Turn and Face the Wall

Bob Woodward has long since squandered any claim to impartiality, or even presumption of honesty, but if this story from his latest book "Peril" contains any truth at all, then the only acceptable response by the rest of America is the one suggested in the title of this post.

Briefly, Woodward claims Gen. Milley called a "secret" meeting on-or-about Jan 8, 2021 with the express purpose of organizing a military coup in coordination with at least some of the leadership of the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China. IF TRUE, then Summary Execution seems the only appropriate judgement permissible to any who honor the military's oath of service and loyalty to the US Constitution. And the thing is, we don't have to rely on Mr. Woodward to find out.

If there was a meeting between Milley and other senior officers to subvert the Constitution, every single one of them are potentially participants in treason. We need the other participants of the meeting Woodward claims took place to speak out about the nature and content of such a meeting, with those who confess pre-emptively allowed to resign their commission with loss of all privilege's or pay, but no further punishment. All others, specifically General Milley, being subject to immediate and public Summary Execution if convicted.

DEATH TO TRAITORS!

UPDATE: Maybe something will come of this; maybe.

SSDD

Back in the pre-internet days of 1992, there was a trial of four Los Angeles police officers for their actions while arresting Rodney King the previous year. In my personal experience from the time (I lived in Sylmar, CA at the time - not exactly ground zero, but I could see the helicopters circling over the arrest site), I predict that the Chauvin trial in Minneapolis will follow essentially the identical script.

The state trial, despite Minnesota AG Keith Ellison's best efforts to the contrary, will end in an acquittal of Officer Chauvin due to his third-party documented compliance with Minnesota state law and Minneapolis Police Department policies and procedures in place at the time of the final arrest of George Floyd in 2020. Also like the acquitted Los Angeles police officers 30 years ago, Chauvin will be arrested within days of his acquittal by the US DoJ for violating Floyd's civil rights, even though the arrest was entirely legal, and Chauvin at the least will be convicted by a federal jury with all of his personal property preemptively seized by the US government at the time of his federal arrest.

If he's smart, Chauvin will have already begun negotiating a federal plea deal as I write this, that ends up with him being a felon, but with as little federal prison time as community service sentencing will permit. Maybe he will be able to keep some of his personal possessions.

Whatever else Derek Chauvin experiences in the rest of his life, he can be certain that it will be very, very different to anything he has experienced so far.

UPDATE 4/22/2021: If anyone needs evidence as to why I haven't won the lottery yet, herewith submission #1.

I am truly impressed

It may or may not be a quality you might want in a potential Presidential candidate, but Tulsi Gabbard has a 5 hour bladder. When you consider what surfers do while they are waiting in the line up outside the break, that's a real range of talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp3X-tvG7dU

Opportunity Thy Name Is Starbase, Texas

 On March 2nd (yesterday as I write this), Elon Musk published a tweet announcing the creation of Starbase, Texas, a new city. This creates the perfect opportunity for Musk to resolve one of the main objections to his Tesla production goals - where does the electricity to charge all of those vehicles to come from? - by addressing the related question, where does the electricity for a Mars or Lunar colony come from?

It is a matter of black letter law here in Texas that a property of 100 acres or more, that is outside the boundaries of a municipality, can host a gun range whether or not the neighbors agree or a municipality later expands to include said property. Given that 100 acres can be near-as-dammit 1,100 feet wide by 4,000 feet long (yes, I realize an "acre" is a measure of area and thus has no fixed dimension), a 1 thousand yard long rifle range probably won't be more than 500 feet wide (and likely less), which leaves the several hundred feet of land on either side to host a vehicle driving track, about which more later. As a business, an outdoor shooting range can be marginally profitable on its own; as part of an outdoor recreation complex, such a business would likely succeed financially depending on how close it is to the outskirts of a municipality.

Where might Elon Musk put the electric generating plant(s) needed to power the city of Starbase, not to mention all those electric cars and trucks (and other vehicles) he is already building at Tesla? How about under ground, beneath the rifle range? There are various reactor designs from which to choose, especially if you don't want to develop weapons-grade plutonium as a "by product" of your power plant. While a Helium 3 (3He hereafter) fusion reactor seems the currently best option for use here on Earth, molten-salt type fission reactors are possibly a better option for off-planet applications (fusion converts water into energetic particles and thus needs to be regularly replaced; fission re-uses a super-heated liquid to create steam - also reused - to power electric generators, and radiation isn't as big an issue in space) while still providing the rigorous safety technology needed for operation here on Earth (or any other planetary body). How quickly could SpaceX get a Starship onto Luna, to deliver as semi-autonomous (Hello Starlink) as necessary surface mining equipment, with which to extract 3He from the lunar surface? A second Starship vehicle will almost certainly be required to efficiently shuttle 3He to Earth (and eventually Mars) for final processing as reactor fuel, of course. If the molten salt fission reactor works out instead, can 3He be used as fuel in one? If not, how does one go about buying up that much thorium (or whatever)?

Depending upon the reactor design chosen, it should be possible to build ten 100 megawatt power plants below ground under the rifle range/recreation center property suggested above. By distributing the electricity thus generated through a network of tunnels as deeply as necessary beneath the already established right-of-ways underneath existing state and/or federal highways, it becomes possible to add as much as one terawatt of new-generation electricity to the Texas electricity grid from this one property. Extending this model, it becomes possible to add and distribute as many terawatt increases to the US power grid as 100 acre plots of land can be purchased for the purpose. The announcement of Starbase city creates the ideal opportunity for Elon Musk to combine all of his corporate creations in more-or-less direct support of his plans for off-Terra development of human civilization, while fortifying existing human civilization here on Terra.

