Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Black Pill
2. Artemis
3. Act Blue
4. Birthright
5. Gloves
6. Mail-In
7. Alito
8. Ballroom
1. Black Pill. The immediate reaction to Trump’s announced ceasefire with Iran was a hard descent into the Black Pill world. Black Pill is a variation on the Matrix Red Pill or Blue Pill question. The Blue Pill takes you back to your former world, where you no longer know or care about the greater outside world of the Matrix. It means accepting the future the Matrix has for you. The Red Pill keeps you awake, uncomfortable, aware of the greater outside world, ready to travel down the rabbit hole to Wonderland to see how far it goes. The Black Pill applies mostly to men, particularly young men. It is deeply nihilistic, embraces total hopelessness, leading to violence and self-harm. In essence, the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, which used to be a joke. Well, Our Side, likely egged on by the Usual Suspects in the media, the political left and the never Trumpers, are busily selling the notion that we lost the war, we are going to lose in November and shouldn’t even participate anymore because it would be a waste of time. This is a variation of the decades old successful leftist dispirit campaign waged at conservatives during campaigns in an attempt to get them to stay home and not vote, handing elections to the left. If it didn’t work, they wouldn’t keep doing it.
- The first round of Black Pill erupted immediately after Trump announced the ceasefire, mostly in response to Iran’s new demands to include Israel pounding Hezbollah, charging fees for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and abject refusal to hand over the half ton of enriched uranium. There were conflicting stories throughout the week on how many ships were making the passage. The US promised to stop any ships that paid the Iranian Danegeld on the high seas. Iran added to the confusion by pretending not to know exactly where the mines were laid, intentional ignorance that had the advantage of probably being true.
- Pakistan hosted the first round of negotiations on the ceasefire over the weekend, with VP Vance leading the US team. He got nowhere and boarded a plane home. The US response was to sail a pair of destroyers through the Strait and announce the Navy would be clearing the waters, opening a path for shipping. This was closely followed by announcement of a blockade of all traffic into and out of Iranian ports. Essentially, Iran can export no more oil. In essence, he took Iran’s last trump card and beat them over the head with it. The economic impact will be to strangle the IRGC junta.
- There is some speculation that Trump is in no hurry to reopen the Strait, as the tanker traffic has shifted over the last month from the Persian (now Arabian) Gulf to the Gulf of America. New supplier is Venezuelan oil from refineries on the US Gulf coast. And we can do this for a long time.
- One tidbit from the war a week or two ago was mention of an attempt to get weapons into Iran and the hands of the citizenry. Some unspecified number of them were given to the Kurds who were then expected to pass them along. They didn’t. They kept the weapons, telling us a lot about the current state of the Kurds their leadership, and how trustworthy they are.
- There was some Black Pill pushback on the successful CSAR operation to rescue the downed F-15E WSO, painting it as a failed attempt to recover the half ton of enriched uranium. There are a lot of reasons to conduct such a massive operation to rescue one soldier, the most important of which is to the military itself, actually practicing No Man Left Behind unlike the previous two democrats presidents (Libya and Afghanistan). There are other points to make, including one to the Iranians, that we can and will operate anywhere with any size force we want and there is nothing you can do about it, but you get the idea.
- The final Black Pill is fear of (or hope for, depending on your side of the political divide) an extended conflict with an intransigent Iran which refuses to negotiate in good faith leading to another forever war in the Middle East. What they are going to get is a neutered, decapitated Iran, losing another couple layers of leadership, as they do their Monty Python Black Knight routine until we reprise the Curtis E LeMay observation that “… war is about killing people, and when you kill enough they stop fighting.” All of this will be done mostly by drones, completely out of sight and mostly out of mind on this side of the Atlantic, while the US sells oil and natural gas to anyone who can charter a tanker.
2. Artemis. Successful conclusion of the Artemis II flight Friday afternoon with a splashdown off California. Took a while to get the crew and the capsule out of the water. With a few glitches, the mission was a successful test of the rocket and capsule. Have not yet seen any photos of the heat shield following recovery. The next flight, Artemis III will be an orbital test of the entire stack plus the lunar lander with the goal of a manned landing by Artemis IV in 2028. I think this time around, we go to stay, though NASA won’t necessarily be the leader in the move (SpaceX, China).
3. Act Blue. Another indicator of change in the wind on the democrat side came out of the NYT a couple weeks ago with a piece about a law firm working for Act Blue (the premier democrat fundraising / foreign campaign donation tool) warning that it may have misled congress about its vetting of foreign donations. The Apr 2 piece was based on internal memos, e-mails, resignation letters, Slack messages, and interviews. The piece descended into legal mumbo jumbo about warnings of substantial risk that were ignored. If Act Blue was the premier money laundering player for democrat campaigns, and is in the process of being burned in public, what will democrats replace it with? Best guess is that it is confident enough of their NGO / billionaire money laundering / fraud machine to use it this time around. Think of the hundreds of billions of taxpayer money laundered through the NGO fraud machine in Cali, MN and NY (among others). How much of that will make its way into democrat campaigns this election cycle? I think it is a nine digit number until that network is likewise rolled up.
