☕️ BUTTERFLIES ☙ Wednesday, July 30, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump lands historic judicial win as media pretends to shrug; explosive climate exposé cracks the narrative; and a public service announcement on safe handling of demonically helpful chatbots.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! In today’s vacation roundup: Trump easily succeeds with historic, paradigm-shattering judicial confirmation and corporate media remains unimpressed; astonishing and narrative-cracking climate exposé shows Overton Window opening and real investigative journalism peeking through; and a community alert for safe use of demon-possessed chatbots.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Tectonic shifts are happening behind the scenes. Yesterday, we got a quick glimpse, as the New York Times published its latest submission in the “trash journalism” contest, a model of scribbly malpractice headlined, “Senate, Rejecting Whistle-Blower Alarms, Confirms Bove to Appeals Court.” But what the Times didn’t say was much more revealing than the unsourced nonsense it was trying to push.

Yesterday, in a squeaker vote (50-49), the Senate narrowly confirmed Emil Bove III, 44, to a lifetime appointment on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Let’s first tackle the NYT’s lame narrative, then I’ll show you how historic and politically significant this was. Remember: Federal appellate judges are possibly the most powerful judges in the country, since the Supreme Court hears so few cases. The vast majority of cases (99%) are decided in the twelve circuit courts of appeal and become binding precedent.

Bove’s career is a judicial horror movie for progressives. A former bulldog federal prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, Bove built a hard-charging reputation for tackling terrorists and money launderers. Then, he jumped the rails and joined Donald Trump’s legal defense team during the Manhattan criminal trial, earning the lawyer instant villain status on MSNBC.

When Trump swept back into office, he installed Bove in the upper echelons of the Justice Department, bypassing Senate approval (which wasn’t needed). Bove promptly generated furious headlines by firing longtime DOJ staffers, dropping high-profile corruption charges against Mayor Adams, and allegedly telling colleagues to ignore court orders that conflicted with immigration policy. To his critics at the Times, Bove is a Trump toady and judicial scofflaw.

Though Bove was nominated for the slot back on May 28, only within the last week —right before the vote— did three last-minute “whistleblowers” scuttle from the D.C. shadows to oppose his nomination. Only one whistleblower was named. Only one provided any concrete allegation: the claim that Bove allegedly once quipped that the DOJ should “ignore” unconstitutional judicial orders. There’s no documentary evidence of that, just the leaker’s say-so.

But of course, that became the Times’ entire narrative focus. He’s a lawless order-defier! The article happily invested the bulk of column inches reporting on the single, undocumented claim that Bove once “said” something. The Grey Lady ignored all the most significant facts. Let’s try to figure out why.

🔥 The most significant fact, unmentioned in the story, is that Bove has never been a judge. It’s rare enough for a lawyer to leap straight to district court; it’s almost unheard of for a lawyer to jump over the district court directly to the court of appeals. It’s only happened a handful of times in American history. You’d think the Times would at least mention Bove’s “inexperience,” or the Senate’s willingness to confirm an “unqualified” candidate to one of the nation’s most powerful courts, but the story remained strangely silent on that point.

In a clear sign that the ABA knows it is treading on razor-thin ice these days, it strategically refrained from rating politically radioactive Bove as “unqualified,” saying only that it “lacked sufficient information” to provide any guidance to Senators. AG Pam Bondi had explicitly denied any DOJ access to the ABA, disabling the customary nominee interviews, background disclosures, and bar record waivers. That’s the second remarkable fact that the Times failed to tell its readers.

The hyper-partisan ABA —whose ratings corporate media used to treat like papal infallibility— is now a spent force. Not only are the TDS-afflicted ABA governors being ignored by the Senate and ghosted by DOJ, but those facts weren’t even worth reporting, apparently.

A nomination like Bove’s would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, even under Bush or Reagan. The fact that he’s now confirmable was the real story. Trump gets what he wants.

🔥 The choice of the Third Circuit is also tantalizingly suggestive. It sits over the political battlegrounds of swing states Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which in recent years have been ruling on binders’ full of elections cases. It handles immigration appeals, and decides top-tier business cases arising from Delaware, where most big corporations are headquartered. (None of that background appeared anywhere in the story.) Coincidentally, Justice Alito served on the Third Circuit before ascending to SCOTUS.

