☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Tuesday, July 12, 2022 ☙ PERFORMANCE ISSUES 🦠

NYC pushes better masks this time; boosters don't work as advertised; mag advises dems to shed groomers; Brits wait for groomer report; new Hunter Biden problems; and much much more.

Good morning and Happy Tuesday, C&C Army! The summer is well and truly here, and it’s warm weather time. Today’s roundup includes: NYC pushes masks, again; covid boosters don’t work as expected; a breakthrough article in liberal media suggests dems shed groomers; British people wait for a long-expected grooming report; more Hunter Biden leaked videos and voice mails emerge; progressive groups oppose Biden’s re-nomination; BRICS countries continue working to replace SWIFT; and the Russians play hardball with European gas shipments.

🗞*NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

😷 Even though they don’t stop covid transmission, and never have, New York City is once again encouraging residents to wear “high quality masks:”

TODAY @TODAYshow

As coronavirus cases surge, driven by the BA.5 variant, New York City officials are encouraging residents and visitors to wear high-quality face masks indoors.

Science! I suppose they are covering up mask failures with “high-quality masks” now. Cut up t-shirts just won’t do it anymore, what with the new variants and everything. Science!

Given such an obvious opportunity, DeSantis’ press secretary leapt on the news, commenting the migration of New Yorkers to live in Florida:

Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 @ChristinaPushaw

New York City is not going back to normal. That’s why so many people left already and more are leaving.

💉 Israeli National News ran a story this weekend headlined, “New Study: COVID Booster Significantly Delays End of Infection.” Uh-oh! This won’t be good for business.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that boosted people recover significantly slower and are contagious for much longer than unvaccinated people.

Now you tell us.

At five days post-infection, fewer than 25% of the unjabbed were still contagious, whereas around 70% of boosted people still carried viable virus particles. Among partially vaccinated, half were still contagious at +5 days. Worse, at +10 days, 31% of boosted people still carried live, culturable virus. But only 6% of the unvaccinated remained contagious at day 10.

In other words, boosted people are five times more likely still to be contagious at +10 days post-infection than unvaccinated people. So the booster shots actually INCREASE infections. They speed up the spread.

It’s working great!

🔥 The Week ran an article yesterday headlined “Democrats Can Prevail in the Culture War. But They Won’t Like the Winning Move.” Just for reference, The Week is so left-focused that the article starts out noting Democrats’ historic STRENGTH on economic issues, and then dismisses without discussion any need to address economic issues for November’s elections. Who cares about that stuff anyways?

We’ve come a long way from “it’s the economy, stupid.” Evolving. Pivoting.

And, maybe just a little frightened of the import of its words, while carefully building its case, The Week waits until almost the very end of the article to offer its prescription:

“If Democrats want to challenge Republicans on their preferred cultural terrain, then, they will need to… stat[e] clearly and repeatedly that they don’t favor the positions on gender fluidity and medical interventions for children that the right claims they do. If Democrats can’t or won’t do that, any effort at pushback on culture will fail.”

Wow. This advice is absolutely sensible and right on target. Let’s review how we got here:

Covid “Pandemic”

-> “Distance Learning” (unlearning)

-> Parents See Zoom Lessons

-> Parents See Radical BLM, Trans Agenda

-> Parents Get Furious and Activated

-> Parents blame Democrats

There was a singular moment in time, right as everyone recognized how the radical left had termited throughout the national school system, occupying school boards and colonizing superintendent positions. For that brief moment in time, the Democrats had a chance to side with parents against the radical leftwing of their own party.

They blew it.

It might seem counterintuitive that there was even a choice for Democrats. But I don’t think the Democrat party writ large is really responsible for what’s happened in schools. The true villains are Soros, the WEFfers, and similar revolutionary leftwing corporatist-Nazi activist groups. I doubt most Democrat parents are comfortable with their agenda — even if they aren’t allowed to say it out loud.

The Democrat party COULD have seized that critical moment to heroically advocate “for the children,” and purged a handful of destructive radicals from the ranks. Alas. Instead the Democrat party reflexively closed ranks around its most extreme — and wealthiest and most anti-democratic — elements. This pushed ordinary democrats like Elon Musk to start seeing the party as illustrated in this now-famous cartoon:

The Week seems to recognize this awful political problem. The comments were turned off, so I couldn’t evaluate how its readers reacted. Unfortunately, the radical progressives are the noisiest members of the Democrat party, and they bully traditional liberals into silence. The Week is trying to break through the noise with some common sense.