4. Birthright. One final observation about birthright citizenship is that the solution will likely need to be a constitutional amendment. While the current 6-3 conservative majority on SCOTUS has been decent on a variety of lawfare cases, especially those where lower court judges are making it up as they go, they are loath to take a position unless forced to do so. Best (or worst) example of this was their 2012 opinion upholding O’Bamacare because Chief Justice Roberts rewrote it as a tax, something never mentioned in the legislation. I expect something similar with the opinion on birthright citizenship, mostly based on it being too difficult to undo, something that didn’t bother the Burger Court as the 1972 Roe v Wade opinion rewrote abortion laws nationwide. Regardless of the outcome, the opinions and dissent will be fascinating reading for a long, long time while congress will next be up to bat.
5. Gloves. Just when the left was cranking up the environmental hoax machine, this time around aimed at the deadly threat of microplastics, we find that the microplastics themselves have been corrupting lab results of people studying them. Microplastics are defined as plastic particles less than half a millimeter in diameter. They are found everywhere, mostly formed as discarded plastics deteriorate. Note that plastics are essentially hydrocarbons, otherwise known as plant food and fertilizer, eaten by bacteria and algae worldwide. Some are more persistent than others. As they are found everywhere, it is easy to find them, gin up the Next Big environmental scare, and demand immediate passage of controls to restrict their release into the environment. Think of it as Round 9 of the global warming due to manmade CO2 scam and you get the idea. As microplastics are everywhere and small, how do you prove they are present? You bring samples into the lab and test for them in a controlled environment. That testing normally requires the use of lab gloves, usually nitrile or latex, which is the problem, as it turns out that lab gloves shed microplastics and those shed microplastics actively contaminate the samples being tested, rendering the tests and measurements worthless. Neat trick, that.
6. Mail-In. President Trump opened a new front on mail-in voting a couple weeks ago, signing a new Executive Order regulating the use of mail-in ballots. The order directs DHS in coordination with Social Security, to compile and transmit to each state 60 days before that election a list of citizens of that state who will be 18+ at the next federal election. The Postmaster General is directed to initiate rulemaking to require mail barcodes that facilitate tracking for all absentee / mail-in ballots. Those ballots will only be transmitted to voters on state-specific lists. The EO, particularly the USPS use of unique bar codes on ballots is an expansion of their use of tracking numbers for other important items mailed. In that, it is a simple expansion of what they are already doing. The democrat fraud machine was ready with at least 7 lawfare suits filed to prohibit USPS from even starting the rule making process. From what I can see, this is a well-written EO that will be difficult to block, particularly the tracking number piece, which when coupled with the voter list by state, would be a large caliber wrench in the democrat election fraud machine. Somewhere along the line, the lawfare democrats will be forced to answer the question how important do they think the ballots actually are? Important enough to track like a certified letter? Or only the importance of junk mail which is only sent to “Occupant.” Should be a fun argument. It is also a message to the US Senate majority to get off their backside and pass the SAVE America Act.
7. Alito. There is an outside possibility that Justice Alito may have a health issue. He was reportedly hospitalized for dehydration Mar 20, falling ill before giving a speech at a Federalist Society dinner in Philly. He was given fluids for dehydration, did not stay overnight, and returned home that evening. The 76-year-old has long been rumored to be considering stepping down, which would be a real loss as he along with Justice Thomas are the two most reliable conservatives on SCOTUS these days. Replacing either or both will be a lot easier with a Republican majority in the Senate than without one, as democrats learned with Ruth Ginsberg.
8. Ballroom. DC Circuit Judge Richard J Leon (Bush 43 nominee, 2001) issued a preliminary injunction halting construction of the new WH ballroom. The suit was brought by a self-selected preservation group called the National Trust for Historic Preservation which seems to exist to oppose things that Republican presidents want to do to public buildings while waving all democrat changes through without reading them. Judge Leon found that the project needs specific approval by congress before construction proceeds. He was reversed 11 days later by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit based on security concerns brought by the Trump administration. Construction can continue pending outcome of an actual trial. One of the appeals judges dissented with the opinion because she did not believe the National Trust had standing to sue. This opinion would tend to validate speculation that the Ballroom project was cover for improvement of a secure bunker under the WH. Note that the National Capital Planning Commission voted to approve the ballroom on Apr 2, two days after the injunction was signed.
More later –
- AG