HALF-FULL REPORT 09/29/23
Kangaroo Courts
Summary Judgement
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ case against Trump, the Trump organization, and his sons was handed a summary judgment victory today. Judge Arthur Engoron, a Democrat elected to the state supreme court, ruled that Trump overvalued his assets when securing loans and insurance policies. Judge Engoron supported that the courts, and not the free market of buyers and sellers, determine real estate value. Trump was denied a jury trial.
Erdogoron canceled Trump’s business licenses and the veil of corporate protection by invalidating his LLCs. He appointed a former Democrat judge as an independent monitor of Trump’s businesses and will appoint receivers to sell his assets to, probably, democrat cronies.
In her opinion, AG James claimed that Trump inflated his assets by $2.23 Billion on statements given to banks. The court chastised him for claiming that the value should be determined by the price a buyer would pay, and he has willing buyers now.
A non-jury trial will be held on October 2 to determine fines and prison sentences and to carve up the Trump empire. Real estate developer Valerie Jarrett has likely envied Trump’s properties for decades. This victory is to Obama and his team, which made their chops on forced real estate divestiture from the University of Chicago.
Trump has now become a martyr for every person mistreated and savaged by the administrative state.
The reader is encouraged to review the Chevron Deference Here in yesterday’s Skye’s Links. This is a political hit job straight from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead but without an independent Jury.
Just imagine where we are now…the highest court in New York has declared itself above the market in service to the corrupt Biden administration and the RINOs incapable of matching Trump’s vision and vigor.
Every CEO of every company domiciled in New York must wonder whether they are next. Speak out of line, run for office, challenge the narrative, and the state will have a fake trial in a kangaroo court intended to strip your assets and distribute them to political cronies.
Per last week’s HFR discussing the theories taught to the modern left, the politicized courts are being used to strip away their victim’s means of support. In this case, Trump’s ability to self-fund his campaign.
The Deep State fears this Trump. They fear him to their core. He is not being shown equality under the law but equity, where a prescribed unequal treatment is handed down to address perceived wrongs. Of course, the greatest wrong in this new world is not to speak the official narrative.
It is abundantly clear why those underwriting the global DEI narrative, now, with all speed, are attempting to shift gears into sustainability. The assets of BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and their international affiliates can now be plundered by the politically connected in the name of social equity. They won’t even be allowed a jury, even a mock jury.
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Feinstein Bites the Dust
The nation’s oldest Senator, Senator Dianne Feinstein, died this morning at age 90. Her legacy of under-the-table financial deals with China, the destruction of downtown San Francisco, and the advancement of globalism at the expense of the United States will remain her ugly legacy.
She played the long game of hollowing out America’s downtowns through her pro-crime, heavy-handed regulations, and support of massively inflationary policies. Her legacy is leading the United States into a commercial real estate crisis. She did not cause all the issues, but her influence grossly distorted markets for decades.
Retailers lost $112 Billion to urban theft in 2022, with organized retail crime rings being the main culprit. Entire trains are being looted in Los Angeles. Through her drip, drip, drip political action and her efforts to seat outright communists on the Supreme Court bench, this woman hurt the United States. She represented an era that must end. She represented the swamp, West Coast chapter.
Feinstein’s drug policies contributed to the crisis, with over 100,000 annual fatalities and over one million opiate fatalities since 2008. Middle America is undergoing a genocide, and she steadfastly nudged it along. Permissive drug policies and open borders kill while eroding the nation’s military capacity. China Dianne certainly knew this. Yet she persisted. And she persisted.
Her career further focused on making a family fortune, maximizing abortions to the level of another genocide, and advancing the tech industry’s interests, especially regarding energy. Tech realized early on that all the new computers and server farms would require vastly more electricity than available, and the industry embarked on a policy of hostile seizure of electrical power from the industrial base. With Feinstein selling this as peace, love, and environmental management, the United States was de-industrialized.
Before she became a senator in 1992, at the start of the significant de-industrialization, she had already been defeated in five elections. Feinstein served as mayor of San Francisco prior and was a member of the Board of Supervisors, where she was instrumental in placing radical leftwingers into vital administrative positions.
Her legacy is a broken and shuttered American industrial base and roving mobs of looters driving retail from San Francisco. The tech industry loved her as she shielded them from antitrust investigations and provided favorable outcomes in the Senate.
Governor Newsome will appoint a temporary replacement; one can bet they will be one of the usual suspects. He might appoint himself to the seat.
She was a bad communist for 90 years. Now she is a good commie. Dianne Feinstein. 1933-2023.