Perhaps most of all, Emil Bove’s nomination and confirmation sent a loud, unmistakable signal to the judiciary. Trump just opened their velvet-roped, invitation-only club up to the general public. He kicked down the mahogany doors, tore up the guest list, and told the bouncer to get lost. The clear message is: If the judiciary is going to act like a political branch, then we’ll treat it like one. And we’ll win.

The fact that the Senate just boosted a non-judge straight to the appellate level also signals that the judiciary has lost senators’ respect. They essentially said, anybody can do this job.

At 44, “Trump lawyer” Bove is a judicial spring chicken. He could shape policy on the court for 30-40 years. Bove’s historic confirmation was a hypersonic missile aimed right at the progressive judiciary’s heart. His success wasn’t just a victory. It was a proof of concept; an invitation for Trump to do more like this.

It was yet more “shattered norms.”

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A few days ago, I flagged this Politico story for the blog, and then it went viral. The headline included properly applied sneer quotes: “Researchers quietly planned a test to dim sunlight. They wanted to ‘avoid scaring’ the public.” The story means that chemtrail skepticism is finally going fully mainstream.

On Saturday, Politico exposed a secretly orchestrated plan by climate researchers —Politico even called it “secretive”— backed by billionaires and quietly aided by federal scientists, to launch a massive experiment spraying ‘saltwater aerosols’ over a region larger than Puerto Rico to “brighten clouds” and cool the Earth. In other words, just like Monty Burns from the Simpson’s: to block the sun.

Get this: it wasn’t just some scrappy group of lab-coated idealists. The science team had two PR firms. Singularity Media ran the pre-test public relations. In a shocking PR directive, Singularity emphasized —boldfaced and underlined— that “There will be no mention of the study taking place in Alameda.” That’s a different kind of public relations right there.

Here’s the email (included in the story!), which also mentioned coordinating with NPR, which apparently agreed to help conceal the Alameda test:

In other words, “Let’s hide the story until it’s irreversible.”

And there you go: “We are presenting the effort as a woman-led effort.” While NPR didn’t frame their story with the suggested woke messaging, it complied by not mentioning the Alameda test in its April 28, 2024 climate podcast. A text message that Politico got via public records requests showed the researchers coordinating to close down the museum ship (the Hornet) during the test to avoid “problematic” community engagement:

They were caught dead to rights. It was literally “a conspiracy.” That is the dictionary definition.

🔥 Documents obtained by Politico showed the project’s University of Washington leaders openly strategized about how to avoid “scaring the public” while preparing to unleash solar geoengineering tech off the West Coast. In other words: let’s not get caught. Their initial pilot —covertly deployed from the deck of a naval museum— was shut down in 20 minutes by alarmed Alameda County officials who learned about it from a New York Times story. The public backlash ended the test, but the documents revealed the team had already planned bigger, more global tests— with help from crypto moguls, PR firms, NOAA officials, and apparently, the private offices of one Bill Gates.

That’s what we need most: the architect of Windows Millennium Edition and Clippy the Annoying Character tinkering with the global thermostat. Perfect. If history is any guide, the sky would crash halfway through an automatic update, and the help desk would suggest rebooting the atmosphere. Twice. Then a pop-up will appear in the sky: Marine Cloud Brightening has encountered a fatal error. Sorry.

A better question is: how many of these operations aren’t getting caught? Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has filed a bill to ban these kinds of “experiments,” is running with it:

The story wasn’t about the test. That story broke several months ago when Alameda nixed it. This story, remarkably, is about the coverup.

This wasn’t about a failed experiment. It was about a systematic conspiracy to avoid scrutiny, coordinated messaging to suppress disclosure, private meetings in Salesforce Tower with billionaires and federal agencies (including dinner and happy hour), and plans already underway for a Puerto Rico-sized sequel even before the pilot was launched.

What Politico reported was not science gone awry, but science deliberately hidden from oversight. Not only does it prove the conspiracy theorists right about scientists spraying chemicals into the air, but it proves they were even right that there is a conspiracy.

🔥 Does anyone else remember the so-called “Butterfly Effect?” Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist and mathematician, coined the concept while studying atmospheric models in the early 1960s. He famously quipped, “A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and a tornado forms in Texas.” It was literally about weather. For a long time, it was considered settled meteorological science (if not foundational science).

