Month: January 2024

Dear Justice Roberts,                            

From the beginning let’s be clear, whatever I am going to say should not be taken personally by you. However, because you are the Chief Justice, it seems fitting that you should bear more responsibility when a decision of SCOTUS goes awry.

Your (SCOTUS) latest decision about the barbed wire on the Texas border is merely a way of kicking the proverbial can down the proverbial road. Saying that the Federal Government can cut the barbed wire is like “dancing with your sister at the senior prom!” Saying that cutting the barbed wire is okay does not address the real problem on the Texas border. What was not addressed was the legality of Texas placing the barbed wire up in the first place. In addition what was not addressed was the illegality of the President opening the border to any Tom, Dick, Jose, or Mohammed that wants to come across.

Isn’t clear that your recent cursory ruling about who can or can’t cut the barbed wire is merely a delaying tactic to legal issues to come. For instance, it is okay for the Federal Government to ignore laws about preserving the integrity of our country’s borders?  Is it okay for a state government to then uphold the law when the Federal Government ignores it.? And then down the road what will happen when thousands of asylum seeking individuals do not show up for their hearings. If they are here with the blessing of the Federal Government, can they then legally be deported? If they came through where you allowed the Federal Government to cut the barbed wire, can they be deported?

Your inability to deal with the core issues here can only lead to a myriad of future problems. Just like your unwillingness to get involved with the legality of the 2020 election has led to many more legal issues, your “dancing with your sister” will not turn out well!

1/31/24

I recent.y wrote about the travails of EVs that are recently coming to the forefront. Tesla stock is down to about 190, having peaked at 296 last summer, and in the last month or so the stock price has dropped close to 30%. Hertz just sold about 1000 EVs, losing millions of dollars, because people did not want to rent them. Last month in Chicago there was chaos as the EV chargers were not working because of the very cold weather.

While this is bad news for electric autos, what is happening with electric buses (EBs)? Can the situation be any worse for EBs? … Yes it can! 

From Fox Business:

Cities from coast-to-coast are grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed, are too expensive to fix, or they have scrapped their electric fleets altogether.

Officials in Asheville, North Carolina, recently expressed frustration that three of the five e-buses the city purchased for millions in 2018 are now sitting idle due to a combination of software issues, mechanical problems and an inability to obtain replacement parts.

Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette reported two of the four e-buses Colorado Springs’ Mountain Metropolitan Transit acquired in 2021 are not running. They cost $1.2 million a piece, mostly paid for by government grants. 

One of the large makers of electric buses, Proterra, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August. The company, founded in 2004, rose to become the largest e-bus company in the U.S., representing nearly 40% of the market prior to going belly-up.

Asheville’s interim transportation director, Jessica Morriss, told local outlet WLOS-TV it has been impossible to get parts since Proterra filed for bankruptcy last summer. However, Asheville – and several other cities – had problems with the company’s buses long before then.

And the beat goes on …

Still from Fox Business:

In 2020, The Philadelphia Tribune reported SEPTA’s entire $24 million fleet of Proterras had been pulled out of commission. A spokesperson for the transit agency would not get into the specifics of why the 25 buses – the third-largest fleet of all-electric buses in the U.S. at the time – were put on ice.

San Joaquin Regional Transit District in Stockton, California, the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County in Reno, Nevada, and the Transit Authority of River City (TARC) in Louisville, Kentucky, were also struggling with Proterra buses sitting idle.

In Nov. 2022, WDRB-TV reported that TARC’s entire fleet of Proterra electric buses had not operated in two years. The outlet said $9 million had been shelled out for Louisville’s e-buses.

Note that other than Reno these cities do not have much in the way cold, Chicago-like weather. One can only imagine the disaster that electric buses would be in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or Kansas City! 

The real life experiences with electric buses can only be referred to as another ‘BB,’ … ‘Biden Boondoggle!’

1/30/24

I’m sure that a lot of you remember how President Trump dealt with our enemies in the Middle East. He was pro-active. That approach worked because they only understand a show of force.

In addition President Trump designated the Houthi’s as a terrorist organization. As most of you remember, Joe Biden almost immediately removed the Houthi’s from this list. In the last few months the Houthi’s have been terrorizing shipping in the Yemen-Somalia Red Sea area. As a reaction to this, Joe Biden moved many American Navy ships into the area. Finally, Biden re-designated the Houthi’s as a terrorist group, and subsequently reactively started firing missiles into the Houthi’s locations in Yemen. Too little? Too late?

