Opinion
By Jeff Childers
12-05-22
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday, the first day of the work week, a day rife with new possibilities. It’s also the first full week of December as we count down till Christmas! Today’s roundup includes: responses to comments on Balenciaga and more fallout; EcoHealth whistleblower says covid was a bioweapon; hospitals gobbled up covid cash with no measurable result; Musk and the Daily mail slam corporate media’s silence; Katie Hobbs was helping censor social media users; advertisers return to Twitter; Twitter sets records removing child abuse material; Iran disbands its morality police; and hardly anyone is buying Biden’s bivalent boosters.
🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞
🪖 C&C will be out on Wednesday, since I’ll be in Mar-a-Lago tomorrow evening for a child trafficking event and will have to travel early to get right back. I’ll make it up to you!
🗞*WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞
🔥 Corporate media wants the Balengciaga story to go away, but we’re not done with it yet; not even close. We’ll begin with a clarification. Last week I reported on Balenciaga’s self-inflicted culture-war injuries, specifically the intentional misspelling of their firm’s name, by adding an extra ‘a’, which deliberately invoked demonic themes in one of their campaign ads. I also noted with great interest that, Google translated the firm’s name — once the extra ‘a’ was added — into nothing less than a demonic invocation.
Alert C&C commenters sprang into action, pointing out two facts. First, Google’s translation is wrong — that’s not actually what it means in Latin — and second, the firm’s actual name (absent the extra ‘a’) traces back to a famous 17th century Spaniard, Crístobal Balenciaga, and so it wasn’t recently minted. A few commenters were concerned that I might inadvertently mislead folks into believing an easily-disproven psyop — which is always a valid concern.
Having carefully considered those concerns, the post stands. I accurately reported that the dark designer was the source of the spin on its own name — not me — and I accurately reported how Google translated the misspelled name from Latin (albeit in error).
One commenter linked to a helpful article explaining how Google’s translation service can be manipulated by users, which makes things even more intriguing; did Balenciaga’s marketing team rig Google’s translate before putting the misspelled name in the shot? If so, why would they do that?
The evidence suggests Balenciaga could have been trying to get “the Christians” all riled up about their demonic imagery, to create buzz and a controversy over the brand. Or they could actually have been pushing demonology along with their pedophilia. Who knows? Either way it’s still gross symbolism that shouldn’t be anywhere near kids, or even most adults, to be honest.
Meanwhile, seen in Dallas:
And this entertaining bit:
Applying to Balenciaga in Bondage
1:06 AM ∙ Dec 4, 202259,693Likes6,721Retweets
Gays against Groomers, recently re-instated to Twitter, has been reviewing other Balenciaga ads, and you’ll never guess what they’ve been finding.
Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs
5:31 PM ∙ Nov 23, 202243,229Likes12,334Retweets
The theme of child sexual abuse apparently running through many Balenciaga advertisements raises a serious question over whether the current crop of ads were in fact only a stunt that misfired, or were actually part of a darker agenda.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
🔥 The New York Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Scientist Who Worked at Wuhan Lab Says COVID Was Man-Made Virus.” In a new book titled “The Truth About Wuhan,” whistleblower Andrew Huff describes his work for EcoHealth Alliance, the shady, money-laundering, grant-getting “non-profit” that was up to its evil neck in coronavirus research.
“EcoHealth Alliance developed SARS-CoV-2 and was responsible for the development of the agent SARS-CoV-2 during my employment at the organization,” Huff explained in his book. He believes the U.S. used the project to assess the bioweapon capabilities of foreign labs – including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Huff, an Army veteran, worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016. He said the non-profit helped the Wuhan lab assemble the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species.” He explained, “I was terrified by what I saw. We were just handing them bioweapon technology.”
The former Ecohealth vice-president called the Wuhan disaster one of the greatest cover-ups in history – and the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11.” He says that, after quitting EcoHealth over ethical concerns in 2016, he was approached and offered a job by DARPA in late 2019 — a job that would have tied him up in restrictions over classified information so that he couldn’t talk about his experience with coronavirus.
He thinks that was an intentional effort to keep him quiet. He’s also currently suing EcoHealth in New York.
I can’t imagine anyone disbelieving Dr. Huff, and nobody believes the NIH. Even the lawmakers who accept the NIH’s lame explanations are just pretending to believe them. There’s a huge disconnect between the public and government actors. The truth is dripping out. Drip, drip, drip.