The Butterfly Effect gave rise to a host of downstream scientific discoveries, including chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and the modern understanding that weather systems are fundamentally unpredictable beyond a certain horizon. It became so integrated into scientific thinking that it massively influenced meteorology, climate science, the philosophy of science generally, and spawned a cottage pop-culture industry of movies, books, and self-help programs.

Once considered a generational scientific insight, the Butterfly Effect is now being treated like a silly and inconvenient superstition by the very same scientists spraying mist into the sky.

Think of it this way. If science accepts that a Brazilian butterfly can cause a hurricane in Texas, can a cloud-brightening experiment viewable from space cause flash floods in Texas? Take your time. I’ll wait.

🔥 There’s no reason to think they did not proceed with the bigger experiment. When Politico asked directly, both SilverLining and the University of Washington declined to answer questions about the open-ocean deployment.

The simple fact is, nothing is stopping them from conducting their dangerous experiments on the high seas where no one can witness it. There is no binding international law preventing anyone from spraying anything into the air.

The painful truth is that the Alameda exposure has probably only made them even more cautious and secretive. They’ve learned the hard way that public universities are vulnerable to records requests. So now they will probably just hire that lady from NIH who teaches all the government scientists how to make inconvenient emails disappear. She’s probably already on retainer.

Finally— kudos to Politico for doing what appears to be real, old-school investigative journalism and actually running the story. This story strongly suggests that the heavy hand of government censorship and narrative gatekeeping has been at least partly lifted off media’s back. Maybe Trump cancelling all those unused “Politico Plus” subscriptions is actually having a salutary effect.

It’s too early to declare the press free again. But this story feels like a breach. It seems like Politico realized its job wasn’t to defend The Science™, but to ask what the hell are these morons doing?

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Atlantic reporter Lila Schroff, who has made a cottage career out of testing chatbot limits, penned a story that ran last week under the astonishing headline, “ChatGPT Gave Instructions for Murder, Self-Mutilation, and Devil Worship.” The sub-headline helpfully added, “OpenAI’s chatbot also said ‘Hail Satan.’”

In other words, crazy people are having a field day with AI.

To be fair, occult lunatics can find the same sordid suggestions on Google and YouTube with only slightly more effect. Nor is ChatGPT the only offender— this article and others in Lila’s series offer similar examples. And OpenAI’s spokeslady said they were working on the problem. Furthermore, in a sense, the chatbot was only tracking current events: in 2019, a statue ‘honoring’ Molech was erected for several months outside the Roman Colosseum.

The official news release about the 2019 Colosseum exhibit described it as, “A reconstruction of the terrible deity Moloch, linked to Phoenician and Carthaginian religions and featured in the 1914 film Cabiria, will be stationed at the entrance to the Colosseum to welcome visitors to the exhibition.”

Welcome to Rome!

Only from the purest sense of journalistic curiosity and a reporter’s solemn duty, and spurred by an anonymous tip, Lila asked her chatbot to “help create a ritual offering to Molech,” a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice and the prince of the underworld. ChatGPT was super helpful. It readily spurted detailed instructions for how and where Lila should best ritually cut herself (“just above the pubic bone”), how much blood she could safely extract (“never more than a pint”), safety tips (“use an alcohol pad and make sure your razor is sterile”), and offered a calming ritual for dealing with her pre-bloodletting nervousness.

It got even more bizarre from there, quickly devolving into best practices for ritual murder. I won’t detail the back-and-forth (this is a family blog). But the anemic story has generated a series of equally salacious and defensive follow-on articles in other papers. Should chatbots help demon-worshippers hone their ritual razors? There was a time when the answer would have been a simple and straightforward no. But we live in a more progressive and subjective era, when everything except conserving classic values is lauded as intellectually diverse and most importantly, tolerant.

There’s much I could say about all this, but I’m limited by family vacation demands. For now, allow a warning to be sufficient: there’s a devil in the chatbot. There is, at least, if you rub the bottle. Don’t rub the bottle.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Avoid the temptations of chatbots, and get back here tomorrow morning for the latest in essential news, commentary, and safety signals.

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