July 28, 2023. Here is the news without which your week would not be complete!
In these pages I have sought to avoid the most attention-getting headlines, because you probably already know what they are. But this one I really cannot resist.
We are about to rival that famous quote on which Bill Clinton’s legacy will be based, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”
The President’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who perhaps has the worst possible job ever and should probably be a prime candidate for Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs” show, has been subjected to what could only be called vicious and unfounded attacks. Her unfaithful and irresponsible collaborators, er, colleagues in the press corps have begun asking her about the many new reports that Hunter Biden strong-armed foreign officials for promised bribery payments, which flowed, in part, to Joe Biden.
The strong-arm tactics seem to revolve around a foreign party funneling money to a Biden-owned shell company where it was laundered through two dozen other shell companies before finding its way to the President.
The President himself, or perhaps the Vice President, because this story has apparently been growing for about 15 years now, is said to have participated in many conversations, meetings and on speakerphone where he apparently talked about business with his son and others.
This could be construed by some unreasonably hostile, too-much-starch-in-my-underwear right-wingers as somewhat different from the President’s claim that he “Never, not once! Period!” ever talked about business with his son.
It turns out that those supposedly conflicting statements are merely a matter of semantics.
Press Secretary KJP has stayed on message, pointing out that she has answered such hateful and spurious allegations “a million times,” and the answer has never changed one iota, from “He has never talked about business with his son,” to “He has never been in business with his son.”
See? Identical statements. “Talked about business with.” “Been in business with.” Yep, I was right. Identical.
Let’s move on. Nothing to see here.
Number 7. Just the News dot com. Republican election clerks hit with lawsuits, recall votes for actions in 2020 presidential race.
If you’re going to be in a position of public accountability, where you are required to take assertive action to ensure fairness and accuracy in our nation’s most treasured strength – the voting booth – you really need to understand politics if you want to avoid the slammer.
County election officials in Michigan and Colorado, two of the swing states which did a 180 from Trump-Pence to Biden-Harris in the nighttime hours of the 2020 presidential election, are facing felony charges over tampering with voting machines and claiming there was fraud in the vote counting process.
Now, the legal system will grind slowly into gear proving that they physically touched machines (by using a thumb drive to make backup copies of votes cast) and that they attempted to certify Trump as the winner.
Well, Tina Peters of Colorado did actually copy a hard drive, which is what one does when one wishes to preserve data before it can be corrupted. And Stan Grot of Michigan did actually submit a slate of electors favoring Donald Trump when he, executing his public responsibility, determined that Trump had won the state.
So, in the sense of, “Did they do it?” they are both guilty as sin.
The question of whether Peters and Grot faithfully carried out the duties of their offices, holding to the oaths they swore, and protecting the integrity of the voting process regardless of the outcome of the election, is an extraneous detail that will be rolled under the oxcart of progress.
Never mind whether the original hard drive data was illegally changed, or whether the last-minute software update would manipulate the vote counting to favor the Democrat, or whether Mr. Grot found actual evidence of fraud in switching votes from R to D. Those are mere distractions, completely irrelevant to the fact that the suspects, innocent until proven guilty, did what they did and said what they said, and must now face the judicial firing squad.
This is exactly the right move to ensure that no public official charged with ensuring election fairness will ever take any action to ensure election fairness. So, it’s a victory not only for 2020, but for all future elections. Which might now have become completely irrelevant in America.
Because phenomenally expensive electric vehicles are not yet quite expensive enough, the California Assembly approved a bill requiring that all EVs be equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities. This means that when the conventional power grid fails, because of all the EVs it is required to charge (because buying a gas-powered car will soon be illegal), your new EV can be used as an emergency backup battery to power your home and office.
And presumably your neighbor’s home, and also the tent cities in downtown areas where the residents cannot afford EVs.
The week the bill was passed, a sudden heat wave — I am not making this up — swept the state, prompting utility providers to urge customers to purchase portable gas-powered generators to keep their A/C working. (Keeping your A/C working with a generator is not like running a desk lamp. It actually requires some analysis of voltages, amps and length of cables, not to mention fuel, fumes and hot exhaust pipes. But that may be the curmudgeon in me talking.)
It should be absolutely irrelevant to this story that less than a week later, the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a rule effectively outlawing the sale of portable gas-powered generators. Because carbon emissions.
This is the sort of circular intelligence-killing arrangement that any Californian with the IQ of a houseplant ought to be able to recognize.
Number 5. The Cool Down dot com. School janitor sparks outrage with image of lunchroom trashcan.
After lunch, a 50-gallon trash can at school was half full of unopened milk cartons. The custodian got a photo of it, making some quite unhappy. The photo made them unhappy, not the discarded milk.
Public schools across the U.S., focused on providing at least one quality meal each day to students, find they must dispose of thousands of pounds of prepared food each month. It goes wasted either because the cafeteria prepared too much, or because the children simply did not care for it.
Who could ever have suspected that this would be the result of state legislatures requiring that children be fed at school on the state dime?
And I wonder how much the “prepared too much” problem has to do with enrolled students being absent. If the meals are important for nourishment, and if kids are absent, does that not suggest malnutrition? And if we are passionate about giving them adequate care, does that not suggest we should pursue them at home?
Home deliveries of meals may be in our future; I can see a bus route taking shape. “If you can’t make it to school, you little darlings, at least let us bring you a hot lunch.” Lost in here somewhere is the passion for giving them adequate education.
