Opinion
By Jeff Childers
02-27-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup today includes: in a real-life parody of Google Gemini, the FBI is once again looking for criminals in all the wrong places; major developments in the Fani Willis case rock the media; Sora AI text-to-video tech scores its first kill; wild social media story lacks roots; you won’t believe Biden’s new theme for the State of the Union; and the Italians’ SNL makes a few painful observations.
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🔥 The diligent team of crack law enforcement experts at the FBI created a massive ratio yesterday with a helpful public service advisory on shoplifting (a ‘ratio’ occurs when a tweet gets more comments than likes). The first problem was obvious, the FBI must have used Google Gemini to create an image of “shoplifters.” But an even bigger problem quickly emerged once I started looking at what the FBI was pushing.
What the FBI was really up to was shoring up Biden’s pathetic efforts to blame inflation on everybody but himself, by suggesting that higher food prices are somehow caused by sneaky white women stealing purses at Macy’s. But commenters to the tweet properly roasted the floundering federal agency, and helpfully offered FBI agents lots of photos of actual shoplifting, you know, in case they are confused.
The FBI’s link in its tweet opened a self-congratulatory puff piece is titled “What We Investigate: Organized Retail Theft.” Down at the very end of that page, the FBI finally linked to three (3) shoplifting cases it helped investigate:
So I thought, now we’re talking, let’s check them out! Maybe there was a good reason the FBI picked a photo of ladies probably named Katelyn or Lindsay or something, as the faces of “organized retail theft.” But then I immediately ran into my first obstacle: the FBI’s links to pages about the real organized theft cases unhelpfully included no pictures at all. So I expanded my search.
You’d be surprised how many news sites avoided picturing the convicted criminals. But here are the two men sentenced in the New York home improvement holdup case: Jalil MacIntyre, 31, a Jamaican national — immigration status unknown — and Deshun Jackson, 23, of Brooklyn:
It only took a little more digging to find the four heavily-hyphenized, “Ecuadorian Nationals” — in other words, illegals — indicted in Ohio for tuning up a national theft ring (of Apple products): Alexander Diaz-Remache, 38; Gustavo Daniel Vinueza-Bueno, 36; Jonathan Eduardo Remache-Diaz, 32; and Alvaro Oswaldo Loaiza-Alvarez, 27. Assuming those are their real names.
Finally, I discovered — much to my surprise — that the “Nashua Man” who pleaded guilty to transporting $2 million in stolen Apple products to Hong Kong actually had a name. The “Nashua Man’s” name is Guangwei “William” Wu, 30. Despite sinking more time into the search than I should have, I could not find Wu’s picture anywhere, so you’ll just have to imagine what he looks like. (I did find out that Wu pleaded to a lesser offense, stroked a check for the $2 million as restitution, and got only a year of supervised release. So he probably also had a good legal and PR team sending out mugshot takedown notices.)
So there you have it. Not only did the FBI’s own cited cases include no white criminals, there weren’t even any women! And as far as I can tell, only Deshun Jackson — one of seven — is an American. The FBI had real pictures of two black guys, four rough-looking hispanic males, and an Asian gentleman. So, why pick two manicured, coiffed, and well-dressed white women?
There is only one logical conclusion: the racist FBI hates all you white ladies and is trying to pin the blame for all these heists and capers on you.
🔥 The Fani Willis case took a dramatic turn yesterday after Fox News ran a story headlined, “Judge says Nathan Wade’s divorce lawyer must testify on relationship with Fulton Co. DA Fani Willis.”
Terrence Bradley is the Atlanta lawyer who used to work at the same law firm with Fani Willis’s specials squeeze and unqualified Trump special prosecutor Nathan Wade. By all accounts, Terrance and Nathan were good friends — for a while. For several years, Terrance advised Nathan on his divorce, which according to Nathan really started in 2015, even though he didn’t file the paperwork until the day after Fani hired him to help get Trump.
Anyway, it’s common knowledge that Nathan and Terrance talked about Nathan’s love life, a lot; face to face, by email, and by text message. But Terrance has so far kept his mouth shut; he and Nathan argued those love-life conversations about Fani Willis must remain attorney-client privileged since they involved the divorce — even though Nathan never paid Terrance a single dollar, they had no contract for legal services, nor did Terrance ever appear in any court or even send a letter to anyone on Nathan’s behalf.
At some point, the two men had a falling out. In one of last week’s hearing’s most dramatic moments, Fani’s lawyer forced Terrance to admit that Nathan fired him over allegations of sexual abuse toward a female staff member. Terrance admitted that was the reason he was fired, but hotly denied the abuse ever occurred. Absent any more detail, one is tempted to imagine the two men shared a competing romantic interest in the female staff member, but Nathan won the day using some pretty underhanded tactics.
Anyway, the bottom line was that, because he asserted privilege, Terrance was not allowed to answer the most important question of all: when did Nathan start sleeping with Fani Willis?
