Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10/27/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! And so we begin the last week of October, with its tricks and treats marking the beginning of the joyful (and sort of frantic) Christmas season. Your roundup includes: President Trump makes an unscheduled stop and scores four trade deals and a peace plan; gold-standard research lab publishes new study finding surprising effects from the influenza vaccine; corporate media inflates twisted study claiming covid jabs cure cancer; and North Carolina boy scout troop demonstrates Scout-like bravery and valor.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Where in the world is President Trump? (Or Carmen Sandiego, for that matter?) Late last night, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Trump strikes deals on trade, critical minerals in Southeast Asia.” The President’s unscheduled stop in Kuala Lumpur, wedged in between Vietnam and the Philippines, wasn’t surprise sightseeing— it was a strategic ambush. Trump’s team inked four unexpected trade and mining agreements that put new pieces on the rare-earth chessboard, hardening America’s claim on critical minerals while leaving Beijing staring across the table at a shrinking pile of pieces.
It seems impossible this undisclosed trip could just be a last-minute addition. On top of four trade deals, President Trump also supervised the signing of a long-term peace agreement between irritated neighbors Cambodia and Thailand— a deal the experts had gloomily predicted would surely crumble.
And he did it all over the weekend.
You’ll recall that earlier this year, a decades-old dispute along the foggy border between Cambodia and Thailand —an old argument over an ancient cliffside temple and tourist trap— burst into an enthusiastically kinetic war until last summer, when Trump brokered an unsteady cease-fire. Yesterday, with Trump sitting between them, the two still-angry leaders calmed down and agreed to begin completely disarming the border region and engage in a structured, long-term dispute-resolution process.
The President was in good spirits and ‘danced’ his trademark shuffle with some delighted Malaysian performers:
At the weekend’s start, the New York Times had groused about Trump fleeing the U.S. to avoid hard questions about, well, everything going on over here. But he did it again. Trump just landed critical minerals deals with four Southeast Asian countries —minerals badly needed to provide options during negotiations with China— without months or years of diplomatic seesawing, without swarms of State Department striped-pantsers, and without anyone knowing it was coming until just before the ink was on the paper.
The President is rewriting entire bookshelves on diplomacy— and redefining the Art of the Possible.
🔥 Not only that, but also over the weekend, with the new leverage from Trump’s new Asian deals, Scott Bessent’s negotiating team and their Chinese counterparts announced a preliminary framework for a US-China trade deal, which will push back China’s threatened rare-earth (magnets) sanctions by a year.
The ‘markets’ were pleased as punch. Headline from Discovery Alerts, this morning:
Again, it bears repeating that Trump did it all over the weekend. He left Washington on Friday night. While the Beltway was brunching, the pundits were pontificating, and the Times was complaining, Trump and his team were red-lining the globe, striking mineral deals, brokering peace, and resetting U.S.–China trade terms before most of Washington even noticed he’d left the Western hemisphere.
This turnabout led the New York Times to post a top-of-page article grudgingly conceding Trump is doing some things right. “Without question,” the Times allowed, after spending nine months questioning everything, “Mr. Trump has enjoyed some substantial second-term foreign policy victories.” (Don’t worry— the Times stayed true to brand. After that difficult admission, the paper immediately shifted to complaining how bad Trump’s temper is and wondering whether the President can do any more success, since Canadians now flinch in terror whenever they spot a red cap.)
This is the hardest-working Administration in U.S. history. Does the man sleep?
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Earlier this month, the gold-standard Cleveland Clinic published a shocking study titled, “Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season: A Prospective Cohort Study.” In short, the Clinic found that last year’s flu vaccine was at least as effective at preventing the potentially deadly disease than using Himalayan prayer beads or nailing a dead raccoon over your front door.
Haha, I’m just kidding. According to the study of some 53,000 healthcare professionals, dead raccoons and prayer beads work better than the flu vaccine. The Clinic found that, after about 90 days following the injections —well after any FDA-required postmarketing trials stop looking— staff who got the shots became increasingly more likely to get the flu than their unjabbed coworkers.
In technical terms, the Clinic’s researchers discovered the flu vaccine had a negative efficacy of -27%.
Now look, dummies, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’ll just stick with the raccoons. But that’s because you aren’t a $cientist. Unlike you, those profit-seeking professionals know how to say “correlation does not prove causation.” Just because thousands of healthcare workers were more likely to come down with the flu after getting the shots doesn’t prove the shots caused it. It could be anything, like witches. Or anti-vaxxers. Either one.
You really need to learn this lesson. Correlation definitely does not prove causation … unless it tends to show that vaccines work. Then it’s Katy, bar the door.
Speaking of correlations: Igor, please cue the next story.
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Late last week, the Washington Post (of course) ran a vaccine story with a headline so definitive and so magically wonderful I decided to screen-grab it for you. Behold:
I suspect the cascade of studies lately showing increased rates of cancer following mRNA vaccination were getting too inconveniently crowded, so Big Pharma needed some friendly scientists to put some stuffing back in the jabs. If so, it resulted in the stupidest example of engineered $cience since, well, the last time.
But never mind. Focus on that headline and its lack of any qualification or ambiguity: “mRNA coronavirus vaccines prolonged life of cancer patients.” See anything about correlation versus causation there? No, you don’t. Me neither.
I am only a poor, country lawyer, not a credentialed epidemiologist or a fancy pharma prostitute. So I will do my humble best to point out a couple of things I found in this terrific study that caused me to raise an eyebrow upward a quarter inch or more, until it gave me an ice cream headache.
