Opinion
By Jeff Childers
03-03-23
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday, March 8th. Your roundup includes: Lots of unhappy people respond to Tucker’s January 6th video segment; the FTC goes after Twitter; Australia, Great Britain, and New Zealand all saw similar high levels of excess death in 2022; Mayor Adams joins calls for face nudity; public trust in public health agencies plummets for some reason; New York City is having trouble keeping employees for some baffling reason; the Times runs an exclusive story identifying the Nordstream Pipeline bomber; and DeSantis hilariously asks for permission to boat Novak Djokovic into Florida.
🗞*WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞
🔥 Lots of unhappy media personalities, democrats, and democrat-aligned Republicans (including Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney) complained bitterly to outraged reporters yesterday about Tucker Carlson’s Monday night segments featuring the January 6th Capitol video.
While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cautiously condemned Fox News for publishing a story “at odds with Capitol Police Chief’s version of events,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended his decision to release the January 6th tapes, insisting he has no control over how people like Tucker Carlson interpret events. McCarthy told barking reporters that his only goal is to promote transparency. It got more interesting when McCarthy hit back at CNN and at the January 6th Committee for their own releases of potentially-harmful security video and information, arguing that complaints directed at him about security were hypocritical.
Tucker’s update last night included this next fascinating clip about Capitol police officer Tarik Johnson, who was at the heart of the department’s response to the protest, and who begged for help and instructions from the well of the Senate. But nobody responded, so he began evacuating Senators himself.
The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox
Later, democrat Johnson — a 22-year veteran Capitol police officer — put on a red MAGA hat to make his job of helping manage the crowd easier. A photo of him wearing the hat got Johnson suspended without pay until he gave up and resigned. Johnson was never interviewed by the January 6th Committee, and he’s now working as a furniture mover, since he can’t get any law enforcement work.
You don’t want to be a MAGA-hat-wearing democrat in Washington D.C. these days.
🔥 The Empire Struck Back this week. The Wall Street Journal ran a predicable story yesterday headlined, “FTC Twitter Investigation Sought Elon Musk’s Internal Communications, Journalist Names.”
Operating under a pre-Musk 2022 “consent decree,” which is a court-approved agreement that regulatory agencies often ‘negotiate’ with companies to settle government lawsuits, the FTC demanded all of Elon Musk’s internal communications at Twitter, any written reference to Elon (by anybody), and all information on any journalists cooperating with Twitter (i.e., the Twitter files). They also sought Elon’s formal deposition.
I would be very interested to know who it was at Twitter that agreed to the FTC consent decree and gave the government all that power over the company, what with the Twitter buyout imminently pending.
Regardless, nobody except corporate media reporters are confused that this is anything but a retaliatory witch hunt in response to Twitter’s having embarrassed the government by disclosing its secretive and profound control over social media. Reporters credulously lapped up the FTC’s laughable excuses that they are merely engaged in “routine follow up” on the consent decree, to protect Twitter users’ privacy.
They’re doing all this for us, the Twitter users, for OUR benefit. Just like they always have.
In one section of its requests, the FTC asked Twitter to describe the exact “nature of access granted each” journalist, and explain how allowing that access “is consistent with your privacy and information security obligations under the Order.” In another section, the FTC asked about the exact number of layoffs and resignations as Musk reduced the company’s head count from 8,000 to 2,000 — without any noticeable changes in the service.
Like many others, my guess is the FTC is a lot less concerned about protecting us, and a lot more concerned about the “privacy” of the government employees who were bossing Twitter around.
💉 The UK Sun ran a baffling story yesterday headlined, “DEATH RIDDLE: Mystery as Australians Dying at Levels Not Seen in 80 Years – And UK Might Be Seeing Same Phenomenon.”
Australia’s 2022 death figures clocked in at over 174,000 deaths, which was 12% over already high predictions. According to the Sun’s sources, these 2022 figures — a year after vaccines hit the scenes — represent one of the highest excess death levels Down Under in 80 years.