In January, two Navy SEALS were presumed by the U.S. military to have died after going missing during an operation near the coast of Somalia, although few details were provided. Officials said they were attempting to seize Iranian-made weapons that were being sent to the Houthi terrorist group based in Yemen, which has carried out a number of attacks on U.S. military ships and commercial vehicles since the start of the Israel–Gaza conflict.

Now on Jan 28, 2024 after months of attacks on our troops stationed around the Mideast, what everyone knew was very possible, happened.

Three American servicemembers were killed early on Jan. 28 in a drone attack on a small U.S. base in Jordan, the Biden administration said in a statement. At least two dozen other troops were injured in the incident, according to U.S. officials.

They were the first U.S. fatalities after at least 150 strikes by Iranian-backed groups against American forces across the Middle East. Joe Biden vowed to hold the perpetrators to account; so far, no organization or government has claimed responsibility.

Two important things:

First, Two months of attacks on our troops. Not two days. Not two weeks. But two months! More than 150 attacks on our troops. Not ten. Not fifty. Not one hundred. But more than 150!

Second, Joe Biden has now vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable. Perhaps, if Joe Biden was more pro-active, these three servicemen would still be alive, and he would not have to now be reactive.

1/29/24

The following is an amazing Sunday story from Epoch Inspired:

Mr. Sean Desmangles’s son, 18-year-old Niem, was born with a rare blood disorder that caused brain damage, preventing him from developing and leaving him unable to talk or walk. Every three weeks, his father chaperones him to NYU Langone Health for a blood transfusion.

When Niem turned 18, it got difficult for Mr. Desmangles to continue carrying his son up and down the stairs so he created a GoFundMe page to raise money for a stairlift.

“Sometimes you have to swallow your pride when it comes to doing stuff for family,” Mr. Desmangles told The Epoch Times. “I was trying to figure all my friends, send them the links.”

Mr. Desmangles also reached out to Officer Abdelaziz, whom he’d known for more than a decade.

New York City Police Officer Kareem Abdelaziz, 38, and his brother, New York Fire Department Lt. Abdelrahman Abdelaziz, 43, have known 51-year-old Sean Desmangles since he moved to their neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, from St. Lucia in the Caribbean for better medical care for his teen son.

“He was a customer at my dad’s convenience store that we had for nearly four decades,” Officer Abdelaziz said. “He would bring his disabled son in a wheelchair on a daily basis, buy groceries, and hang out on the weekends.”

When Officer Abdelaziz first learned about Niem’s condition, he became very emotional.

“It’s a lifetime condition that he has to live with so it was just more about supporting him and his family from day one,” he said.

So when Mr. Desmangles sent the GoFundMe link to Officer Abdelaziz on a December morning asking for help, he immediately reached out to his brother.

‘I didn’t even get to finish my sentence; my brother absolutely said, ‘We’ll help him out, there’s no question about it,’” the officer said. “I hung up the phone. I got my thoughts together, my emotions together, and I reached out to Sean.’”

To make a long story short the Abdelaziz brothers funded the installation of the stairlift. After the stairlift was installed, Mr. Desmangles was able to show the life-changing apparatus to his son. It “meant a lot” for the Abdelaziz brothers to relieve their friend’s burden ahead of the holiday season.

“In the afternoon my son came and used it for the first time,” Mr. Desmangles said. “My son had the right to smile, and, for me, it was a great help because no more carrying over steps. He is heavy, he is big.”

Kudos to these two brothers. Certainly New York’s finest!

1/28/24

Even though it is only January I already have two candidates for “Bozo of the year!” (Last year the “Bozo of the year” serendipitously had a last name that began with ‘B,’ but that is not a hard and fast rule.)

The first candidate is Swiss banker, Hubert Keller.  

From Valuetainment: 

During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland last week, Swiss banker and ‘agenda contributor’ Hubert Keller said coffee production is bad for the environment and is exacerbating climate change.

At a panel discussion Keller said, ‘The coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of coffee… Every time we drink coffee, we are basically putting CO2 into the atmosphere.”

Keller went on: ‘And one of the reasons is because most of the coffee plantation or most of the coffee is produced through monoculture and monoculture is also affected by climate change… The quality of these natural assets is deteriorating quite rapidly.’

Not surprising, Keller is a managing partner of global wealth management firm Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, a bank deeply committed to Environmental, Social, and corporate Governenace (ESG) philosophy.

However before you cast your “Bozo of the year” vote for Keller, consider another WEF speaker, Jojo Mehta, who described fishing and farming as environmentally destructive activities. She advocated for destructive activities to be recognized as “ecocide” under new international laws that would punish crimes against nature in the same way genocide is prosecuted.