But there is a bright side for the environment here. At a Utah elementary school, discarded food is composted into biofuel and fertilizer. This helps them avoid adding 2,500 pounds of bio waste each month to the local landfill. And here you thought this was a story about wanton waste!
Number 4. Democratic Underground dot com. Seat Kidnapping? The latest trend that’s appalling travelers.
I love this one. A passenger on Southwest Airlines, with a ticket privileging her to board first (because on Southwest there is no assigned seating) was comfortably seated in her chosen aisle seat as the plane filled with other passengers.
A man stopped at her row and pointed to the vacant center seat. She arose to allow him access. He entered the row and promptly sat in her aisle seat, leaving the center seat for her. She was apoplectic.
As I would have been.
This reminds me of the time I was on an American Airlines flight where overhead luggage space is at a premium. With the plane nearly full, I noted a man in the row in front of me who came down the aisle with his bag in hand. Reaching his assigned row, he removed a suitcase from the overhead, placed it on the cabin floor in the passageway and put his own bag up instead. Then he entered the row and took his seat.
When the flight attendant came down the aisle, she noted the bag and announced, “Whose bag is this?” The man who had moved it kept his head down in his smart phone, and it took a few minutes for the owner of the bag to admit, “Oh! I guess it’s mine. But I had stowed it overhead.”
The flight attendant sternly reminded her that all bags must be stowed properly. The owner already had one bag under the seat in front of her, so the attendant spoke to an uninvolved man across the aisle: “Sir, please place this bag under the seat in front of you.”
He looked at her. “It’s not my bag,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Please place the bag under the seat in front of you,” she repeated, in a somewhat more stern tone. He reluctantly complied.
Meanwhile, the bag-swapping villain in front of me continued to study his smart phone, pretending to be oblivious to the scene.
I contemplated ordering an in-flight soft drink and then pouring it down the back of his shirt. But I didn’t.
Number 3. The Western Journal. Commentary. Golden ticket for Biden? NASA eyeing flying object valued at $10 quintillion.
At last, perhaps there is a solution to U.S. debt, now over $32 trillion. NASA is only a few months away from launching its 6-year unmanned mission to study 16 Psyche, an asteroid in the Ceres belt past Mars. Psyche, first identified and named in 1852, is a tiny thing, only 140 miles in diameter. Recent studies from earth indicate it glitters like gold. And iron and nickel.
The supposition is that it was part of a larger planet which broke up during solar system formation.
Scientists are enraptured by the notion of studying the layers of mantle and crust, to give clues to how our own planet was formed. Their interest in the M-type asteroid is calmly scientific.
Nowhere in the press releases is there any mention of anyone being enraptured with the gold, there for the taking, shining brightly enough and in such huge, unguarded quantities that it can be seen 300 million miles away.
Gold that is estimated to be worth $10 quintillion. That would be a 10 followed by 18 more zeroes.
(And one can only wonder where the mother lode is, hidden in that asteroid belt.)
If we keep on our present indebted trajectory, by the time NASA reaches it, and we fight with the Chinese, the cartels and the triads over how to harvest the gold, we might be able to break even.
I think I’ve seen this plot before. It was called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and starred Humphrey Bogart.
Number 2. Fox News. Researchers horrified, decry rise of fascism as students mock responses to work survey.
Oregon State University. The Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies surveyed 349 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) students and were shocked to find that 15% of them maliciously mocked the survey itself.
Examples of responses follow.
What is your gender? One answer: I’m an Apache Helicopter. Another answer: I’m a V22 Osprey.
What is your disability? One answer: My disability is that my country is run by communists. Another answer: Transgenderism is a disability; it is the inability to come to terms with biological reality.
What is your skin color? Answer: My skin color is not important. Everyone is grab bag of genetics from all over the world.
Reading such answers “had a profound impact on [the] morale and mental health” of the researchers. One transgender researcher was already in therapy for anxiety and depression; the stress level increased to a point where he/she/they had to take time off to heal from the traumatic harm caused by having to read such responses.
In the conclusion to the study, the researchers urged a change in education itself, to make the university a central site for revolutionary struggle, where a pedagogy of liberation can be pursued.
In particular, they argue, STEM students must understand that race, gender and sexuality are rooted in fascism. Because STEM students will end up in areas like fossil fuels and defense, they should be taught about global racial capitalism, and ongoing apartheid in Palestine, for example.
Just for example.
Number 1. Free Beacon dot com. Axis of evil? Obamas, Clintons linked by suspicious deaths.
This is really just too rich.
Anyone’s death is tragic, whatever the circumstances, but sometimes the circumstances simply cannot be ignored.
It’s really unfortunate, say, when the circus tent collapses, trapping people within, but when it collapses because of a Hellfire missile fired from an F-16, the context suddenly becomes the story.
Barack Obama lost his personal chef this week in a drowning incident near the Obama’s estate on Martha’s Vineyard. In the “Wait, what did you say?” department, it is perhaps relevant, or perhaps merely a coincidence, that Hillary Clinton lost her personal chef who was killed in a hiking incident near Taos 8 years ago.
How many former presidents or presidential candidates have lost their personal chefs, while the chefs, apparently young enough to be active and healthy, were engaged in outdoor physical recreational activities? Alone? With no one around?
I’m sure it’s nothing.
Enjoy your weekend!
Curt
The Alligator News Roundup