Only about 10K of those were recorded as covid deaths. Guess where the majority of deaths clustered: mostly heart disease and cancer.
It’s a mystery! A mystery wrapped in a Fauci-shaped riddle and buried under a pharmaceutical enigma. They’ll probably never figure it out. It’s just TOO HARD. They used all their brainpower figuring out covid and how to respond to it, which never gave them a single doubt. Everything was totally clear until about ten minutes ago.
The single expert that the Sun consulted for the story speculated wildly about many ways that the excess deaths could possibly be linked to covid infections, given that so many people have now been infected. Undiscussed was any other common experience that the dying may have had, any other shared variable. I don’t know, maybe some kind of medical treatment or something. Or, and I really think this could be it: fresh air.
And as the article noted, preliminary data in the UK appears very similar to what the Australians are seeing.
💉 Two weeks ago, the New Zealand Herald ran an eerily similar story headlined, “New Zealand Records Biggest Increase In Registered Deaths In 100 Years.”
In 2022, New Zealand’s death figures broke a hundred-year record. The last time there was this much excess death was in 1918, during the Spanish Flu. 2022’s excess mortality was about 11% higher than 2021 — remarkably close to Australia’s figure.
Curiously, during the first two years of the pandemic, New Zealand did not record any excess mortality. The country’s significant mortality first started in 2022 — after the jab rollout — although an expert cited for the article speculated that the appearance of the Omicron variant — which was LESS lethal everywhere else — might have somehow been more deadly in New Zealand.
Maybe. Or maybe something ELSE happened in 2022 that was common to dying Kiwis and also to dying Australians. Maybe they should look for something like that.
I’m referring to commotio cordis, of course.
🔬 The journal ‘Health Affairs’ published an unsurprising study this week titled, “Trust In US Federal, State, And Local Public Health Agencies During COVID-19: Responses And Policy Implications.”
The Harvard-led researchers conducted what they call a “first of its kind” survey, and the bottom line was trust in federal, state and local public health agencies is not good. Their conclusion, of course, was that public health agencies need even MORE power, to overcome low trust levels, which the researchers blamed on a generalized lack of trust in government.
Here’s the elucidating chart summarizing the reasons cited by people who said they had “low-trust” in the CDC:
Among a smaller number of folks who said they had “high” trust in the CDC, the top two reasons were that they believed the CDC follows scientifically valid research (94%) and have the scientific expertise (92%). In other words, these people “deferred to the experts.”
I’m guessing there would also have been a clear split if they’d asked respondents about their political affiliations. Since the survey was originally taken in February 2022, I’m also wondering if the numbers have changed any, especially since many democrats are now also unhappy with the CDC for opening schools, rolling back covid restrictions, and dropping mask mandates.
😷 Bwahahahaha! The New York Times ran a hilarious article yesterday headlined, “Mayor Adams to New York City Shoppers: Drop That Mask.”
Imagine the shock and dismay communally experienced by thousands of élite New York Times readers, whose print editions slipped from their nerveless fingers as the gobsmacked mask-ophiles absorbed the horrifying import of those ten simple words.
If readers’ abused eyeballs ever reached the sub-headline, the Times explained further: “To prevent robberies, Mayor Eric Adams is telling shopkeepers to bar customers who refuse to lower their masks when they first enter stores.”
The NYT quoted the mayor, who isn’t asking for ongoing face-nudity, just a brief face flash when ENTERING a store:
“We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops, do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask,” the mayor said in a radio interview on 1010 WINS on Monday. “And then once they’re inside, they can continue to wear it if they so desire to do so.”
The mayor ran on a “tough on crime” platform, and his suggestions were provoked by news of a 67-year-old Manhattan deli employee, who was shot and killed on Friday night by an unidentified robber in a dark face mask and a white, full-body Tyvek suit.
