The Kraken Flipped; Runaway E.V.s; & Greta Gets Old
In his Editor’s Column, Michael Walsh wrote about the Sydney Powell plea deal and its significance for the Trump campaign and the upcoming election.
The Lights Go Out in Georgia
Last week brought more bad news for the Donald Trump campaign: several of his associates in the Georgia fiasco of 2020-21 -- including, ominously, Sydney "Kraken" Powell -- pleaded guilty to lesser charges in that state's holy war against the former president. Georgia is the place, you may recall, where even after the disputed/fortified/stolen presidential election was effectively over, the GOP still had a chance to hang onto the Senate but managed to blow both seats to Democrats (Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock) who otherwise would never have had a chance. The other guilty pleas were made by attorney Kenneth Chesebro and a bail bondsman, Scott Hall.
As part of the two lawyers' plea deals, they've both agreed to testify against the many other defendants in the case including, potentially, Rudy Giuliani and even Trump himself. Naturally, this was immediately spun by members of the Trump campaign as a win:
Former President Donald Trump will benefit from the plea deal Sidney Powell accepted from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, according to Georgia lawyer Steve Sadow, who said Powell’s requirement to truthfully testify in upcoming trials related to the 2020 election in Georgia will help Trump. Sadow said in a statement to The Messenger that Powell’s testimony, which is required as part of her plea deal, “will be favorable” to his defense strategy, “assuming truthful testimony in the Fulton County case.”
Cue now the chorus of voices shouting about the Steal, despite the fact that a) at the time no courts took any of the cases and b) now that the matter is being adjudicated, the Trump team is losing and rolling over on its own. Ms. Powell, one of the former president's staunchest defenders whose personal credibility considerably enhanced public trust in the rightness of Trump's case, did what was best for herself in taking the plea deal; Powell is not stupid, and wisely chose not to sacrifice herself for someone who would toss her aside without a second thought — and who in fact has already distanced himself from her.
In any case, I have discussed the arguments regarding the Steal in two pieces here at the Pipeline; The System IS the Steal, and The Sting, and addressed many of the issues as they were happening in my columns for the Epoch Times, which were favorable to Trump.
Trump has attempted to bolster his support by identifying himself with the fate of the nation, directing most of his animus at his most potent challenger, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, largely for his effrontery in running against Trump for the nomination. Trump is demanding "loyalty" in a field in which loyalty is situational at best, and usually goes by the name of back-scratching. But the Republic is in too desperate a shape for considerations of "loyalty" when "victory" is the only thing that matters. Unbeholden to anyone else for his surprise victory in 2016, no one else is beholden to him now that he has squandered it in defeat. The only loyalty any candidate owes is to the country he seeks to lead, and Donald Trump is not the nation.
And if you haven’t yet, you’ll also want to read this Michael Walsh article from last week:
The Gods of the Copybook Headings Strike Back
Peter Smith wrote about a particular gullible skeptic.
Destroying Civilization to 'Save the Planet'
Recently saw Dennis Prager interviewing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy expressed skepticism about the official line on his uncle’s assassination, about vaccines, about the involvement of U.S. government agencies in the research which likely led to Covid, and about the war in Ukraine. Why, Prager asked, if you are skeptical about the official line on all of these topics, do you unquestioningly accept the official line on climate change? It was instructive. First, irrelevantly, Kennedy cited the (non-CO2) polluting effects, as he saw them, of coal and oil. He went on, feebly, to cite to his own personal observations of the weather. Kennedy, it seems, is a quintessential skeptic of authority, except on “climate change.” He is not alone.
Fealty to authority on the climate-change scam is a mark of our age. Keep in mind, in the case of "climate change," those in authority — governments, in league with institutional science, corporatists, globalists, communists and carpetbaggers — want nothing less than to destroy the energy systems that underpin progress and prosperity; and, if that’s not enough, to upend productive farming practices. You can’t do all of that without scaring the serfs and forging fealty. Thus the narrative is adorned with doom-laden adjectives like "catastrophic" and "existential," and with dire prognoses of assorted morbidities and disasters such as heat exhaustion, tropical diseases, inundations, droughts, hurricanes, wild fires, and millions of unkempt refugees pouring down your streets and into your spare bedrooms. Slip in “global boiling” for good measure.
Expect a stream of ever more extreme descriptors of the wastelands ahead lest we mend our ways. However, the ten-years-to-midnight shtick is unlikely to be used again. People live too long and see through it. Setting timeframes can be dangerous and the propagandists at the forefront of climate catastrophizing probably know that by now. People get nonchalant about being repeatedly told that awful things are about to happen when they don’t. God forbid, political movements might arise to do the unthinkable and defenestrate net-zero.
Is there a limit to the hype? There must be, I suppose. However, by that time we might have passed the point of no return. Best to appreciate that “climate change” has no well-defined end point. Wars end. Pandemics end – even if leftists are reluctant to let Covid go. "Anthropogenic global warming" goes back as far as the middle to late 1970s.
Lisa Schiffren commented on some recent disasters from the world of Electric Vehicles.
E.V.s Are Out of Control
For most of us, the most important attribute in a car we're thinking of purchasing is reliability. And that's a quality which is in short supply in the realm of Electric Vehicles. A few recent stories will help illustrate this point.
First up is the E.V. in Scotland that decided to go rogue. In a report titled “I Was Kidnapped by My Runaway Electric Car,” driver Brian Morrison of Glasgow described an incident which occurred one Sunday evening as he was driving down the A803 highway, heading toward Kirkintilloch. All of a sudden, the car's brakes ceased responding. "I realized something was wrong when I was coming up to a roundabout and went to slow down but it didn't do it," he said. "Then I heard a loud grinding noise that sounded like brake pads, but because it was such a new car I knew it couldn't be a problem with them.”
He managed to get through the roundabout, and then faced a long stretch of straight roadway. He assumed that the car would slow down and stop if he kept his foot off of the accelerator. But that did not happen. Fearing for his life, Mr. Morrison considered jumping out of the car, but he has mobility issues, and he worried that even at 30 mph -- the speed the E.V. was stuck on -- he would be seriously injured.
Instead he called emergency services, which sent the police to help. They also put engineers on the phone, who were surprised to learn that it wasn't even a self-driving car. They had no idea what to do. Once the police cars arrived, one pulled in front of the car, another behind, with a third next to him. He tossed his keys into the car alongside, but the E.V. didn't stop.
Eventually the police decided to attempt a controlled crash into the back of one of their vehicles. That did the trick, though they kept the cop car in place, for fear that the E.V. would start up again. When the investigator arrived, several hours later, “he plugged in the car to do a diagnostic check, and there was pages of faults,” Morrison said. This may be the first time this has happened with an electric car in Scotland. But it’s hard to imagine it will be the last.
Brandon Weichert commented on the fragility of America’s power grid.
America's Energy Grid Under Attack
Earlier this year, the United States Department of Energy released a report detailing the various threats to America's energy grid. In that report, the DOE assessed that there were 163 reported security violations of the country's energy grid in 2022. Included in that report was breakdown consisting of vandalism, physical attacks, or other "suspicious activities." That was the highest amount of threats to America's energy grid since 2020, when the incidents shot up to 94. That's about a 73 percent increase in serious threats to America's energy grid in two years.
Think of the country's power grid as its central nervous system upon which signals --i n this case, energy -- travel instantaneously. Like your body's nervous system, the national power grid has clusters of synapses, called substations, which transmit and amplify the energy coming from the power plant and distributing that power to the various end points along the grid. Those substations keep every aspect of America electrified. Attack those substations and you could throw large chunks of our country into darkness.
In 2022, numerous attacks occurred at several power substations. On Thanksgiving Day in 2022, an Oregon substation was vandalized. A couple of weeks later, in early December, two North Carolina substations were damaged by intentional gunfire. The result was that 45,000 North Carolinians were left without power for days in the middle of winter. A similar attack occurred in Washington State on Christmas Day of 2022. Thousands of Washingtonians were left without power.
There are multiple other examples that indicate something serious is going on. Scores of malign actors, whether they be terrorists, criminals, or anarchists, have all identified America's power grid as a key source of weakness. Cripple some substations and they could not only throw tens of thousands of Americans into darkness, but the attackers could also cause billions of dollars in damage.
If the attacks on substations were severe enough, the loss of power could last days, even weeks, meaning that many vulnerable Americans could die in the dark. What's more, as we see whenever our creature comforts go away for a protracted time, parts of the country descends into lawlessness and chaos. Cut the power for a prolonged amount of time and you've turned America into an unstable, primitive nation. It really doesn't take long for a society to descend into a Hobbesian nightmare world of all against all.
And Tom Finnerty blogged about Greta Thunberg jumping the shark.
The Greta Pivot
That’s all for this week, but keep a look out for our upcoming pieces at The Pipeline!