Opinion
By Jeff Childers

02-10-24
Good morning, C&C, itβs your Saturday Weekend Edition! In todayβs roundup: Cloward and Piven strike Denver, which announces cuts to citizen services so it can pay for illegal border jumpers; a fungus among us mysteriously claims young Michigan chef; more fungus strikes Seattle hospital; deadly fungi attack the entire world making a new and improved global health threat; Congressman tries and fails to inspect shady migrant facility outed by James OβKeefe; AI getting dumber as it gets more liberal; Senator Hawley challenges DOJ over Biden incompetence; ironic jab pushing tragedy; great election news for Florida angers Obama judge; and an old Biden hit song has new relevance for this weekβs news cycle.
π THE C&C ARMY POST π
πͺ Thanks to everyone for the well-wishes yesterday for Michelleβs birthday, and for putting up with a rushed C&C post with so much going on. She had a great day bookended by a husband-prepared special breakfast and a special dinner with her twin sister and my brother-in-law, who came in from out of town for a special gala birthday weekend visit.
π₯ I would also like to think any number of C&Cers who have notified me that the one-time donation link was broken, and put up with my long delay in fixing it. It turns out that the service, which we were forced to use after I was blacklisted from most processing platforms, has itself finally pulled the plug. The good news is we engaged a whole new, better service. Here is the brand-new link to the One-Time Donation Feature, for folks who want to help but canβt or donβt want to subscribe for whatever reason.
ππ¬ WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY π¬π
π₯ A number of outlets including CBS reported that β because of Republicans! β the city of Denver is beginning to cut real municipal services in order to support a burgeoning population of illegal migrants in the Mile-High City. (But that does NOT mean we have a border problem, donβt be ridiculous. We have a funding problem.) The new cuts come on the one month anniversary of Denver cutting all city budgets by 10%, across-the-board, back on January 9th.

Well. All budgets except for programs for illegals. Those budgets are increasing. In a somber press conference yesterday, Mayor Mike Johnston shared the bad news with Denver taxpayers. He began by emphasizing the most important thing: this is not his fault. Nor is it illegal border jumpersβ fault either. Mayor Johnston really couldnβt stress this enough β although he tried his hardest β it is the Republicansβ fault, for not federally funding the illegal border jumpersβ care by sending Denver a lot of other citiesβ taxpayer dollars.
Mayor Johnston then smuggled his two main points across his presentationβs border, carefully concealed in a basket of bureaucratic buzzwords. First, cuts to long-standing city programs like parks and the DMV require a shared sacrifice. Second, the cuts will be equitable.
What Mayor Johnston was trying to say is the sacrifice will be shared equitably, meaning unevenly. The city plans to mainly cut services to passengers in coach class, meaning taxpayers, before the shared sacrifices equitably reach any citizens who ride Denver in First Class which, for now at least, includes illegal immigrants.

In a wonderful metaphor, among the programs cuts was the cityβs annual spring flower planting. There will be no flowers in Denver this year; there is a human crop growing there now.
Don’t you dare say the human crop is uglier than the flowers. Thatβs body shaming. And probably racist.
Democrats voted for Denver to become a sanctuary city in 2017, right after β did Mayor Johnston already mention this? β those wily Republicans somehow tricked them into doing it. But as far as I can tell, unlike New York, Denver has no βright to shelterβ law for illegals.
Over the past year, Denver has welcomed with open arms over 40,000 border jumpers, which in military terms is about twelve brigades or forty battalions. Just saying.
π What the fungus? The nation is facing an another new outbreak, this time of deadly fungal disease. Sorry, I mean diseases. A simple headline search reveals the disturbing trend. First up, two days ago, the New York Post reported healthy Michigan chef Ian Pritchard, 29, died from a blastomysis fungal infection that turned his lungs into Swiss cheese.