I wish them luck, but I’m skeptical that reason will prevail at this moment in history. We shall see.

🔥 Meanwhile, Sky News UK ran a related story this morning headlined, “Long-Awaited Report Into Widespread Grooming of Children in Telford Due to Be Published Today.”

An independent inquiry will report today on its months-long investigation of claims that up to 1,000 children were groomed in Telford, UK over a 40-year period, while the local police turned a blind eye or even assisted the groomers. It is literally unbelievable, but it is also undeniable that SOMETHING horrible happened there. Out of many, many examples, one middle-class girl interviewed for the story said she was trafficked to “men of every kind” between ages 14 and 18. She said the traffickers would “threaten that they would rape my mum or my sisters. There was quite a bit of violence involved.”

There are credible reports of scores of underaged pregnancies in Telford that somehow failed to trigger social agency investigations, and were essentially ignored — even including cases of repeat pregnancies in the same underaged girls. There are other credible reports of girls who would not cooperate with groomers being murdered along with their families, usually by burning their homes down in the middle of the night.

When the scandal emerged several years ago, residents claimed well-known “gangs” of muslim men were behind widespread organized grooming and trafficking of British school girls, which provoked an even bigger debate in the UK about hate speech.

A 2018 investigation by the Sunday Mirror concluded:

* Social workers knew of abuse in the 1990s, but police took a decade to launch the first probe.

* Council staff saw abused and trafficked children as “prostitutes” instead of victims, according to discovered files.

* Abusers addicted middle-class girls with drugs to keep them compliant.

* Authorities failed to even record details about Muslim abusers for fear of “racism.”

* In one case, police failed or refused to investigate FIVE TIMES until an MP intervened.

* One victim said cops tried to stop her from finding out why her abusers had not been prosecuted, because they feared she would talk to the media.

Meanwhile leftwing media in Britain has downplayed the scandal. The BBC has consistently reported that the Telford cases have been “sensationalized.” Wikipedia’s entry on Telford doesn’t even use the word “muslim,” although that feature of the scandals has roiled Britain for years.

Gerard Batten, UKIP’s Interim leader at the time, told press: “These horror stories out of Telford are further evidence that these rape gangs are not a local, but a national problem, with new examples being constantly uncovered. There is a refusal on the part of the authorities to recognize that this is a consequence of Islamic ideology and to face the ghastly truths.”

The British experience parallels the U.S. experience in several key ways. The grooming, the leftwing defense of the groomers, and the deployment of political correctness to squash speech and necessary investigations can be found in both countries. In Britain, the extremist left has captured the local police and the social agencies; here in the U.S. it has captured school boards and the medical establishment.

In Britain it’s trafficking; here it’s transition affirmation and treatment.

So, will the Telford report today be courageous and honest, or will it just be more politically-correct pabulum designed to de-escalate the discussion about why the left is always siding with child abusers? We’ll see.

In both countries, the radical left are political arsonists, taking a blowtorch to the culture wars. The good news is it is creating an untenable situation that has to be resolved one way or the other. I believe good will be triumphant over evil in the end.

🔥 I didn’t report this story over the weekend because corporate media was ignoring it and I couldn’t source it anywhere solid, but finally yesterday, National Review ran a story headlined, “Secret Service Responds to Graphic Hunter Biden Photos, Videos.”

The Secret Service confirmed yesterday it is “aware” of reports that Hunter Biden’s iCloud account was leaked by 4Chan hackers over the weekend, exposing texts, pictures, and videos of Joe Biden’s son doing drugs and engaging in other salacious and almost certainly illegal activities.

To give you some idea of what kind of material was on Hunter’s iCloud account, when I checked, the 4Chan’ers were in the midst of heated discussion with each other this weekend, warning about how to avoid becoming a target of federal investigation for publishing pictures of Hunter involved with underaged girls, because the pics could be characterized as child pornography, and the leakers could be accused of publishing it. The videos that they did leak, and that survived 4Chan censorship, are pretty bad.

In one example, for some reason, Hunter Biden filmed himself weighing out a baggie of crack cocaine and arguing with a prostitute about how much there was. Now imagine for a brief moment how the media might be responding if the video included Donald Trump, Jr. instead of Hunter Biden.

4Chan, usually quite hands-off, has already cracked down on many of the posts and deleted their content, presumably because the pictures featured illegal child pornography. So we can expect the hackers to be trying other more creative ways to get the information out. If you are unfortunate enough to encounter one of these, do NOT republish it.

Note that the new material is NOT from the Hunter Biden laptop. It’s from his ICLOUD account. Where Hunter stored all his private stuff, with Apple.