🔥 The Wall Street Journal ran a sadly predictable story yesterday headlined, “Billions in Covid Aid Went to Hospitals That Didn’t Need It.” It begins saying “the U.S. government gave hospitals tens of billions of dollars to help them cope with the strains of the pandemic. Many of the hospitals didn’t need it.”
They took the money anyway. Imagine that.
According to the Journal, until late in the pandemic, the feds used a hospital’s gross revenue to determine how much aid each hospital got; not covid caseload, community transmission levels, financial need or distress, staffing challenges, beds, patient volume or anything else that would have made sense. In other words, the biggest hospitals got the most money, period.
Those same hospitals then toed the line with jab mandates and everything else the government wanted.
Jim Parker, a senior advisor at HHS, explained “We had to accept very early on that our first foray into distributing funds was going to be imperfect.” Oh well. You just have to accept it!
That “first foray” cost $50 BILLION DOLLARS. Thanks, taxpayers.
Some of the large hospitals receiving covid funds dumped the money into long-term investment funds. Others spent the money on new facilities and expanded campuses. Meanwhile, smaller hospitals that got less covid aid had to lay off nurses, cut expenses, and reported losses, including in many facilities serving areas of the country with the highest covid death rates.
Shockingly, covid funding was NOT associated with patient success rates. In other words, it doesn’t seem to have mattered how much money a hospital got, patient death rates were all over the map.
This awesome plan is what the so-called “experts” came up with. It didn’t make any identifiable difference in patient outcomes. But spending all that money DID clearly help put the country into an inflationary tailspin.
Thanks, experts!
🔥 The Missouri v. Biden case is the one about government attacks on free speech via social media controls. Filings in the lawsuit are turning up some interesting nuggets, like this obnoxious email exchange showing Arizona’s Katie Hobbs telling Twitter what posts to cancel:
This is an example of the direct line that Ms. Hobbs’ office had into Twitter. So, politically-connected Democrats didn’t just report a tweet for violation of the terms of service by clicking the button, like all us deplorables have do. Instead, these connected politicians had a special customer service contact at twitter, to “handle” their requests.
Below is what a “report” of violation of the terms of service looked like.
In other words, the tweets were critical of the government.
I dare you to try getting an email response from Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. Good luck. That kind of access is only available to liberal politicians, apparently. Well, not anymore at Twitter, since all those “content moderators” have been laid off. But presumably this is still standard operating procedure at the other social media giants.
Gross. Gross and unconstitutional.
🔥 Haha, UK media sees corporate media’s response to the Twitter Files story the same way I do. Over the weekend, the Daily Mail ran a story headlined, “Elon Musk Slams NY Times for Ignoring His Exposé of How Twitter Censored Hunter Biden Laptop – as Woke Outlets Including Washington Post, CBS News and ABC All Avoid the Story Too.”
Haha, ‘woke outlets.’ In a tweet about corporate media’s embargo of the Twitter Files story, Musk described the New York Times as an “unregistered lobbying firm for far-left politicians.” Awesome. Musk was responding to a post from conservative radio host Clay Travis, who said, “There is not one single article about @elonmusk or the @twitter email release last night on @nytimes app this morning.”
The Daily Mail pointed out that corporate media outlets which HAVE covered it have just downplayed the story. For example, CNN said the leaked emails only “corroborated what was already known about the incident.” Nothing to see here! And the Daily Beast headlined its story, ‘’Deeply Underwhelmed’: Right-Wingers on Musk’s Overhyped ‘Twitter Files’.”
So weird that the papers are trying to protect old Twitter and the government. Or, are they maybe protecting the democrats?
🔥 Meanwhile, Musk tweeted this weekend that both Apple and Amazon have agreed to restart advertising on Twitter, after both companies had joined a noisy public blacklist opposing Musks’ restoration of banned Twitter accounts. So that’s good.
Then, the Daily Wire ran a hopeful story yesterday about Twitter headlined, “Zero Tolerance’: Suspension Rate Nearly Doubles For Twitter Accounts Exploiting Child Sex Abuse Material.” According to an independent researcher, Twitter, which had been widely criticized for years for ignoring child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), is now — under Musk’s management — removing offensive material at a “faster, more efficient, and more aggressive” speed, having at least doubled the daily suspension rate of accounts promoting CSAM.