BTW: Jojo Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of Stop Ecocide International, which compared the side effects of “farming,” “fishing,” and energy production to mass murder and torture. Her organization is currently working with diplomats, politicians, corporations, NGOs, and academics to advocate for the recognition of such acts of “ecocide” as serious crimes.

I am sure as the months pass by, other noteworthy candidates will arise.

However, keep in mind that future candidates do not have to be members of WEF!

1/27/24

To me throughout this whole Jan 6th thing there are many things which just do not add up. Each take individually .. well okay. But when one questionable thing is on top of another … my suspicion antenna goes up.

First, there is the Jan 6 house panel on which Nancy Pelosi would not put a reasonable Republican representative, but rather chose two very suspect pseudo-Republicans, neither of which will be back in the House. 

Then as has recently become apparent, that committee released only partial selected tapes of what happened. Apparently what was withheld did not fit the forgone conclusion that the Democrats had predetermined ahead of time.

Many many FBI agents (some think up to 200) were infiltrated into the crowd, and although there were many suspicions that something untoward was going to occur on that day, nobody felt that additional security was necessary. I still cannot understand that, and thus far there has been no credible explanation for the absence of additional security.

The doors to the Capitol were held open by those on the inside … very mysterious!

Next, the only one who died on that day was a rather small female Air Force veteran. She was unarmed and yet was shot point blank. The individual who shot her was neither charged nor prosecuted. Apparently this  shooting was quietly “taken cate of” by someone who knew best.

In December, the Supreme Court decided it would take up the appeal by Jan. 6 defendant Joseph W. Fisher of the Biden administration’s novel use of an Enron-era evidence-tampering law to prosecute hundreds of defendants for obstruction of Congress during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incident.

Many of these defendants were charged with obstruction of Congress based on 18 U.S. Code Section 1512(c)(2), or “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant.”

Several legal experts have said, in earlier interviews that the high court is likely to find that 1512(c)(2) is being improperly used against Jan. 6 defendants.

The implications extend beyond individual cases to the core strategy employed by the Justice Department (DOJ) in securing convictions.

Defense lawyer Kira Anne West, who has been involved in more than 50 Jan. 6 cases, has accused the Justice Department of overreach in prosecuting some of the approximately 1,300 Jan. 6 cases.

Ms. West, who volunteered to defend dozens of Jan. 6 defendants, said during a recent C-SPAN “Booknotes” podcast that most of her Jan. 6 clients had neither a criminal history nor did they engage in any violence that day.

“Some simply went into the building, turned around, and went out,” she said. “Many were in for a very short period of time, less than 20 minutes. Yet the government is charging them with felony charges that you can get up to 20 years in prison for. That makes absolutely no sense to me.”

Going into the Capitol on January 6th is not excusable. A misdemeanor … yes, but a felony warranting 20 years in federal prison? … not hardly!

Hopefully the Supreme Court will make amends for turning its back on all of the fraud and illegality surrounding the 2020 election. If they had done what they should have done in the first place, January 6th would have never happened.

1/26/

Initially I was going to start this piece by saying, “I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but …” However it then dawned on me that a lot of readers would not be familiar with a ‘record,’ never mind a ‘broken record’!

So I changed gears.

Suffice it to say, I have written many times about the many pitfalls of  marijuana legalization, and here is another one.

From NewsNation:

“New data suggests more people who use marijuana experience psychotic episodes. In some cases — particularly in young people — it can lead to permanent psychiatric disorders.

Truveta, an analytics firm, reports diagnoses of marijuana-induced psychosis emergency department visits increased by more than 50% between 2019 and 2020. Additionally, the rate of cannabis-induced disorder emergency visits continued to increase through 2023.

“A 2017 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found even one psychotic episode after cannabis use increased the risk of developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder by 47%. The risk was found to be higher for those between the ages of 16 and 25.

‘You have to be very careful, particularly careful, using cannabis if you have a family history of bipolar or schizophrenia because you are particularly vulnerable,’said Dr. Peter Grinspoon.

“Critics argue the research should differentiate between types of marijuana and its effects on psychosis.

Doctors urge teens to wait until they’re adults to use cannabis, as it is much safer.”

I sometimes wonder who is the big pusher of marijuana. Is it George Soros or the devil … assuming those are actually two different entities.

Either way neither marijuana induced bipolar disorder nor schizophrenia go away. Ergo, I say particularly to young people, “just say no!”

1/25/24

Sport’s Illustrated has just gone the way of Bud Light and Target. Just last week the iconic magazine fires all of its staff. Rather than focus on this year’s disastrous Swimsuit Issue, I thought that the following article from the Babylon Bee said it much better than I ever could. 

