Opinion
By Jeff Childers
05-25-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your Weekend Edition roundup of essential news includes: game on in Ohio as fake Republican Governor helps democrats fix Biden ballot problem; Biden’s revenge fantasy playing to Trump’s strengths and America’s spiritual desires; more bad signs for Biden’s faltering economy; historic solar aurorae now named the Great Solar Storm of 2024—but is it over yet?; media starting to run interference for AI fears; and healthy young documentarian succumbs to turbo cancer but corporate media blames McDonald’s.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 Benedict DeWine, I mean Arnold, I mean Ohio Governor Mike DeWino, was the subject of a UK Guardian story Thursday headlined, “Ohio governor calls special legislative session to include Biden on election ballot.” Try to imagine any democrat state governor helping Trump like this.
Ohio’s Secretary of State is Republican Frank LaRose. (Is that weird? DEwine, LArose? Whatever.) This week, LaRose heroically doubled down on rejecting the democrats’ flawed application to include Joe Biden on Ohio’s general election ballot. The reason is simple: because Joe will miss the statutory filing deadline on August 7th. The reason Joe will miss the deadline is because the Democrat National Convention in Chicago starts weeks afterwards, on August 19th, so Joe won’t yet be the official party nominee when the August 7th deadline comes and goes.
Instead of DNC democrats acting like sane people and just scheduling their convention a couple weeks earlier, as they have done every other election year, democrats are predictably weeping about the crisis of democracy, which apparently means scrupulously holding Republicans to every microscopic rule while making the rules up as they go along for themselves.
Secretary LaRose hilariously but subtly invoked Colorado, where democrats fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep Trump off the ballot:
So the Dems have Bidened it up again, and now Republican Governor Mike DeWine is trying to help them out of a jam. On Thursday, DeWine called a special legislative session, hauling all Ohio’s lawmakers back to Columbus this Tuesday, so they can change Ohio’s laws to accommodate the democrats’ tardy convention schedule.
“Ohio is running out of time to get Joe Biden, sitting president of the United States, on the ballot this fall,” DeWine said during a surprise Thursday evening press conference. “Failing to do so is simply not acceptable. This is ridiculous; this is an absurd situation.”
Try to imagine the Democrat Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, calling a special legislative session to ensure Trump could get on the ballot in that state. But I digress.
Republicans hold a veto-proof super-majority in both houses in Ohio (House: 67-32, Senate:25-8). (And we have part of a governor.) Republicans seem willing to help; this week Ohio’s Republican Senators submitted a ballot fix to the House. The problem was it included a provision banning foreign nationals from donating to Ohio ballot campaigns, and it increased requirements for ballot initiatives (recently abused in Ohio). Outraged democrats refused even to consider it, calling it a dirty trick offered by people of low character, or words to that effect, which prompted Governor DeWine to throw up his tiny mole-like hands and call for next week’s special session.
“The Senate Republicans decided, ‘You know what? We want to extract a cost to get the president on the ballot,'” Rep. Dani Isaacsohn (D-Cincinnati) said. This is “anti-democratic,” Isaacsohn and dozens of other Ohio democrats exclaimed.
To his credit, Governor DeWine supports the additional election-security language.
Ohio Republicans: Hold the line! Don’t be emotionally manipulated, and keep reminding Dems how they started it, by trying to purge Trump from the ballot in Vermont and Colorado. They even held a five-day ‘trial’ in Colorado to ‘find’ Trump was an insurrectionist. Squeeze some good election security concessions out of these poor-planning democrats.
🔥 Like a half-witted Hamlet, this week Joe Biden obsessed over Revenge. It is one of his big new campaign themes. The Hill ran a story about the campaign’s new marketing twist last week headlined, “Biden urges Atlanta voters to stand up against Trump: ‘He’s running for revenge.’” Revenge! Somehow Trump is like a dish best served cold. Here’s Joe two days ago, warning America about Trump’s Revenge Plan:
If I understand Biden’s ‘thinking’ — taking the literary license to assume that neuronal activity actually occurred — the campaign’s notion is that revenge is a bad thing, an ugly, sinful, backward-looking motivation. At the same time, he, Joe Biden, is a guardian of light, a fine, optimistic fellow, and definitely not the biggest race-baiter who ever zombie-stepped the wrong way across the White House lawn.
The first weird element was how all this new, high-minded talk came from the same team who gave us the ridiculous character “Dark Brandon:”
At first, I just couldn’t understand it. The Republican base is burning for revenge — electorally, at least — and more generally, all Americans love good revenge plots. Biden is busily turning Trump into John Wick:
Americans seem to relish revenge fantasies where, after the normal justice system fails or becomes corrupted, one man takes matters into his own hands and makes everything right again. There are countless archetypes, going back to Hollywood’s Glory Days. Maybe Biden thinks Trump is more like Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973).