Normally Swiss cheese is a good thing; but you really donβt want your lung looking like that particular dairy delicacy.
The Post, quoting the CDC, reported that in people with weakened immune systems, a blastomysis infection starts in the lungs, after spores get breathed in, and then spreads to the central nervous system, skin, and joints. The fungus is basically found everywhere, living in plants, soil, leaves, and wood, to name a few places.
There is no cure. Four out of five patients can manage by taking chronic antifungals, the others kick the cheese bucket.
The New York Post did not report any particular reason to think Ian had a weakened immune system. But I can think of one. It seems sort of obvious.
π Yesterday, the Weather Channel (of all places) ran a story headlined, Dangerous Fungus Outbreak Reported At Seattle Hospital.β Iβm not sure what kind of weather was involved. It wasnβt clear from the story.

According to the weather report, CDC officials are βworking withβ Seattleβs Kindred Hospital to βcontainβ a four-patient outbreak of drug-resistant Candida auris fungus. The four patients were all infected in the hospital. Unsurprisingly, C. auris primarily spreads in healthcare settings, which is another reason to avoid them, and affects patients with weakened immune systems. Ahem.
The fungal infection is fatal in up to sixty percent of cases.
Although media tried to portray the βoutbreakβ as a steady increase since 2017 β so donβt worry, nothing to see here! β even though a βsteady increaseβ is not an outbreak, but whatever β cases really jumped starting from the end of 2020:

I can think of something else that started jumping β or jabbing β at the end of 2020. The CDC gave a nod to the obvious link, ambiguously commenting that it believes the recent rise is related to pandemic stress in healthcare settings, like staffing shortages and long stays by covid patients. If thatβs true, it should soon go back down, right?
π Finally, and my favorite one, MSN ran a story yesterday directly comparing the mushrooming fungal infections to covid, headlined βHealth expert shares key differences between deadly fungal disease sweeping the US and Covid-19.β

Itβs C. auris again. According to MSNβs story, the C. auris fungus is βsweeping the U.S.,β calling it a βserious global health threatβ with β get this β βcases having increased dramatically from 2020-2021.β
Yep. Right on schedule!
A video attached to MSNβs article, reporting on a new Lancet study, claimed there are now six times as many fungal deaths than deaths from malaria, and three times as many as from tuberculosis. But hereβs the key, again. An Irish doctor quoted for the story said this; can you spot the dead giveaway?
βIt’s not healthy people out in the community getting infected. It’s people who are on ventilators, central lines, or in ICU. C. auris isn’t affecting the general population, just a smaller population who are very sick.
The other difference is how C. auris is spread. The infection is spread much more through contact in healthcare settings rather than through respiratory transmissions. People aren’t breathing C. auris in.
Most if not all of C. auris cases have acquired the infection in healthcare settings, too, or have a history in healthcare settings. We’re not so worried about people catching C. auris in the gym or at the movie theater or at the grocery store. That could change overtime as it becomes more common, but it’s not what we’re seeing now.β
Did you catch the common element? Weakened immune systems. Itβs a weird thread running between all these increasing rates of previously-rare infections.
But what could be weakening all these folksβ immune systems?
π₯ We can thank James OβKeefe for breaking the story on the shady NGOβs bussing migrants into sketchy, secret facilities that refuse to let reporters in and call the cops on them. Yesterday Wisconsin Representative Tom Tiffany (R-Wi.) β citing OβKeefeβs video β tried for himself to inspect a converted Ramada Inn in Arizona, pursuant to his Congressional oversight authority, but was shut down cold.

And, of course, they called the cops on him. In the video, you can see Congressman Tiffany suggested, several times, he intends to call for public hearings in the Judiciary Committee (at least) and potentially subpoenas. Letβs hope so. Somebody needs to shine a light on these cockroaches. Iβm not being racist! I treat all pestilential insects as equals.
π₯ They couldβve just asked me and saved themselves a lot of work. According to an A.I. researcher who monitors the βevolutionβ of AI chatbots and language models, the services are getting safer but dumber.