In the cloud. Online.

One has to wonder: what would motivate Hunter to record himself doing all this criminal stuff and putting it online? Losing his laptop was bad enough but this is an order of magnitude even more reckless. It rockets far beyond a secret desire to get caught. It’s almost like Hunter is bragging that he is entirely immune from prosecution. He can do whatever he wants. He’s rubbing it in our faces.

So far, he’s right.

🔥 In more bad signs of Democrat discontent with Joe Biden, the Blaze ran an article yesterday headlined, “Progressive Group Says Running Biden as the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nominee ‘Would Be a Tragic Mistake,’ and That It Will Campaign to Ensure He Is Not Nominated.”

The gist is that a full-on progressive group said it will actively campaign against Joe Biden if he runs again. The group, RootsAction, released a statement saying, “President Biden has been neither bold nor inspiring. And his prospects for winning re-election appear to be bleak. With so much at stake, making him the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer in 2024 would be a tragic mistake.”

It’s not just Joe’s advanced age and fragility. “It’s his performance,” explained RootsAction, “his inability to fight for working people and stand up against Republican and corporate obstruction — that has us worried about 2024.”

The unintentionally hilarious part is that it’s starting to look like what we have all been assuming is flat wrong. We all assumed there’d be NO WAY Joe would run again. We assumed it was obvious that he was a one-termer. We assumed it was one and done.

It seemed obvious. It they don’t expect him to run again, that explains why they don’t care about Joe’s polling — what does it matter?

But, if democrat activists are worried enough to go public, that means they they must think there’s a good chance Joe WILL run again. Or, maybe this is all just a big stage drama to pave the way for Joe’s graceful exit, stage left.

🔥 ZeroHedge ran a story yesterday headlined, “China And Russia Want To Replace US Dollar With BRICS Currencies.” BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and represents a group of nations working together to replace the U.S.’s SWIFT international payment-processing service.

International traders use the U.S. SWIFT system to process cross-border payments because it is safe, fast, accurate, and convenient, linked to 100 countries and able to convert currencies in real-time.

The BRICS attacks on the SWIFT system are only possible because the U.S. started playing games with SWIFT at the outset of the Ukraine crisis earlier this year. In other words, Joe Biden did that. The petulant children in the Biden Administration did what no previous administration was ever reckless enough to do: sacrificed the credibility and trustworthiness of the SWIFT system for short-term political objectives.

It remains unclear whether BRICS can pull off creating a viable SWIFT replacement; it’s a huge job. But the Biden Administration is making that job a whole lot easier. Thanks, Joe!

🔥 European media is reporting that Canada has finally agreed — over Ukrainian objection — to return a German natural-gas turbine that had been under repair. The Germans plan to use the turbine in the Russian gas pipeline system, which is what caused the controversy, and caused the Canadians to lock down the part. Shipping it now required a special exemption from the Russia sanctions.

Meanwhile yesterday, Russia closed its Nordstream-1 natural gas pipeline for ten days “for maintenance.” That cuts Germany off from Russian natural gas, which the Germans depend on. They are freaking out, worried that the Russians won’t turn the gas back on at the end of the ten-day maintenance period.

The Germans aren’t the only ones. ZeroHedge ran a story yesterday headlined, “Goldman Doubles 2023 European Gas Price Target As It No Longer Sees Full Restoration Of Nordstream 1 Flows.” The story explains Goldman Sachs’ investment team also predicts Russia will partially or fully shutter its pipeline unless the Germans make major political concessions on sanctions.

One concession that the Russians want is approval of their brand-new Nordstream-2 pipeline, which is very similar to Nordstream-1 except, if I understand the complex factors correctly, Nordstream-2 would allow Russia to avoid shipping natural gas through Ukraine. Ukrainian energy companies like the ones Hunter is involved with would lose significant revenue if Nordstream-2 comes online.

Nordstream-2 has been mired in political lockdown from the war sanctions, and Russia wants those sanctions lifted. So some observers think Russia is playing hardball with Germany to coerce approval of its new, Ukraine-excluding pipeline. It’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all the moving pieces on the world’s chess board.

Robin Brooks @RobinBrooksIIF

10 day maintenance of Nordstream starts today. Will this be permanent? The facts: (i) we told Putin we stop buying his gas in 2024; (ii) Putin swims in cash due to high energy prices; (iii) Putin can "afford" to mess with Europe as he's already shown by cutting Nordstream by 60%.

Have a terrific Tuesday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more.

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