbl/day flow to one million bbl/day. Iran’s last remaining proxy is systematically being destroyed.
3. Media. Trump picked a fight with WH media a couple weeks ago banning CNN, MSNOW and Political from the privileged WH reporting posts. Trump was at his most bombastic, banning them for content (fake news) rather than anything else. Of course, the media went to the courts to force reinstatement of their privileged positions, which a Trump appointee to the DC Circuit gladly ordered. From the outside, this appears to be yet another case of Trump being Trump, forcing the courts to kick him back into play. If you look a bit deeper, it really smells like a setup, with the bans orchestrated to set the stage for a WH without Trump. What happens should Trump force the courts to define what media access is in the WH over a series of lawsuits? What do democrats do when their ability to pick and choose their friends and paid for cheerleaders is compromised by the inability to kick out conservative friendly media organizations so as to open room for their BFFs? Given the physical space is limited, this quickly turns into a problem. I don’t know why Trump picked this particular fight. I don’t know how it will end other than poorly for those who underestimate Trump. Should be a great time to buy popcorn for the show.
4. Greenland. Speaking of the Art of the Deal, Trump announced a security agreement with Denmark and Greenland Sept 22 to strengthen Arctic and North Atlantic security. The agreement is an open-ended deal between all three parties giving the US security access to Greenland in perpetuity. It also locks out other governments from opening bases and other facilities in Greenland without agreement from all three parties. Why is this important? The current agreement between Denmark and the US over Greenland security is entirely based on the continuing existence of NATO, the same NATO that hasn’t allowed US jets to land on NATO bases in support of action in Iran. Somewhere down the line, the US is going to do to NATO what it is currently doing to the UN – telling it to pound sand. This agreement allows that action without any damage to North Atlantic security. And to the real Black Pill nation, it also allows Canada’s liberal government to continue its accelerated drift to the EU. Trump’s demand for Denmark to sell Greenland was the opening bid in a classic Art of the Deal negotiation, one that appears to have been successfully concluded.
5. Single. Michigan Live (MLive) posted a piece describing the burgeoning self-selection out of dating and marriage entitled More young men are staying single, and experts have concerns. Well, no s#$%, Sherlock. What a surprise with the functionally insane feminist left now completely in charge of the media and its evil twin, social media. The piece is aimed at unmarried men 20 – 39, Gen Y and Z, somewhere north of 30 million unmarried young men. This is up by half from 20.7 million in 2000. Meanwhile, the total number of married men in the same age group declined over the same period, which would seem to corroborate the totals. The piece then goes on to explore concerns, and the problems disconnected young men can cause society. But precious little understanding why the young men are dropping out (hint: feminism). Perhaps the problem is that when you roundly and continuously tell young men that you hate them and they are responsible for every single problem in the world today, they will get it in their heads (statistically) that you really, really hate them and conclude they don’t want anything to do with you. Either way, we have a growing demographic problem, one the feminists helped set into stone, and one they refuse to even acknowledge.
6. O Canada. Speaking of old neighbors acting beastly to one another, Canadian PM Mark Carney, fresh off sidling up to China and the CCP, managed to get Canada offered an Associate Membership with the EU. Oh, joy. The move represents Carney’s attempt to wean Canada off the US teat and break bread with his new BFFs in China and the EU. As usual, terms are vague to non-existent. But the diplomatic weight of a new diplomatic relationship would provide grist for hundreds of media pieces between today and the end of the year. Carney’s problem is that Trump will still be president, though with a recent memory of an idiot Labor leader in Canada trying to make him and the US into a fool. This may work for a while, though I am skeptical that it will work for very long at all.
7. Conspiracy. When sitting federal judges engage in conspiracy to subvert the law, is it a conspiracy? They would opine, no. The rest of us, not so much. Federal Judge Patrick Schlitz, formerly a well-regarded judge in MN apparently conspired with his fellow federal judges starting with a Jan 2026 discussion to overrule a Minneapolis magistrate decision to deny several arrest warrants related to the storming of Cities Church that month One of the warrants the magistrate refused to sigh, was for former CNN host Don Lemon. This was a family affair, as his wife was at the time a top aide to MN Attorney General Keith Ellison. Schlitz spread it on pretty thick, feigning uncertainty that he had the authority to overrule the magistrate, promising to discuss the issue with colleagues in a late Jan luncheon. The day after the judicial luncheon, Schlitz filed a judicial order accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement of violating nearly 100 MN court orders, threatening contempt charges against ICE officials. This closely follows the path of DC Circuit federal judge Boasberg who made multiple false accusations that DoJ violated his court orders. Schlitz started out as a reliable conservative federal judge, appointed by Bush 43. He has apparently “grown” in office, determined to make his community happy with his opinions rather than whatever the law is supposed to say. And he is abusing the system to get the outcome he desires.
8. Patent. One of the more important Adam Smith conclusions in the Wealth of Nations, 1776, was that businessmen always conspire to raise prices and limit competition (conspire against the public). The Bad Actor in today’s story appears to be Stratasys, a patent mill holding over 2,600 patents related to 3D printing dating back 40 years. This fell out via litigation against Bambu Lab over 3D printing who ended up on the short end of a $26.7 million judgment against them Sept. There is a lot of debris in the water on this this one, as Bambu Lab is a Chinese company based in Shenzhen, China, while Stratasys is a patent mill with a reputation for filing patents on everything, not unlike what the Wright Brothers attempted the early days of aviation, then aggressively defending its patents, which I suppose is an alternate, thought limited business model. While you can make a lot of money defending patents, it is hardly a growth-oriented business model over the long term and won’t make you many friends.
9. Firefighter. We will end with a piece that is so obvious and ugly that someone is likely to make a lot of money in subsequent lawsuits. A NE volunteer firefighter was rejected for a career position because he was homeschooled. The 22-year-old was a volunteer and NE licensed EMT. Earlier that year he applied for a career position with the Fremont Fire Department. The job posting in effect at the time required graduation from high school. The applicant submitted a diploma reflecting he had been homeschooled. The city rejected the application based on grounds that he did not graduate from an accredited high school. NE legally categorizes homeschools as unaccredited, exempt schools. As such the city declared him ineligible. Here’s where the city screwed the pooch. Understanding they had a tsunami of bad press inbound. They updated the official job description after the fact to explicitly mandate graduation from an accredited high school, retroactively changing the rule that blocked the kid. Note that none of this official flopping around, dreaming up new and more magical excuses answers or even addresses the question of what makes an accredited grad more capable than a homeschooled one. The answer to that would be zip, zero, nada. I predict that rewritten rules will not end up being the only thing written, as there is a large caliber check to the kid in the not-so-distant future.
More later –
- AG