CLIP: AI scientist monitors developing AI models like ChatGPT and were surprised to find them getting substantially worse (1:26).
Back in October, AI researcher James Zou published a paper on his groupβs tests on AI performance over time. To give you the gist, hereβs a summary of Jamesβs comments from the video clip linked above:
βThese models are changing over time, through feedback from humans and fine tuning. So this actually motivated us to monitor how does the behavior of this generative AI change over time, such as from interacting with users like us?
You might have expected that these models should be getting better and better over time, at least thatβs our hope, they should be improving. But maybe the big surprise that we found is that these models are getting better in some of the components. GPT-4 is getting safer over time.
However, the model is also getting worse β substantially worse β in many of the other components. For example, I asked the model to do chain of thought reasoning, which is a common technique. The ability of ChatGPT-4 to do chain of thought reasoning, that seems to have really degraded over time.β
What James meant by βsafetyβ is ensuring the chatbot always answers consistently with liberal values. Think safe spaces for snowflakes. But apparently, increased A.I. βsafetyβ β enforced liberality β is also correlating with a decreasing ability to correctly perform some kinds of logical reasoning.
In other words, the more liberal the AI gets, the dumber it gets.
Hey, donβt shoot the messenger. Iβm just following the science.
π₯ Well, YES:

π Seen online and presented without comment:

So.
π₯ The Orlando Sentinel ran an uplifting election-law story yesterday headlined, βFederal judge grudgingly rules for DeSantis in elections law challenge.β Grudgingly is one way of putting it.

In 2021, Florida passed a package of election-law reforms designed to prevent cheating. After a legal challenge in 2022, a federal Judge (an Obama appointee) ruled large parts of the new laws were unconstitutional because, to him, they were obviously targeting black folks, because the entire Florida Legislature and Governor DeSantis are obviously racists.
In 2023, a three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit overturned part of Judge Walkerβs decision, but allowed other parts to stand, barring elections reforms that to you and me look like commonsense proposals completely unrelated to anybodyβs race, but to race-experts are clearly, without a doubt, 100%, invidious racism masquerading as election security reforms.
So then Governor DeSantis appealed the panelβs ruling to the entire 12-judge 11th Circuit. And the whole 11th said, wait a minute, this isnβt right, and sent the case back to the start, to Judge Walker, to certify whether the suing plaintiffs had met a key evidentiary test required to invalidate any law for racism: whether plaintiffs provided real evidence in the record that the law in fact βunduly burdenedβ their First Amendment and equal-protection rights.
Whoops. Judge Walker was forced to admit that, no, there was no evidence the laws in fact burdened the plaintiffs. So he closed the case, leaving the original law in place. But he was not very happy about it, and grabbed the last word, criticizing his judicial bosses on the 11th Circuit on the way out, who apparently are also racists. Iβm not saying Judge Walker sees racists everywhere he looks or anything (heβs a very smart judge), but in this case, well, decide for yourself:
βAs this court previously found after a lengthy, two-week bench trial, the state of Florida has, with surgical precision, repeatedly changed Floridaβs election code to target whichever modality of voting Floridaβs Black voters were using at the time,β Walker wrote. βThat was not this courtβs opinion β it is a fact established by the record in these cases. Even so, following the state of Floridaβs appeal, this persistent and pernicious practice of targeting the modalities of voting most used by Floridaβs Black voters has apparently received the stamp of approval in this (11th) Circuit.β
In case you were wondering, by βmodalities of voting most used by Floridaβs Black votersβ I think Judge Walker means voting without showing a driverβs license and using mail-in voting options.
There you go. According to Judge Walker, we are going backwards. Racism now has the official stamp of approval by the 11th Circuit Court of appeals. Cue a federal investigation by the Justice Department. But in the meantime, the package of election security laws is no longer enjoined and is fully in place, right in time for the 2024 election season.
Progress!
π₯ Finally, in light of Joe Bidenβs Hindenburg-like press conference performance two nights ago, with all the attendant discussion of his continuing prospects as a conscious human being, and not a poorly-performing A.I. replica of a president, I thought it was appropriate to haul back out and dust off this old chestnut from 2022. Enjoy the classic hit, βMy Mindβs Going Blank Nowβ by Joseph R. Biden:

CLIP: Hit music video My Mindβs Going Blank Now (2:18).
Enjoy it. I did.
Have a wonderful weekend! And since you are not an AI chatbot, think logically, and come back here on Monday morning to kick off next weekβs terrific line up of Coffee & Covid.
We canβt do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nationβs needle and change minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: β Learn How to Get Involved π¦
Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com
Β© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida