Astro-Turf
Source sky news
Welcome back to the Washington place. The place officially goes up for sale on the 10th of this month, we still have a little work to do, but I can see the light in the tunnel from the oncoming train. Dinner tonight is meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and Mexican Street corn. Booze is in its normal place, as are soft drinks.
The tip jar is at the link. Thanks, as always to everyone who has chipped in. So lets chat.
First off, for those that are not familiar with the term, “Astro-turf” is not just the first-generation artificial turf for sports fields from back in the 70s, that caused so many injuries. It’s also slang for something that claims to be ‘Grass-roots” IE: a people’s movement, and not at all organized by political operatives, yet IS actually organized by political operatives. It’s fake grass-roots.
Sorry if that was “mansplaining” but I don’t always know the level of insider knowledge in my readers. Which brings us to the first item on the agenda:
Crowds on Demand. OK, so it turns out I’m way behind the power curve myself. This is something I was not aware existed! And it turns out it’s been around since 2012, when founder Adam Swart opened the firm. Oh, I was sure that such a thing was available somewhere, but seriously? As a publicly traded company???
This is something to be aware of, when you see the protesters in the streets, or the crowds yelling something either for or against a particular position or politician. We talked about how Truth is already a casualty of political war, last week, well, add to that the fact that the protests you see may be bought and paid for.
I want to quote from the company WEBSITE at https://crowdsondemand.com/protests-rallies-and-advocacy If you don’t believe me, go see for yourself. In fact, please, as I often say here, don’t trust any one source, including me, do your research.
“Whether your organization is lobbying to move forward a healthcare, financial, energy or other social initiative, we can organize rallies and get media attention for your causes and candidates. We also assist individuals, companies and political organizations with protests and picketing campaigns. We’ve protested governments, corporations and everything in between.
“If you need to hire protesters, we can get a crowd on the street, sometimes within 24 hours time. If you need speakers to present at a council meeting, we can provide talented and well-spoken individuals to advocate for the cause. We also have a dedicated team of phone-banking staff who can call Congressional Offices and convince government officials to support your cause and help you overcome opposition. If you need lots of letters and emails written from constituents, we have a network of tens of thousands of individuals across the country who can send well-written constituent letters to their representatives.
We provide a cost-effective way to lobby government to pass or defeat legislation, push for approval of projects, and influence government in a grassroots manner. We are the ultimate guerilla lobbying and government relations firm.
“We create out-of-the-box campaigns, audiences and events to make an impact for our clients.
“Are you looking to create a buzz anywhere in the United States? At Crowds on Demand, we provide our clients with impactful advocacy campaigns and events. We are best known for organizing passionate demonstrations, rallies, flash-mobs, corporate PR events, and light-hearted events such as paparazzi, brand ambassadors, and PR stunts.”
Go read those last five paragraphs again, just so it sinks in. By the way, “passionate demonstrations” is stand in phrase for the sort of BLM type riots that burned down Minneapolis neighborhoods.
Done? Great. Now just for fun, imagine you’re as close to being an honest politician as exists in this fallen world. As a result, you understand that you are a public representative, a public servant. You are supposed to do what your constituents want you to do. That’s the theory, right?
But how the hell can you tell what they want? Well you have staffers that go through the tens of thousands of messages, letters, and emails that you get a week, and compile a list: These are the top issues of your constituents, and this is how they want you to vote:
Tearing down the Whatthefuck River dam, to save the super-special one-of-a-kind salmon species in that river (that looks, and is genetically identical to the salmon species that runs up the river four miles away from the Whatthefuck) is trending huge, with 87% of the messages we get being for “save the fish!” Then there’s these other issues, A, B, C, that are also being mentioned, and the folks back home are against A, for B, and think C is a waste of their money.
Well, as an honest politician, (Yeah, I had to shake my head just writing that.) You want to do what the folks want, right? But then some colleague from the state of New York, mentions that he was just bombarded with letters that turn out to be from “Crowds on Demand.”
“What the fuck is that?” you ask.