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Covid-19
The Canadian group Correlation in the Public Interest Here found that the mRNA mean, all-age vaccine-dose fatality (vDFR) rate of 1 in 800 killed 17 million people as of September 3, 2023. The results mean that 0.213 +/- 0.0006% of the world population died from the injections over three years. This fatality rate is 1,000 times greater than Dr. Fauci led the world to believe.
Why would a young person of sound mind trust the United States government? Covid and the government’s Politicization of Health to Sack Trump (PHST) has supercharged the left-libertarian movement among the millennials. They are a compliance-leaning generation but are no longer inclined to comply with the government. Their alternative is to move their minds into the digital world even further. No wonder the Central Intelligence Agency announced it is spending big on A.I.
This is a megatrend, and the consequences are profound and vast.
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That 2019 Flu Shot
Remember the hotly disputed quadrivalent 2019 flu shot? The argument was over using a live, attenuated H3N2 virus in the dose. H3N2 is the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, with evolutionary changes. The vaccine component was considered 25% effective and was included because most hospitalizations during 2017/2018 were from H3N2.
Research suggests that those who took the 2019 flu vaccine had worse, sometimes significantly worse, outcomes from Covid-19. “Worse” means cytokine storms leading to hospitalization and mechanical ventilation. As scientific papers are published, and if they can escape the censors, they will be linked on TTP. However, for now, researchers are finding a strong correlation between receiving the H3N2 flu shot during the fall of 2019 and hyperactivity of the immune system in patients exposed to Covid-19 during the winter of 2019/2020.
Now that Covid-19 is in the wild and will always be with us, emerging data suggests that boosting influenza immunity and Covid-19 immunity at or near the same time might lead to an undesirable, complex immune response.
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Labor Strikes
About six percent of the private sector is unionized, and 30% of public sector workers are members. Earlier this year, Biden used the force of law to stop railroad workers from striking over pay. Shortly after that, American Airlines and United increased pilot pay by about 43%, avoiding strikes. UPS workers struck and settled while the Teamsters put Yellow Freight out of business. FedEx recently rejected a 30% pay increase, and many CVS pharmacists have called a strike over workload and pay. Los Vegas Culinary Workers are picketing, and the Los Vegas Hospitality Union is about to walk out the door.
Oil, Chemical, and Atomic workers prepare for new contract negotiations while Steelworkers sit back and read the tea leaves. The Mine Workers are keeping their heads down for now.
Sixty unions make up the AFL-CIO in maritime, shipyards, the building trades, transportation, and communication, and of the major unions, the AFL-CIO is deepest into Biden’s hip pocket.
It seems that strikes are breaking out all over, with the UAW strike now affecting twenty-eight plants. The UAW has not endorsed Biden. They want to win pay increases and then secure an E.V. mandate rollback. Trump might be their guy, as the electric vehicle mandates will kill the domestic auto industry.
Hollywood writers are returning to work, meaning the late-night talk shows with their base and vulgar commentary are returning.
Pay increases run between 40% and 44%, but significant workload concessions are unmet. Ultimately, everything will be more automated, jobs will continue to be de-skilled, and consumer costs will continue to increase. Everyone loses.
Toyota is investing in larger, heavier machines. Their new Gigapress can stamp out one-third of a car in a single action from a slab of molten aluminum, replacing 86 manufacturing steps. The new gear is at their Myochi, Japan plant. In other words, Toyota is not using robots to replace people working in conventional assembly operations; they are moving from the assembly line to another dimension. Henry Ford’s system had a good run, but the assembly line-based plant is becoming obsolete due to regulations, labor scarcity, and new technology.
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Wars and Such
It looks like Christian Armenia lost Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan after one week of fighting. Armenians are leaving the region in large numbers, with over 70% depopulation of 170,000 people reported this morning. Azerbaijan’s Blitzkrieg overran the territory, ending its 32 years and 26 days of independence. Erdogan of Turkey met with Putin earlier this year and likely agreed on the timing and execution of the Blitz.
The American Department of State could not respond well as they are increasingly busy with coups and aggression elsewhere. Russia and China appear to be pursuing a strategy to overwhelm the Biden Administration.
Russia is returning to its winter strategy of attacking Ukrainian power plants and electrical distribution systems. So far, they have left gas pipelines mostly alone. Older, Soviet-era transformers and switchgear, boilers, and turbomachinery cannot be replaced in-kind and require Swedish, French, German, and Japanese supply chains. American firms such as General Electric cannot meet the demand due to a lack of manufacturing plants and equipment.
Lessons are being learned should the American grid be attacked during a future conflict. Last year’s attack on a Moore County, NC, substation took the facility offline for a week because of bullet punctures in a transformer’s cooling jacket. An attack with heavier weapons would have forced the replacement of a transformer, in which only a handful of spares exist nationwide.
