Opinion
By Jeff Childers
08-20-23
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s another new week of living in the most unbelievably indescribable time in history. Just ask Bob Peters. Your roundup today includes: CNN admits Trump was right, shattering the Matrix; trouble in Hunterland; Biden says its in the DOJ’s hands now; air pollution article illustrates science hypocrisy; Hawaii fire response evidences crumbling diversity infrastructure; San Fran woman gets what she voted for; the most liberal democrats need their own private security; New York City’s controlled demolition by illegal alien invasion; more evidence supporting the Moderna “aid package” theory; another look at the leprosy-vaccine connection; Ulez protestors take it to the streets; and other woke, racist teacher is promptly removed from her position of influencing impressionable children.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 Hurricane Hilary made landfall yesterday, wiping out thousands of private email servers.
🔥 During a remarkable discussion this weekend on Jake Tapper’s CNN show, the celebrated anchor first surprised his viewers by correctly reporting that Hunter Biden did in fact somehow earn sketchy millions — “substantial sums” — from Ukrainian and Chinese sources. Tapper left unsaid, but painfully obvious, that nobody still knows what Hunter supposedly got paid for, exactly.
Maybe someday, someone will ask the Bidens that question.
Next, Tapper shocked CNN’s lefty viewers even more, when he correctly pointed out that, during the 2016 Trump-Biden debates, Biden firmly but falsely said “my son has NOT made money, in terms of this thing about, what you’re talking about, China … that’s NOT true.”
Biden clearly lied and did not make a mistake. Bob Peters, I mean Joe, didn’t say “I don’t know whether Hunter is getting paid by the Chinese.” Instead he said, “that’s not true.” While one of Tapper’s co-anchors gamely tossed out the prepackaged defense that “nothing connects Hunter’s money to Biden,” he protested too much. Tapper hadn’t yet accused Hunter of doing anything illegal that could be connected to Biden. So nobody else on the panel touched the premature defense, and it ingloriously died on the table.
That was good enough, but I almost coughed up a hairball when Tapper bluntly told the shocked panelists, “I mean … Trump was right.” That’s probably as much vindication as the former President will ever get. Trump should use it in a campaign commercial or something.
🔥 Is there trouble in Hunter land? On August 17, 2023, at the request of prosecutors (so that the charges could be re-filed later), the Court dismissed Hunter Biden’s misdemeanor tax offenses, closing United States v. Biden, the case where the judge stopped the government from giving Hunter perpetual immunity on everything illegal he’d ever done.
So far, so good.
But last week, several more of Hunter’s attorneys abruptly quit, bringing this year’s total to five departed lawyers. Attorney Joshua Levy quit in March, and Christopher Clark quit last week, saying he could be called as a witness in the dispute with the government over the failed plea negotiations.
That might be true. Or more likely, it was just a tepid gloss over Christopher’s untimely departure. To my lawyer’s ears, it sounds like an excuse. Why not wait to see whether he actually is called as a witness?
Last Friday, Hunter lawyers Brian McManus, Timothy McCarten, and Matthew Salerno — the entire Latham & Watkins firm — filed a joint motion to withdraw from representing Hunter.
You may recall the dust-up between the Court and the Latham & Watkins firm, where the Court had accused them of pretending to be lawyers for the Republican Party and successfully asking the clerk to withdraw a GOP brief. The recent round of quitting may be related to that little contretemps and fears about what the judge might do.
Hunter still has at least two other lawyers from politically well-connected law firms, so the judge will probably quickly approve the withdrawals, unless she has other sanctions in mind. The Latham & Watkins lawyers are probably sweating buckets right now, waiting to see whether the judge will let them ooze off into the sunset.
Mass lawyer departures aren’t usually a good sign. Rats off a sinking aircraft carrier, and so forth. On the other hand, it’s a unique case, so who knows?