Yesterday, Judge MaCafee, 34, met privately with Terrance in his judicial chambers, in camera as the lawyers say, to test the privilege. They spoke for an hour and twenty minutes. In other words, the judge wanted to hear for himself what the two lawyers had talked about, what Terrance might say on the stand, and then decide whether, in fact, it was a real attorney-client communication.
Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer leading the team of defense lawyers, has previously told the court in her filed papers that Terrance “Bradley has non-privileged, personal knowledge that the romantic relationship between Wade and Willis began prior to Willis being sworn as the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia in January 2021.”
Yesterday, dramatically, after meeting with Terrance, Judge MaCafee ruled on the privilege question. He ruled that Terrance must take the stand and answer some questions. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported late yesterday that Judge McAfee’s assistant sent all the lawyers an email stating certain communications between Terrence Bradley and Wade were not protected by attorney-client privilege.
Terrance could testify as soon as this afternoon. Closing arguments are on Friday.
This exciting development follows last week’s blockbuster news of AT&T cell phone records showing Fani and Nathan exchanged late-night visits, over 2,000 calls, and about 10,000 text messages in 2021 before Fani claimed the affair allegedly began. That averages six calls and thirty texts a day for 11 months straight.
Fani and Nathan claim those communications occurred strictly for professional reasons. Uh huh. They have not volunteered to release any of the text messages to prove it.
I’m starting to think I’ve under-estimated 2024. It still has a lot to give.
🔥 Indie Wire ran a prophetic story Friday headlined, “Tyler Perry Put $800 Million Studio Expansion ‘Indefinitely on Hold’ After Seeing OpenAI Sora’s Capabilities.”
Perry, the billionaire African-American movie producer of “Madea” fame, announced he’s just put a huge Atlanta studio expansion project on hold, after watching the video-generating capabilities of OpenAI’s “mind blowing” text-to-video system. Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta is already described as one of the largest studios in America.
But it’s not, apparently, getting any bigger anytime soon.
And so it begins. Perry’s project-cancelling is the first major economic effect caused by the new deep-faking technology, which is not even available to the public.
“All of that (project) is currently and indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I’m seeing,” Perry explained. “If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing,” he continued. “If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can just sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me.”
“I am very, very concerned that in the near future, a lot of jobs are going to be lost,” Perry lamented. “I really, really feel that very strongly.”
Disruptive change is always temporarily painful. The horse-drawn cart industry predicted the new “horseless carriage” phenomenon would tank the economy and it would be bad for horses, too.
New opportunity always follows disruption. It has always happened and it will happen again. Apparently sooner rather than later, this time.
🔥 A video making the rounds yesterday purportedly showcased a mild-mannered assassin allegedly hired by Ukraine’s secret police to car-bomb Tucker Carlson for $4,000, but who was somehow stopped or arrested by the Russians. It’s not completely clear. While the tale would be consistent with how the Ukrainians usually man-handle journalists, I could not verify the video’s veracity, and I noted the story was not featured on Russia Today. Nor has Tucker said anything about it. So it remains in the “rumor” category until there’s more reliable information. But I figured someone would ask about this salacious story in the comments.
📉 On Friday, Politico reported that Team Biden is strongly considering making snack-food shrinkflation — “fewer chips in the bag,” as Joe said — the magnificent centerpiece of Joe Biden’s belated State of The Union speech on March 7th. I realize that idea sounds more like an SNL sketch than a real plan. It’s literally unbelievable that the leader of the free world would target smaller processed food packages as America’s primary problem.
On the other hand, maybe they haven’t told Joe yet about the border, Ukraine, the Middle East, or Taiwan? I could understand not telling him; it’s a lot for someone in Joe’s condition to handle.
Politico’s article seemed like a trial balloon designed to test-market the shrinkflation concept and debut two new Biden Administration catch phrases, a new, made-up buzzword, “greed-flation” (I am not making that up) and the old standby, “price gouging.”
Greedflation combines two bad things: greed and inflation. It’s a twofer! It is tempting to believe Joe came up with that himself, or maybe during a chat with John Fetterman, because if that’s the caliber of thinking of the people managing Joe, then we are in serious trouble.
Now imagine what Saturday Night Live could do with this kind of material — if they were allowed. Sadly, you just can’t get that kind of entertainment in the United States anymore; we’ll have to wait for the next Republican president. But fortunately, you don’t have to wait, an Italian comedy show released its new skit mocking Joe Biden yesterday. It might even be better than SNL.
CLIP: Italians release humiliating Biden parody sketch (1:09).
And if you are still hungry, like there were too few cheese-its in the can, here is another recent Biden skit by the same outfit, which is even more brutal than the first one (2:28).
Enjoy! I’ve heard that laughter is the best medicine when suffering from greedflation. It seemed appropriate that the humor should come at Biden’s expense.
Have a terrific Tuesday! And slide back here tomorrow to find out what happened to Fani, and for the CIA’s mind-blowing limited hangout. See you then.
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© 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