Eliza Bleu, a survivor advocate against human trafficking, who has long complained about Twitter’s inaction over CSAM, told The Daily Wire she was “floored” after seeing the latest report of how many profiles have been recently removed. “I don’t think I thought any of this stuff was even possible at the scale that they’re removing it now,” Bleu said. “I feel like I’m witnessing a miracle.”
As an example, the recently-issued report compared 44,000 DAILY removals of CSAM-involved user profiles under Twitter’s new management to only about 57,000 such removals in a MONTH under the company’s old management.
During a live stream this weekend, Musk attributed the recent success to Twitter USERS. “I think we’ve actually had like a really good case of crowdsourcing of having people on Twitter actually help solve the child exploitation stuff,” Musk said Saturday. “It is true — yes — Twitter has done more to stop child exploitation in the last month than probably the last ten years. It kind of blows my mind, frankly, and we’re gonna keep doing it. It’s always gonna be number one. I mean, kids can’t defend themselves —so, we must.”
One wonders, doesn’t one, why Twitter’s old management — with its giant hive of thousands of additional “content moderators” — had so much trouble getting rid of CSAM, compared to the newly-reorganized, much leaner company. I mean, old Twitter used to LOVE banning accounts, if you measure affection for the practice by the number of bodies assigned to that job.
Why then was CSAM so hard for them?
You know the reason. Anyway, more progress!
🚀 The Wall Street Journal ran another hopeful article yesterday headlined, “Iran Disbands Morality Police, Considers Changing Hijab Laws, Official Says.” The Iranian government’s move is widely seen as a response to nationwide protests, mostly by Iranian women, to the country’s head covering (“hijab”) mandate.
Biden and his State Department have been actively encouraging the protests, and sanctioning Iran for cracking down on demonstrators — pretty much the opposite approach they took with the Canadian trucker protests. It’s totally cynical of you to think all this support is just because of the proxy war, because Iran is supplying Russia with attack drones, so just stop it.
💉 The Journal ran an optimistic op-ed yesterday headlined, “Hardly Anyone Is Buying Biden’s Bivalent Boosters.” Gosh! Check out this sub-headline: “The administration has oversold vaccines for two years, and Covid is less lethal now anyway.”
Ouch!
The Journal’s op-ed — penned by its editorial board, not a guest contributor — pointed out the uncomfortable fact that “many Americans who rolled up their sleeves for the original two-doses and even third ones were led to believe the vaccines would prevent them from getting sick.” But, as the Journal noted, “Many nevertheless fell ill.”
No refunds.
The editors even called out HHS for a recent World Cup ad pushing people to take the booster — so they wouldn’t “miss the game.” But the Journal noted that some people are “knocked out for days with flulike symptoms” after getting the jabs anyway.
First, the op-ed itself is great news; it’s significant that a major corporate media outlet is explicitly panning the jabs. The Journal’s article all but mocked the government’s efficacy claims. At another point, it even questioned the basic logic — using Fauci’s own words:
“The real danger is in the people who have not been vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci said at a Nov. 22 press briefing. “If we’re going to see a problem this winter, it’s going to be among those people.”
If that’s true, who needs another booster?
Indeed.
But the article made another great point that I haven’t seen in corporate media before. It acknowledged that most people who took the jabs were never worried about dying from the virus in the first place. They took the jabs to be “part of the solution” and to avoid transmitting the disease to others, like grandma. But since the jabs don’t prevent transmission, the their MAIN REASON for jabbing has been deleted.
It went further. The article even reported that CDC data showed boosted Americans were testing positive at HIGHER rates than folks who only got two doses. But, the Journal reported, “These data were recently removed from the website when case data were added for the bivalent booster.”
Scrubbed, in other words.
The editors stopped short of explicitly accusing the CDC of manipulating data to try to make the new booster look good, but the implication was clear: boosters might be harmful.
The op-ed ended with this totally rational advice:
The best way to protect yourself from getting sick with Covid or any other respiratory illness is by getting enough sleep, nutrition and exercise.
The embargo is over. It won’t happen immediately. Media can’t just turn on a dime. They have to swing around to it, otherwise they’d be exposed as government stool pigeons, which of course is exactly what they have been.
Have a marvelous Monday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more.
C&C is moving the needle and changing minds. If you can, I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-
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The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