🔥 Joe Biden would never interfere with Hunter’s failing defense. Right? The Hill ran a story Friday headlined, “Biden says special counsel probe of his son is ‘up to the Justice Department’.”
That was big of him.
On Friday, Biden responded to a reporter’s question about the Hunter investigations at a joint press conference, saying “I have no comment on any investigation that’s going on. That’s up to the Justice Department, and that’s all I have to say,”
Close observers wondered if the old Dog-faced Pony Soldier was sending a message.
But don’t worry. Even if he was, the Justice Department can be counted on for fairness. Or possibly not. Fox News ran a story last week headlined, “FBI agent says Biden transition team, Secret Service were tipped off on 2020 plans to interview Hunter Biden.” The sub-headline explained, “Comer says this reveals DOJ ‘misconduct’ in Biden criminal investigation under US Attorney Weiss.”
An FBI supervisory special agent told House Oversight Committee investigators under oath that in December 2020, the DOJ tipped off the Biden transition team that the FBI planned to interview Hunter Biden – a tip-off that resulted in the interview being called off, even though Hunter was the prime target of the multi-year federal investigation.
I’m not saying the DOJ is a wholly owned subsidiary of Biden, Inc. I’m just saying.
💉 Politico ran a story earlier this month that wonderfully illustrates Establishment Media hypocrisy. The article was headlined, “Drug-resistant killer bugs linked to air pollution, top scientists say.” The article’s second sentence explained, “new research suggests tiny airborne pollutants may be linked to higher rates of drug-resistant lethal bacteria.”
Sounds bad.
Politico was so worried about the climate that it overlooked the much more interesting fact of skyrocketing rates of antibiotic-resistant infections. Its article hardly discussed that, if at all.
But the related study’s rationale for connecting rates of air pollution to rates of new infections was the most interesting part of the story. If the article had been about comparing jab rates and excess deaths, it would have instantly drawn screeching cries of “correlation does not equal causation, squawk!”
But not one mention of “correlation vs causation” made it into the Establishment’s political magazine, which gushingly reported the new study — based on a model, of course — that correlated increasing global air pollution rates with increased antibiotic-resistant infections.
If they’ve told us one, they’ve told us a thousand times. Correlation does not prove causation. For example, during that same time period, rates of people listening to rap music increased too, providing another possible correlation. (Just kidding. I don’t have the figures on the rate of rap music consumption. But you get the point.)
The increasing rates of antibiotic-resistant infections suggest something could be suppressing people’s immune systems. As long as we’re doing correlations, what other rising rates could we correlate those infections to? Jab rates, maybe?
Nope. In that case, don’t be an idiot, you can’t just use correlations. And don’t ask questions. “Science” means you can invoke correlation when it is politically convenient, and shout down critics and wrongthinkers as needed.
🔥 More evidence appeared over the weekend that the nation’s diversity-hire infrastructure is crumbling under its own massive incompetence. The only question is, how many people will be killed in the collapse? The New York Post ran a story Saturday headlined, “Hawaii official concerned with ‘equity’ delayed releasing water for more than 5 hours as wildfires raged: report.”
FYI, Lahaina’s death toll is up to 111 Americans, with no sign of slowing down.
Dangerous moron Kaleo Manuel, deputy director of Hawaii’s Commission on Water Resource Management
Former Obama Foundation Leader and Hawaiian water official Kaleo Manuel, pictured above, refused to authorized Lahaina firefighters’ request for water for over five hours while the town was burning. Instead, Kaleo asked them to submit a report about the “impact of water diversion” before he would agree to approve it. I am not making that up.
This news has only added more fuel to residents’ raging convictions that the government wanted to burn them out, and who can blame them?
One clue was that last year, Kaleo exhorted a University of Hawaii audience of compliant, grant-hungry academics that, “Let water connect us and not divide us. We can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity … How do we coexist with the resources we have?” In the talk, Kaleo referred to “water” as “a sacred god.”
Sharing, equity, coexistence, Neo-paganism, nature over human life. Wokeness.
Speaking of which, Hawaii’s woke Governor, Josh Green, described the water-denial mishap as a reasonable “debate” over whether “agricultural water supplies should be used for battling wildfires.” He actually said that.
But don’t worry! On Wednesday, the government evacuated Kaleo to a brand new federal job in the Department of Land and Natural Resources where he can continue his important work on nature’s equity rights. So he won’t be available to testify.
The government’s brain-damaged drive for diversity may have finally reached maximum incompetence. Hopefully. We’ll see.
🔥 The controlled demolition of San Fransisco continues. A video clip making the rounds this weekend shows a San Fransisco woman who reported an unpleasant encounter with an unpleasant individual while shopping:
One can forgive her for asking her assailant the ridiculous Karenic question, “did you just spit in my face??” Although the type of person who will spit in your face is clearly unlikely to engage in a reasonable debate about it, she was shocked after all. A more compelling issue is that one wishes to ask whether she voted for the policies that created the environment where random men spit in her face in the first place.
One suspects that she did.
The thug’s threat to “rape” her constitutes the crime of assault, and spitting in her face is battery, both of which in normal times would have resulted in a arrest and prosecution. But note very well that the woman in the clip doesn’t even mention police. She never even called them. Why not?
Maybe because she knows that, after sixteen rounds of “defunding,” and after watching thousands of low-level criminals be not prosecuted, police won’t — or can’t — do anything about it?
The young lady’s story connects neatly with the next article.
🔥 The controlled demolition of New York and other blue cities continues. Yesterday I posted a video clip of what appeared to be a sidewalk collapsing into a New York City subway station, which is a metaphor for Saturday’s New York Post story, headlined “AOC, ‘squad’ spent $1.2M in campaign cash on private security despite calls to defund the police.”
Oh.
According to the Post, the so-called “squad” of socialist lawmakers, who are the most active anti-police group in Congress, who all oppose funding police departments, together spent over $1.2 million last year on private security forces and to “upgrade” security at their district offices in crime-ridden blue cities.
Ironically, woke representative Cori Bush paid almost $400K to a conservative, pro-Second Amendment security firm from St. Louis.
And, those security expenses were on top of the already-generous, taxpayer-funded security details provided to all representatives by the U.S. Capitol Police.
So, while the Sqaud is busily promoting “defund police” policies and advancing laws to reduce citizen’s access to firearms, they are simultaneously increasing their own sense of security using private police forces — using their own constituents’ money. See how it works?
In a just world, representatives would be forced to rely only on police, and go without any extra security. They should have to live in the cities they created. Just like the rest of us.
🔥 New York’s City Journal ran a story Friday headlined, “Empire Snub.” The sub-headline provided more context: “New York State’s governor joins President Biden in making it clear to New York City: you’re on your own.”
That doesn’t sound too good.
The problem appears to be that New York City is now hosting — at taxpayer expense — over 110,000 illegal aliens, with +2,700 more arriving every week. The City’s woke, virtue-signaling homeless advocacy system was only meant to be a way to distribute largesse, and was never actually supposed to deal with homelessness per se.
Now the City’s homeless “system” — if you can call it that — is buckling under the strain and nearing its final, indescribably shameful collapse.
Woke, diverse, inarticulate New York Mayor Eric Adams has been begging the federal government for help — but to no avail. Why? One possibility is the feds’ hands are tied. If the feds send New York City money for illegal aliens, then Texas could sue them and get a whole lot more money. Not to mention every other red state afflicted with the same curse.
Or maybe it’s playing out just as intended.
Residents, however, are decidedly uncomfortable with the direction things are going. Even though the City Journal is a reliably leftwing outlet, it stopped covering for the liberal city government and accurately described the crisis — and described the apocalyptic hellhole that New York City is rapidly becoming, after having to deal with the strain of only a relative few non-paying citizens soaking up the creaking welfare resources.
The City Journal didn’t sugar coat the problem: Eric Adams is a feckless numbskull who might be diverse but has no idea how to handle the problem. It seems to be a completely alien idea to the City Journal that diversity is not the same as competence:
With no end in sight to the migrant wave, the mayor lacks any plan to deal with the crisis—other than to keep asking Washington and Albany for billions of dollars to secure yet more hotel rooms and erect more tent cities … It’s clear that Adams has reached the end of this game. The White House is not going to help him, and Albany is not going to help him… It’s becoming obvious—if it wasn’t already—that it was a spectacularly bad idea to convert large-scale Midtown hotels into migrant shelters for the foreseeable future. The problems mount. The loss of hotels harms the city’s struggling post-Covid tourism industry, and it pushes up apartment-rental prices, as visitors priced out of hotels turn to apartments permanently converted into illegal Airbnb rentals. Migrant men working for food-delivery apps such as UberEats and Grubhub also have begun to store dozens of mopeds, motorcycles, and e-bikes haphazardly around the streets and sidewalks of Midtown hotels, creating an eyesore. Migrant women and children illegally vend fruit, sodas, and other wares in Times Square and Central Park, competing with legally licensed vendors, most of them immigrants themselves. And when the city isn’t renting entire hotels or blocks of rooms, it is taking over community recreation facilities, including soccer fields used by public-school children.
So the controlled demolition of New York City continues at a furious pace. Somewhere in Hell, Cloward and Piven are having a laugh together.
💉 Oh no! On Saturday, the Boston Globe ran another story helping explain last week’s Establishment Media hysteria over the newest covid scariant, “Eris,” all the booster boosterism, and all the reports about the wonderful benefits of masking.
The Globe’s Saturday article was headlined, “Moderna readies its updated COVID vaccine for fall, but demand could be tepid.” Tepid? So what? The story’s sub-headline connected the dots between the virus fearmongering and the money: “The Cambridge biotech’s stock is down sharply so far this year following its meteoric rise during the pandemic.”
Aha. Here at last is the real problem, as the Globe neatly put it:
Moderna has lost more than 40 percent of its market value this year amid doubts over how soon profitable new drugs will be able to offset slumping vaccine sales. For now, the COVID vaccine remains its only approved product…
Earlier this month, the company reported a net loss of $1.4 billion in the second quarter, a sharp reversal from the $2.2 billion it earned in the corresponding period last year.
Where’s the annual Pfizer booster shot in the news? Why is it just Moderna?
Sadly (for the Globe), although national covid hospital admissions ticked up slightly in August, climbing a tepid +14.3% to 10,320, they remain far below the much more terrifying 42,813 during the same period last summer. And vaccine sales are scraping the bottom of the pharmaceutical oyster bed.
People are hesitating! The Globe blamed folk’s “covid fatigue,” or “dimming enthusiasm,” for more jabs.
According to the Globe, only 32% of respondents to a Kaiser survey back in April said they’d be “very likely” to get an annual covid shot, with 21% equivocating they’d be “somewhat likely” to get it. But only 17% of Americans have taken the so-called bivalent booster.
So. What could the Establishment Media do to help out its biggest patron, Moderna? It’d better be quick!
💉 Recently my friend, mRNA-pioneer and courageous covid doc Robert Malone, published an excellent Substack about the media’s “leprosy” psyop. He began by crediting my C&C post on the same topic, which was titled “Hansen’s Psyop,” and Dr. Malone, correctly pointing out that I am a lawyer, not a scientist, wanted to clarify a few of the finer points on the science.
One of those finer points was that the studies I linked suggested mRNA jabs trigger dormant or previous leprosy infections, rather than causing new infections. So I did a little more research — not for point-scoring or for argument — but only to advance the conversation, and found another recent study suggesting things might be a bit more complicated.
Early this month, Discover Med News ran a story headlined, “Leprosy adverse events associated with BNT162b2 anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (two case reports).” The article described a recent British study that correlated vaccination with leprosy infections.