The lessons from Ukraine suggest that power distribution systems should migrate to standardized parts using standardized designs to facilitate rapid repair. Arguments for an updated electrical grid in the USA will increase due to the threat of drones and hypersonics to distribution hubs.
It won’t be easy to fix.
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Republican Debate II
This week, the second debate occurred at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. Trump skipped the event and spoke at a non-union auto parts plant in Michigan. Vivek and Haley fought as Haley appeared tasked with leading the attack on her fellow minority. This was most likely the party’s attempt to avoid racism charges.
Vivek’s new haircut looked like Eddie Munster’s (Butch Patrick). Christie looks more ready for a heart attack than an attack on Biden. Nothing new surfaced other than Trump’s ratings continue to climb.
In Michigan, Trump said that none of the other candidates merit consideration as his V.P. Given Trump’s preference for working with highly qualified, sharply dressed professional women, Kari Lake remains a strong contender. Unless, of course, Trump realizes that the intelligence community placed Dr. Deborah Brix in the White House to manipulate Trump’s preference for qualified female executives.
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Beautiful Trouble
This is the fifth installment of the New Left’s training material presented in the book, board games, and flashcards from Beautiful Trouble. Beautiful Trouble is an updated version of Rules for Radicals for the digital age.
To the leftist, tactics have a different meaning than in the corporate or military world. In this case, tactics mean the application of tools of the weak against the strong. The central idea is theater, the creation of the media event, with pressure brought against the target’s support system.
The purpose is to create a decision point. A decision point means forcing the target to decide on an action or course of action, establishing the basis for a counter-action, and establishing reflexivity.
Examples taught are the creation of flash mobs, occupation of city streets, strikes, eviction blockades, and posting tiny windmill tots in a park or placing signs around town.
Advanced Leafletting can be theatrical, involving costumes or nudity, passing out fortune cookies, or assembling a group of singers. Code Pink used their signature pink clothing and signs and launched custom balloons, as seen in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Artistic Vigils, from the Latin meaning to watch over the dead and dying, used to involve a lot of silent protesters with candles. These have mostly been abandoned as a waste of time. Instead, protestors are taught to create an emotional ritual that can be repeated at the same time and place. For example, protestors dressed like executives assembled every Thursday night in front of a CEO’s home.
The goal is to mimic or mock a form of a church service, turning the cause of the day into a transcendent experience. Music, drums, chanting, or silence fit this tactic.
Banner Hanging is becoming more creative and extends beyond those giant Oxfam banners that block the view of public buildings in Europe. The goal is to target branding through communicating a message or blocking and covering something like a tourist atraction or office entrance. Examples include running red or yellow caution tape, posting signs, or setting up fake homeless camps on a sidewalk. The critical element is to say it with props to force the target to make a response. The responses and media coverage are the objective. An example is the large BLM street markings that New York City directed to be printed in front of Trump properties. The intent was to goad Trump into disparaging BLM on TV.
Blockading is a bit different and comes in two types. A soft blockade is a group of people assembling at points of decision, points of production, or points of extraction (like a mine). The typical UAW protest in front of a factory gate is an example.
A hard blockade involves chains, locks, parked cars, tear gas, Molotov cocktails, or a violent mob. The goal is to create a decision dilemma and trigger reflexivity and escalation. A blockade is useless without a media strategy.
Creative Disruption is the old-school disruption of a restaurant or town hall meeting, shareholder meeting, or other event. The goal is to remove a target’s options, such as completing a session, and again, force a reaction that will be caught on the ubiquitous iPhone.
Examples include glitter bombing, singing songs, blocking traffic, or creating fake scenes. PETA places animal cages containing nude women onto highway right-of-ways to muck things up, hoping the women are mistreated when arrested.
Petitioning has gone digital, with an actual petition carrying little weight. However, delivering the petition results creates room for theatrics, costumes, and other spectacles. Again, The goal is to force a decision and a reaction and capture the response on video for further editing and uploading to social media.
Brand Derailment is taught in depth. The successful transformation of Joe the Camel into Joe the Chemo is an example, as are all the attacks on Trump’s hair. People think in images, which is why some savvy insurance companies and AT&T use a live human instead of a mascot. It is too easy to “Joe the Chemo” a mascot.
With thousands of new memes created per hour and the deployment of AI software, branding through logos invites attack. Corporations require aggressive trademark protection.
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This wraps up the first half of the tactics presented in Beautiful Trouble. Each is deeper and fleshed out further than shown here, with entire games established around each tactic.
Mike Ryan is a chemical engineering consultant for Iron and Steel, Heavy Chemicals, Minerals, and Fibers Industries.