Characters motivated by revenge are often loosed from normal legal and ethical boundaries, so long as the targets of their wroth have it coming. Times and morals may change, but the thirst for revenge persists. For instance, there is no possible way High Plains Drifter could be made today; it’s a minor miracle you can still watch it on streaming services. In one of the movie’s first scenes, Eastwood — the protagonist, mind you — begins his revenge campaign by violently raping an evil townslady.
At minimum, it’s fair to say Eastwood’s character had some “me too” problems. But it illustrates the larger point. The revenge hero archetype is inherently transgressive; men who are pushed so far outside society that they operate completely outside the corrupted rules. High Plains Drifter’s deliberately ambiguous story strongly implies Eastwood’s character, “the Stranger,” is the avenging ghost of a resurrected US Marshal who’d been murdered by most of the town, and with whom, like the Biblical Rider on the Pale Horse, Hell followed closely behind.
Americans mainly love revenge stories because we crave justice; and implicit in the concept of just revenge is that it was earned, and so the avenging angel always arrives after something bad happens, so as to right the galactic scales. The Russian thugs learned their lesson after beating John up, stealing his Mustang, and murdering the puppy providing the only link to his dead wife. The lawless Lagos townspeople got what was coming to them after literally whipping the law to death.
We live and breath these archetypes. So if, according to Biden, Trump seeks revenge … then who beat Trump up, stole his Mustang, and killed his puppy? Who whipped the law to death? In other words, if Trump is the resurrected, avenging anti-hero, who does Biden fear will be the object of Trump’s revenge?
Obviously, Team Biden is projecting. They fear that Trump wants revenge against them, for whipping the law to death and murdering Trump’s puppy of reputation. Like the townspeople of Lagos, Team Biden destroyed law and order, creating a moral vacuum bound to be filled by something they worry is even more dark and destructive.
Biden is going big with the revenge theme, because his misery wants some company. He wants to convince ordinary, everyday democrats that they also are in Trump’s crosshairs. The ‘revenge’ campaign is aimed at the Democrat base.
In other words, the Biden folks are afraid they’re losing their base. So they are trying to terrorize their own base into voting for the crumbling derelict, out of self-preservation. But this ‘revenge campaign’ is likely to backfire, as the response to Trump in the South Bronx this week excellently evidenced. Normal democrats who haven’t done anything wrong aren’t buying that Trump plans revenge against them.
To make the point, enjoy this priceless clip from the Bronx this week, a quick man-on-the-street interview of a most colorful gentleman who does not resemble the, let’s say traditional MAGA stereotype. “Joe Biden, stop taking showers with children, stop smelling little kids’ hair; don’t do that, that’s wrong. You got to be a good man, like Daddy.”
CLIP: “I’m voting for Daddy” (0:28).
🔥🔥 This quick public service advisory was journalistic catnip; a classic inversion of the traditional bear-eats-man story but with a twist of microscopic revenge. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, this week CBS ran a terrifying and widely-covered story headlined, “Family members infected with brain worms after eating undercooked bear meat.” So quit eating undercooked bear meat. Just stop. You’ve been warned.
Specifically, the South Dakota family was nibbling on some delicious Canadian bear kabobs. The naive campfire diners were off to a great start: on the one hand, you want to be the apex predator. But you also have to cook the bear enough, at least medium-rare, or the apex predator will wind up being a tiny parasitic brain worm; which are three words that nobody wants to see together.
Man eats bear, which gets posthumous revenge through brain worms. You can see why nearly every major corporate media outlet covered the story.
All three hospitalized family members are doing fine and have learned an important culinary lesson.
📉📉 Business Insider ran a pessimistic story about the Biden economy this week headlined, “Recession seems almost certain with 19 states in trouble already, expert warns.” The sub-headline added, “Unemployment has jumped in 19 states, making a national recession almost inevitable.” How could this happen, given the constant assurances the economy is going great?
For some reason, the article failed to mention which nineteen states have seen unemployment jump, thereby making a recession almost inevitable. Weird. I bet they’re mostly blue-colored.
Contradicting all the Biden Administration hand-wringing over how little credit the dementia-patient-in-chief is getting for the terrific economy, the article’s first sentence starkly stated, “Get ready for a recession that hammers consumers, squeezes companies, and drags down stocks.”
This news is making corporate media manic depressive, verging on psychosis. Let’s compare some headlines. From the Guardian, last week:
Poor Joe Biden, wrongly blamed. Or, this one from Axios, also last week:
In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes. But sometimes the meds wear off, like in this Bloomberg headline, also published last week:
As far as I can tell, corporate media is hanging onto its economic cover story by the thin thread that Biden hasn’t officially declared a recession, so we’re not properly in a recession yet, which awaits formal government recognition. Or something like that.