The study examined all 52 people who came to the UK’s Leprosy Clinic for treatment in 2021. What they found was remarkable. Nearly all of those leprosy cases (98%) were in vaccinated people (only one was not vaccinated). Five of the 52 were brand-new leprosy cases, and not cases of reoccurrence or relapse.
Of those five brand-new cases, the researchers concluded that two of the cases were positively “associated with” mRNA vaccination. In the first case, new leprosy symptoms arose one week after the patient got his second Pfizer shot. In the second case — a 27-year old man — symptoms arose 52 days after getting a Pfizer booster (his original doses were CoronaVac).
The authors also noted previous case reports about at least 14 people with leprosy adverse events associated with SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, in 6 published articles, from both leprosy-endemic and non-endemic regions, which is very suggestive. Ten of the 14 patients had a leprosy adverse event after their first vaccination, three after the second, and one following the third shot.
Again, I would not dare quibble with Dr. Malone about the science, because I would quickly be embarrassed. My goal is only to suggest there is evidence of novel leprosy infections connected with vaccination, rather than just reoccurrence. Last month, the Establishment Media was quick to call Florida a leprosy “hot spot” after a single case report.
Is it fair to call the jabs a leprosy “hot spot?”
🔥 I ran a story this weekend about how heroic anti-Ulez vigilantes were taking matters — and London’s new traffic cameras — into their own hands by stripping the odious devices right off their ugly poles. Then I ran a story about how the City of London had actively suppressed scientific studies suggesting the Orwellian traffic-taxing scheme wouldn’t work.
Now, I am pleased to report on the latest stage in the counter-revolution against Ulez in London: traffic activism.
Yesterday, the UK Evening Standard ran the story, headlined “Ulez protest featuring tractors and three-wheel car brings traffic to a standstill.”
They’re using traffic to beat the traffic cameras.
The climate-change-alarmist Ulez scheme requires drivers in “high carbon” areas of London to pay a £12.50 ($16) daily fee starting August 29th, if their vehicles aren’t registered with required emissions standards. Many older cars, including all diesel cars and trucks, cannot possibly meet the new standards, so all those owners will have to buy a new car or pay the daily rate to drive.
For the benefit of Portland residents: in other words, it will cost Londoners $160 every ten days to drive a noncompliant car.
Happily, the protests seem to be having some effect. The Standard reported that Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month urged London’s Mayor Khan to “think twice” about the Ulez expansion. And, on Monday, Labour leader Keir Starmer suggested cities should look at “other options” for tackling air pollution.
🔥 The New York Post ran a heartwarming, counter-revolutionary story early this month, headlined “Texas teacher loses job after complaining sister was dating white man: ‘I enjoy being a racist’.”
Mesquite Independent School District’s elementary teacher Claire Kyle went on a poorly-considered social media rampage last month, after finding out her sister, who is black, was dating a “white man.”
Among saying plenty of other ugly things, Ms. Kyle used a variety of slurs against white people, and “joked” that she had asked her boyfriend to murder her sister’s boyfriend. She also enthusiastically bragged (using exclamation marks) about how much she enjoyed being a racist, which in legal terms is what we lawyers call “an admission.”
After parents began complaining, Ms. Kyle returned to social media to brag again, this time that the school board promised they wouldn’t fire her — because she was an excellent teacher and officials knew she was “only joking.”
Two days later, Ms. Kyle abruptly resigned. Mesquite ISD issued a statement saying, “As of this morning, the employee is no longer a part of the Mesquite ISD organization and is not eligible for rehire,” adding its officials can’t say any more because it’s a personnel matter. They made her a voluntary termination offer she couldn’t refuse, is my guess.
Fool around and find out. Viva la counter-revolution!
Have a marvelous Monday! C&C will return tomorrow morning with another delicious serving, so have your roundup mugs ready.
Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved–
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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.