So he lays it out for you, shows you the web site, shows you the case studies they’re so proud of, where they got politicians to do what someone paid them to get politicians to do, and the public all thought that “Well, it isn’t what I wanted, but damn, look at the numbers, I guess I’m in the minority here.”
So now what do you do? Seriously, what the hell can even an honest politician, if such still exists, do when he can’t know if the letters, the protests, the activism anywhere in the world is real, or something Soros or some other mutt paid for?
You’re back to voting from your gut, because you can’t trust anything. This is a breakdown of the system. I believe in free speech, I fought for it for decades, not just by writing angry letters and being a ‘social warrior’ but in a uniform, putting my actual life on the line.
That said, I also believe in honesty, and some sort of law that requires paid actors and paid protestors (whether on a phone bank, writing a letter, or throwing rocks) to identify themselves as PAID EMPLOYEES of a PR firm is, it seems, long overdue!
On the international front, first, I just have to mention that the leader of Iran has rejected a revised nuclear deal and instead has said that they will continue to enrich uranium as is their right!
I would anticipate a higher-than-normal level of solar radiation in Theran in the near future if this continues, and it will probably have a Star of David on the side of the delivery vehicle.
As I write this, it’s the 36th anniversary of the massacre of innocent civilian protesters at Tiananmen Square. To this day the “people’s government” refuses to admit that it happened, refuses to give a list or even a number on the casualties, and in fact bans the discussion of the event, under penalty of law.
There are a large number of people that shout “It may have been a bad thing, but in the interest of peace and prosperity, we should ‘let bygones be bygones.’” I do not share that view.
Until the PRC government acknowledges those events, and the other mass murders by the government of Communist China, they remain unable to get beyond their legacy as murderous totalitarian thugs, less trustworthy than a diamondback rattler. (at least the reptile snake gives you a warning and won’t mess with you unless you mess with it. The same can not be said of the PRC snakes.)
Continuing the news on the PRC, we have two PRC citizens, one of which was a card-carrying member of the CCP, who were caught smuggling Fusarium graminearum, a fungal pathogen that causes a “Fusarium head blight” in grain crops, into the US. This disease causes vomiting, liver damage and reproductive damage to anything that eats it. It’s fast spreading, and persistent, which means the land itself is infected, and you can’t grow grain on it safely for a couple years. Last time it hit in the US, it wiped out 9.9 million acres of wheat and barley and cost a total of nearly a billion dollars.
When caught, they claimed that they were trying to do research on it, that they had started in the PRC, but wanted to move the research to the University of Michigan, to be together (She’s a student at U of M, he’s a researcher working for the PRC government, they claim they’re boyfriend/girlfriend.) When asked about it, they lied, got caught in the lie, came up with a new lie, got caught in the lie…
If this feels to you like a repeat of COVID, only possibly worse, well… that’s because you are paying attention. If actual research were the goal, we have stocks of this damn stuff here, that we are researching on to try and find a cure/method of control.
The eventual story they told that, “Well we wanted to research this together, and she couldn’t leave for fear of not being able to get back in, and bringing in a sample of the stuff we were working on legally was too hard, and…” Just doesn’t wash with me.
The government is charging them with conspiracy, smuggling, false statements, and visa fraud. What they should be charging them with is attempted terrorism, and espionage, but with the courts we have today, that would be impossible to prove, I fear. So I’ll take putting them in jail for what we can prove, then sending them back to the PRC, where they will no doubt get promotions, and be put somewhere where they never have to go back into the field.
What should make you nervous is that it’s estimated that you only catch forty to sixty percent of the crimes committed. How many terrorist/sabotage cells from the PRC are already in place here in the US, waiting to get their orders? What sort of pathogens, and other sabotage will be released in the first hours of the PRC invasion of Taiwan, to keep us too busy to fight the assault?
Can’t happen? Oh, sweet summer child, it’s happened before, many times.