Mayor Adams’ comments prove he never truly understood face masking, otherwise he’d be much more sensitive to all the people who are convinced they’ll be fatally infected if they drop their guard for even a second. “I was so careful! All I can think of is the time I had to pull my mask down to go into Chico’s,” they’ll say, as they gasp their last breaths like dying salmon sliding down a grizzly’s throat.
🔥 In related New York news, on Monday the NYT ran a “great moments in gaslighting” story headlined, “New York’s Difficulty in Filling Job Vacancies Has Hurt City Services.”
Here are the reasons the Times cited to explain why New York City is struggling to fill lots of open positions. See if you can figure out what might be missing:
The reasons are varied: a tight labor market, the city’s inflexible stance on allowing its employees to work remotely, and a general bureaucratic slowness in allowing city agencies to quickly replace departures.
But I quickly found some clues for the New York Times that might help fill in the missing pieces:
I wonder what it might be!
The words “vaccine” and “mandate” appear nowhere in the Times’ article. Haha, it’s like they don’t realize that every single person reading the headline knows exactly what happened.
You could run western Ukraine for a week on the gaslighting just in this article alone.
🔥 The New York Times ran an unrelated story yesterday finally exposing the Nordsteam bombing culprit, sort of, headlined “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say.”
A shocking revelation. Can you believe that? A pro-Ukrainian group? (Wait — are WE pro-Ukrainian?)
The article cites “new intelligence” received by our crack team of experienced, masterful U.S. intelligence agents, who were able to determine from the otherwise-unidentified new evidence that the bombing of Russia’s critical gas pipelines must have been a sneaky pro-Ukrainian group, and was not a crafty pro-Russia group.
The existence of the unidentified evidence was disclosed by unidentified anonymous U.S. officials, who were deliberately un-specific about what the “new evidence” might in fact be:
U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains. They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it[.]
Is it just a hunch? The New York Times wrote a ten-page, long-form article packed with speculation and decorated with stock photos, all based on undescribed “evidence” allegedly referenced by unnamed anonymous sources.
I wonder who told the New York Times to write this article based on NOTHING.
At least the article briefly mentioned Seymour Hersh’s exposé, but only to dismiss his explosive allegations, having omitted any mention of his own confidential sources, and making it sound like Hersh’s entire story was based on Biden’s public threats against the pipeline:
Last month, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the newsletter platform Substack concluding that the United States carried out the operation at the direction of Mr. Biden. In making his case, Mr. Hersh cited the president’s preinvasion threat to “bring an end” to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.
The Times airily dismissed Hersh’s investigation by sighing that the Biden Administration SAID it had nothing to do with the bombing — and that was that. They denied it, so.
U.S. officials also insisted that they have no idea whatsoever what the Ukrainians might be up to:
Despite Ukraine’s deep dependence on the United States for military, intelligence and diplomatic support, Ukrainian officials are not always transparent with their American counterparts about their military operations, especially those against Russian targets behind enemy lines. Those operations have frustrated U.S. officials, who believe that they have not measurably improved Ukraine’s position on the battlefield, but have risked alienating European allies and widening the war.
We can figure a lot of stuff out, but the Ukrainians, well we just have no way of knowing. You believe that, right?
🔥 Yesterday, Governor DeSantis sent a delightful letter to Joe Biden basically on behalf of Novak Djokovic asking if the unvaccinated tennis superstar could enter the United States by boat to play in the Miami Open, since Biden’s various travel mandates apply to air planes, ferries, and land travel, but don’t mention boats, like the ones bringing ‘refugees’ into Florida’s keys.
10:30 PM ∙ Mar 7, 202328,299Likes4,274Retweets
I think DeSantis’ letter is called “trolling.”
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Remember that I’ll be out Friday for birthday and travel, and plan accordingly. Otherwise I’ll see you guys back here tomorrow for lots more C&C.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
Published with author’s permission.
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.