🔥 Scientific American ran another after-action report on what they are now calling The Great Solar Storm of 2024, headlined “The Great Solar Storm of 2024 May Have Made the Strongest Auroras in Centuries.”
I realize I am beating a dead aurora with yet another solar story, but stick with me. The media, having struggled to avoid confusing us with the possibility that the Sun is causing extreme weather, has constructed a new narrative frame that this historic, definitely not climate-related solar event was a unique, one-off perfect storm. For example, a NASA statement this week claimed, “The CMEs all arrived largely at once, and the conditions were just right to create a really historic storm.”
Just right! It was a Goldilocks storm.
I’m bringing this up again to plant a flag. Because the two gigantic sunspots that caused the unprecedented worldwide auroral event are now rotating back around the Sun toward the Earth. If it all happens again, they can’t just say it was a historic perfect storm. It will be a historic storm sandwich with spicy mayo.
Events are overtaking the leaky climate narrative.
🔥 The public’s response to the sweet-talking AI chatbot must not have as positive as they’d hoped, so it’s time for more narrative programming. Last week, Forbes ran a cover story for AI headlined, “Meta’s AI Chief: AI Models Like ChatGPT Won’t Reach Human Intelligence.” Well, that’s a relief.
It’s a fake news story, betrayed by the fact that nothing happened. I call this type of fake news the “somebody said something” story. Forbes reported the “news” that, in a Wednesday interview, Meta’s top developer Yann LeCun, if that’s his real name, SAID that large language models like ChatGPT and its sweet, seductive new voice (*pending litigation) will never ever be able to think for themselves.
So don’t worry!
Of course, it’s not even that simple. Later down the article, LeCun, who leads 500 developers at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab, admitted they are working on “other AI models” that can think for themselves, but — trying to be reassuring — he opined it would probably take at least ten years to reach ‘general intelligence.’ Oh. LeCun’s claims aside, the jury is still out on whether chatbots could think or not. Intellectual dark web luminary Brett Weinstein recently asked the fascinating question: does human thought, in fact, work similarly to the way large language models do?
Large language models, or LLMs, are explained to work predictively. After absorbing large libraries of books and articles, they string one word after another, apparently calculating, or predicting, based on all the absorbed text, what the next most likely word should be. The astonishing result is the answer produced by the chatbot (after, of course, the human’s question was first quietly revised for ‘safety’).
Brett’s question is potentially mind-blowing. Do infants learn just like large language models do? In other words, do baby humans absorb large amounts of spoken text, and then, once ‘trained,’ form their own thoughts and responses somehow predictively?
Since the essential nature of chatbots are question-response based, the chatbots don’t take initiative or think for themselves, or so LeCun claims. The developer didn’t mention the commonsense possibility of merging multiple bots, which can prompt each other, working similarly to how humans’ right and left brains communicate.
They don’t know; nobody knows. They just keep tossing the computerized hand grenades around the lab to see what happens. But it was an interesting development this week to watch corporate media circling its narrative wagons after OpenAI terrified everybody with its talking chatbot.
💉💉 The New York Times ran a widely reported story yesterday headlined, “Morgan Spurlock, Documentarian Known for ‘Super Size Me,’ Dies at 53.” They are trying so hard to hide jab injuries, they threw fast food under the narrative bus.
In case it wasn’t clear, the sub-headline darkly hinted at a sodium-fueled cause of death: “His 2004 film followed Mr. Spurlock as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month. It was nominated for an Oscar, but it later came in for criticism.”
That “news” happened twenty years ago.
The article’s first seven paragraphs described in glorious detail Spurlock’s infamous experiment of only eating at McDonald’s for a month, concluding, “At the end of the month, he was 25 pounds heavier, depressed, puffy-faced and experiencing liver dysfunction.”
Warming to its work, the Times next described Spurlock’s many human failures. His bout with alcoholism. The accusations of sexual misconduct (verbal).
Despite devoting dozens of column inches to his truncated life, all the Times had to say about the fast-food survivor’s death was this: Spurlock “died on Thursday in New York City. He was 53. His brother Craig Spurlock said the cause was complications of cancer.”
Aha — cancer! He survived his infamous MacDonald’s experiment, but Morgan couldn’t survive the jabs. He should’ve lived to make a film called “Superjab Me!”:
Morgan was only 53 and had two sons, Laken and Kallen, who are now fatherless. The ocean of ink eulogizing Morgan’s life supersized all the coverage he didn’t get during the last twenty years of continuous documentary filmmaking following his independent hit in 2004.
Media wanted so badly to link Morgan’s month of fast-food dining to his death from turbo cancer twenty years later, but given the intervening decades, the best they could do was hint around. But, we know. Accountability is coming. Morgan will get his revenge.
Have a wonderful weekend! And circle back here on Monday morning for another healthy, nutritious, non-cancerous serving of Coffee & Covid, a dish best served warm.
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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