In this vein, Sal has a great piece on the PRC and Micronesia at ready-to-defend-guamfrom-the-south and you should go read it. Bearing always in mind that the Federated Stated of Micronesia are a self-governing nation without a military who has left the United States fully responsible for their defense, while making all sorts of military adjacent deals with the PRC.
With allies like this, we need to put the National Body Armor Trauma Plate in the back. “Et Tu Brute?”
In the war on Ukraine by Russia, if you somehow missed it, David managed to take out over a third of Goliath’s heavy bomber fleet in a couple hours, along with attacks on the Kola Peninsula Sub base, and blow up (again) the only bridge between Russia and the Crimean.
Now it’s been called by a lot of idiots “Russia’s Pearl Harbor.” I want to slap those idiots into the middle of next week. That’s like comparing Mohamed Ali’s finishing punch against Frasier, to some gangbanger sucker punching a dude on the street as he walks by and then curb stomping him. Russia and Ukraine have been at war for three years. Attacks against each other should not come as a surprise.
That said, there’s a military doctrine that “Surprise, is something that happens inside the mind of the enemy.” Oh, Boris, you never saw that coming??? Poor sad you.
To those idiots that say “well, you shouldn’t cheer about this, it prolongs the war” and “Well this is a bad thing, because now someone might do such a thing to US, OMG why did we let Ukraine use this new technology?!” I reply:
Okay putz, first I will cheer for anything that weakens the Bear.
If we go to war with the PRC, as is almost guaranteed, Russia WILL side with the PRC. Even if Ukraine loses, which is still more likely than not, every soldier they kill, every piece of gear they destroy, every chunk of infrastructure that they render unusable, is one that WE won’t have to face. Weaken the Bear enough, and Putin’s own people will give him Excedrin headache number 9X18 Makarov. A fine and fitting end.
In the aftermath of that, Russia at least, will stay out of any wars for a while, while they deal with internal issues. It’s even possible that the PRC will be more interested in moving north on the Russian Far East, due to it being easier pickings; or even better, that the folks not in power in the PRC would look north, and think, “Hey, that’s a halfway decent idea, maybe we should give some folks a headache too?”
Second, when it’s time to railroad, people will railroad, it’s just a question of who gets to it first.
In the First World War, the Allies came up with this new, supersecret toy that was going to break the stagnation of the western front wide open! So secret that they developed a code name and cover story for what they were making. “It’s not a weapon, it’s a ‘water tank.’”
Except when that cool new, war changing “tank” (that’s one in the foreground on the left) hit the field, low and behold that thing in the background on the right was pulling up and waiting for it.
Parallel evolution is a thing. Science fiction authors, and their close cousins the modern thriller author (modern thriller=within the next ten years, and very little ‘new’ tech needed for the story to work. S/F=Ten years or more from now, and at least one piece of radically new tech introduced) have been talking about something like this for a decade. It was frankly, a fairly obvious ploy.
We should be GREATFUL that the Ukes used this tactic, as it might wake up those stupid fuckers in Congress that such a thing is possible. Maybe, just maybe, this will keep us from being the idiots who got surprised by a new tech for once.
On the other hand, we’ve been warned of a new tech before. look up General Mitchell’s “Project B” which was a blunt and pointed warning of Pearl Harbor. See also Clancy’s Debt of Honor, published in 1994. “Oh gee, what a ridiculous concept, imagine someone thinking that they could take an airliner and crash it into a building as an attack!” and I could go on, but I think my point is made.
QOTD: today we have a set of “questions and responses” from an interview of Elon Musk by Don Lemon.
Don Lemon: "You often make fun of liberals and Democrats online. Don't you think that's divisive, maybe hate speech?"
Elon Musk: "I don't roast liberals; I roast idiots. It's not my fault they overlap so often."
Don Lemon: "You have offended a lot of people by saying diversity hires ruin companies. Please explain yourself."
Elon Musk: "Imagine assembling a rocket team based on skin color rather than skill. That's not diversity. That's idiocy."
Thanks to the Patriot Post, from whom I get most of these QOTDs
Yours in Service,
William Lehman