If Tesla were to buy the One Wheel company along with the Zero Motorcycles company and fold both into the Tesla sales network, these would provide additional products for Tesla to market here on Earth that would seem to also have application on Mars or Luna in either human operated or autonomous mode operations. In the meantime, having one or more tracks upon which to ride rented or privately owned examples of all Tesla products seems to offer a selection of potential businesses to explore, while training future Loonies and Marsmen* as well. By providing Tesla and SpaceX engineers a location(s) to test and develop power generation and transportation technologies, while simultaneously generating a new income stream for both companies, this proposal also potentially solves the needed energy additions and the distribution security concerns to the US (as well as Mexico and Canada if that should become US foreign policy) national power grids (there are three, East, Texas, and West), all from within the existing boundaries of the Texas power grid network.

If it needs to be said, I'd like to work at the rifle range, Elon.

* See Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein

Twice Not Guilty

 Today, Saturday, February 13, 2021, President Donald J. Trump was - again - formally determined to be Not Guilty of any prosecutable act he took as President via the constitutionally mandated legal process (Impeachment). This being so, it follows that there can be no additional prosecution of any action he committed during his presidency. Donald J. Trump enjoys the exact same legal (and other - see: Former Presidents Act) protections as do former Presidents Barrack Obama, George W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and Jimmy Carter (the name variant he used to be sworn into office).

The argument could be made that he does so twice as much as his fellow Presidential alumni, though I have to admit that smacks more than a little of being praised with faint damns.

The current attempts by a Georgia prosecutor to indict former President Trump must now be regarded as unlawful and possibly criminal in nature. IANAL but I believe that absence of authority to do something constitutionally (at either State or Federal levels of constitutional authority) is entirely and only that. Since the US Constitution mandates that Impeachment and Removal From Office are the only means whereby a President may be prosecuted directly for actions taken while in office (and such Removal being the only mechanism making a former President subject to prosecution post-tenure in office), President Trump now enters the exact same legal status as do all of America's still-living former Presidents.

I wish him and all of his colleagues every lawful success in their post-Presidential lives.

The Silver Silver Bulls

 The recent discussion of a "silver squeeze" has me smiling. A short prefatory story first:

In 1980, two Texas brothers, Nelson Bunker Hunt, his younger brother Herbert, and several other members of their extended family, managed to buy something like two thirds of all the privately held silver on planet Earth, ultimately driving the 1 ounce spot price to $600+ for at least a short time. While doing so was seemingly not against any laws, they ultimately ended up in court where they argued (unsuccessfully you will no doubt be shocked to discover) that they weren't manipulating the silver markets but rather they were building a hedge fund against the rampant inflation of the US dollar during the 1970's. I can't imagine why the Federal Reserve, not to mention the US Mint, took such extreme exception to this denigration of their collective financial acumen.

The two primary reasons the Hunts failed are that they borrowed against their other assets to fund this buying spree, and there were too few of them to make prosecution unmanageably difficult for the USG.

Back to 2021, and silver spot prices have essentially doubled over recent weeks but there isn't any obvious orchestration of the buying efforts. Given the realities of digital social media, there is an opportunity to be realized from the two examples above.

Social security payments are all directly deposited into the recipients bank account on the Wednesday of the week the recipient was born. I for example was born in the fourth week of October, so I receive my social security payment on the fourth Wednesday of each calendar month. Should enough people (lets assume 1 million buyers on each of the four Wednesdays of payments in any given month) buy $500 of silver coins as part of a tranche of buyers on their Wednesday, and they did this for 10 months in total. It ought to be fairly easy to slowly drive the market spot price up to a value of 5x the spot price 10 months previous.

Now, silver is measured on the imperial scale, so 16 ounces to the pound. If you assume an average of 3 pounds of silver is purchased by each individual buyer in the first month, the rise of the spot price in succeeding months will reduce the amount $500 will purchase. Obviously, the up side of this is that your silver is now worth more than when you bought it; the down side being that your $500 the next month won't buy as much as it did the first month. This being a wildly speculative example of a hypothetical, let's say (for the ease of calculating) that all 4 million senior citizens each end up with 10 pounds (or 160 ounces) of silver on the first day of the 11th month, when the spot price has been above a pre-determined multiple of the starting value for a pre-designated amount of time, at which point everybody descends on their preferred precious metals dealer at opening time of the next regular business day, offering their hoard for sale at that days spot price.

No signal required.

The second thing that will happen is that the next day's spot price will drop to almost the level it was 10 months previous. The first thing to happen is that metal buyers across the US will be desperately trying to figure out where to get that much cash. Since the second thing is a desired result we will concentrate on alleviating the first thing. Instead of accepting a check (because bank deposit records are already reported to government agencies), suggest that the dealer exchange an equivalent amount of gold coins for the majority of the silver, leaving no more than $1,000 in currency needed to complete the transaction. It is simplicity itself to come back every week-or-so to sell a coin.

This would result in 4 million senior citizens increasing the value of $5,000 to (realistically, probably no more than 3x) its original value. Still, as a way to potentially make a little extra money, this seems reasonably easy and minimally risky (barring a home invasion or other type of robbery, obviously). At worst, barring being a crime statistic, people will have accumulated a modest amount of precious metal to hold for a future profitable sales opportunity.

Also, identifying - never mind rounding up - 4 million senior citizens who are individually guilty of nothing more than buying a legal product in a legal transaction seems overly Orwellian even for 2021.

I'm not on reddit either, so don't look to me for ringleader material, but it does make for interesting speculation (and a terrible pun), doesn't it? 

Go Marker

 Donald J. Trump did not kill himself.