💉 But first, let’s pause and soak in the intrinsic comedy. The shots weren’t designed to “prolong the life of cancer patients.” How perfectly preposterous. There’s no magical mechanism of action anyone has proposed, except the writers, who speculated that a higher systemic immune response caused by the body’s shocked reaction to the horrid shots prompts a more aggressive response to cancer, too.
I mention that dumb idea for fairness.
Now on to the problems. First of all, behold a conflict of interest so glaringly obvious that the researchers didn’t even bother trying to hide it down in the disclosures:
Haha! The study’s authors are mRNA vaccine developers. Take one guess whether the Washington Post article mentioned this clear conflict. You only get one. (Answer: no, of course not. Don’t be a fool.)
Next —and again, I’m not a vaccine developer or a wily statistician— but when I read the article, I discovered the universe of claimed benefits shrinking faster than Gavin Newsom’s man-card. The study group only included patients already receiving an experimental immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. Second —though they looked at all types of cancers— the researchers only found life-prolonging data for two very specific cancer types (metastatic melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer).
And then came this little gem (which I expected to find). The raw data didn’t show any life-prolonging. The data required a little statistical massage therapy first:
Thirty-nine adjusting variables. Why did they control for 39 covariables? Why not 22, or 46? Was it perhaps that, when they dialed in 39 statistical adjustments, the happy results popped out? The supplemental tables included a long, dense explanation of how they picked those variables that only shifted the problem around.
Unlike WaPo’s swooning article about the study, the study itself did not claim that the correlation they found proved causation. (“Receipt of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines within 100 days of initiating ICI is associated with significantly improved median and three-year overall survival.”) But that did not stop the Washington Post (and many other corporate media platforms) from citing the study as some long-desired evidence of magical secondary effects from the jabs.
Finally, note that the study said nothing about rates of cancers. The entire finding was a statistically adjusted marginal extension in survival times (not any cure) for two specific types of cancers among patients receiving a specific kind of immune therapy, written by scientists who develop mRNA cancer vaccines. Now look again at the WaPo’s headline.
The WaPo’s framing worked. Scads of BlueSky people were ecstatic:
I used to dive deeper into these silly studies to find all the tricks, but it is time-consuming, and more to the point, the jab-worshippers won’t listen anyway. For every valid objection, they cough up a generous exception— exceptions that they never allow for studies by non-conflicted scientists using much larger data sets, like the Cleveland Clinic did.
Don’t bother. Suppose you start citing more studies and data and actually winning the argument. In that case, progressives will smugly unleash a highly scientific slam dunk like, “That sounds like something Hitler would say,” and that’s the end of the debate as far as they are concerned.
Anyway. So much for “correlation doesn’t prove causation.” It turns out, it often does. Just ask Blue Sky.
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From Cleveland Clinic to Cleveland County. Late last week, the Shelby Star ran a delightful story headlined, “Boy Scouts were at the right place at the right time to put out church fire in Cleveland Co.”
The fires started in the foothills of Cleveland County, North Carolina, where the land rolls slow and green, the kind of place where you can smell Sunday dinner a mile before you reach town, and every third porch sports an American flag and a rocking chair. It’s the kind of countryside that smells like pine resin and diesel — church steeples taller than the water towers, cows lazily chewing their cud (because they can’t digest gum) right next to the volunteer firehouse.
Two Baptist churches — Calvary’s Cross and Tabernacle — stood a few miles apart near the tiny crossroads of Casar. As the sun set on the night of October 17th, someone tried to burn them both to the ground under cover of the deepening darkness.
But Providence had scheduled a detour.
A caravan of Boy Scouts from Troop 39, out of Matthews, was driving north toward Camp Grimes and singing “99 bottles of beer on the wall” when alert Scout leader Jason Yepko glanced to his left and spotted orange light flickering against the siding of Calvary’s Cross Baptist Church. He pulled over, safely parking well clear of the flames, and started snatching up the water jugs the troop had packed for their trip. The Scouts leaped out beside him and went to work.
They weren’t heroes in uniform that night— just six khaki-shorts-wearing, road-weary teenagers, a couple of coolers, and a Scoutmaster. Yet they charged the fire like a squad that had trained for it, dousing the waist-high flames that had begun to crawl up the church’s outer wall. When the water ran out, they didn’t stop. They used their cups of soda from their last Buckee’s stop, pouring out their Cokes to choke out the last stubborn tongues of flame.
Then, having done what they could, Scoutmaster Yepko called 911.
By the time firemen arrived, the boys had already combed the grounds for stray embers and cleared the area. Minutes later, the radio crackled with news of a second fire down the road — Tabernacle Baptist Church on Corinth Church Road. The fire crews —already at hand thanks to the Scouts’ timely call— rushed down the street.
When the smoke finally settled, two churches stood where two smoldering ruins should have been. No one was hurt. The sheriff’s office declared the blazes intentional arson and began combing the sites for clues.
But that night, the headlines belonged to the courageous Scouts.
“They did an awesome job,” Scoutmaster Yepko told reporters afterward. “We were at the right place at the right time.” The boys, he said, had lived out the heart of the Scouting law: Do a good turn daily.
Cleveland County Fire Marshal Perry Davis agreed. “I’m very appreciative of people in the community who have witnessed these events and minimized the damage,” he said, tipping his hat to the impromptu firefighting troop.
When their work was done, the boys dusted the soot from their hands, prayed quietly with the grateful pastor, collected their cups and jugs, and climbed back into their convoy — back on the road to Camp Grimes, where tents and bug spray awaited. The church behind them stood strong, blackened but unbroken, its lawn littered with wet ash and the sticky remnants of soft drink salvation.
The American Spirit is alive and well.
Have a magnificent Monday! Camp back here tomorrow morning, for more instructive and informative essential news and fiery commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