Babylon Bee 1/19/24:

“NEW YORK, NY — After sending a company-wide email to notify all of its staff that they were being laid off, a top executive at iconic publication Sports Illustrated contemplated how things turned out so wrong as he stood in front of framed covers of obese and trans swimsuit models.

“I just don’t know where things went south,” said Jack Weber. “Did we not get woke enough? Should we have featured trans models even earlier? Was the heavy woman we put on the cover not heavy enough? What was it? Maybe we should’ve given more consideration to plastering the Pride flag on our cover back in June. I was certain we signaled the appropriate amount of virtue for every possible cause and movement out there. It just makes no sense.”

The magazine, long seen as the authoritative source for all sports news, finally cut loose all its workforce after realizing no one was reading the publication anymore. “This really threw us for a loop,” Weber said. “We had so many big things planned to turn things around. A salute to Caitlyn Jenner. Naming Lia Thomas our Female Athlete of the Year. We were even in negotiations to have Lizzo as a special celebrity cover model for the swimsuit issue this year. Now, all of that will be lost.”

At publishing time, Sports Illustrated announced it had found a new solution to its problems by hiring an entirely new staff that would be the most diverse and inclusive in the history of sports news publications.”

Perhaps from now on we can refer to Sport’s Illustrated as the ‘Bud Light’ of magazines!

“Requiem in pace.”

1/24/24

Is it possible that we are now seeing the first of the dominos to fall? Is it possible that after what just happened at Ford and Hertz that we will see many similar things at GM or Avis?

For those who are not aware recently realistic thinking came to both Ford and Hertz. The reality appears to be that the market for EVs is not what the government is forcing down the throats of American citizens.

First, from The Epoch Times:

“Ford to Scale Down EV Production, Transfer Crew to Gas Vehicle Assembly Plant”

“Ford’s decision came amid reports that electric vehicles are piling up at dealers’ parking lots and more Americans are hesitant to buy electric vehicles.

Ford Motor Company will transfer some workers from the F-150 Lightning assembly line at Rouge Electric Vehicle Center to another plant for gas-powered vehicles.

The company made the move to “meet demand for the popular Bronco and Bronco Raptor and the all-new Ranger and Ranger Raptor.”

The crew at the Michigan Assembly Plant will work seven days a week on two shifts after the transition.”

Meanwhile at Hertz:

“Rental firm Hertz Global Holdings is selling about 20,000 electric vehicles, including Teslas, from its U.S. fleet about two years after a deal with the automaker to offer its vehicles for rent.

The company will instead opt for gas-powered vehicles, it said on Jan. 11, citing higher expenses related to collision and damage for EVs even though it had aimed to convert 25 percent of its fleet to electric by 2024 end.

The car rental giant lists more than 700 EVs on sale, including BMW’s i3, Chevrolet’s Bolt, and Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y SUVs. It is selling some Tesla Model 3s for as low as about $20,000, nearly half the purchase price for the cheapest variant of the compact sedan, according to its used car website showed.

Analysts expected Hertz’s latest move will press the price of used electric vehicles lower.”

To me while this is big news, it is not unforeseen as both Ford and Hertz are out to make a profit. If consumers are not buying or renting EVs then this was bound to happen. Is it possible that the pendulum is now starting to swing?

1/23/24

If there are to be programs that favor low income individuals, and I think there should be, then these programs need to be made available to all low income individuals and families of all races.

Seems like common sense to me, and especially since in June the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action policies in a decision that had a profound effect on the admissions processes at universities across the country.

From the Daily Wire:

“A group of Asian parents filed a federal lawsuit this week claiming that New York’s state-funded STEM summer program is declining to accept their children in favor of black and Hispanic students.

The parents sued New York’s Department of Education on Wednesday, Jan 17, over the Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP), claiming that black and Hispanic kids are accepted to the program regardless of their income while Asian and white kids must show proof of their low-income status.

‘In other words, the Hispanic child of a multi-millionaire is eligible to apply to STEP, while an Asian American child whose family earns just above the state’s low-income threshold is not, solely because of her race or ethnicity,’ the lawsuit alleges.

The free program accepts about 11,000 students in 7th grade and up every year for classes at 56 colleges and medical schools across the state, the New York Post reported. The program features “instruction, exam preparation, hands-on and research training, college admissions guidance and career-focused activities such as field trips and college visits.”

The program’s website says it accepts ‘economically disadvantaged, or African American, Hispanic/Latino, Alaskan Native or American Indian” students.’”

Even though these STEP  admission based criteria have been present since it’s inception in 1985, it is likely that these restrictions are no longer going to pass muster. If a program is for low income families, then it should be for all low income families, and only low income families.

1/22/24