☕️ CLOSE ENCOUNTERS ☙ Tuesday, October 15, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The most unlikely October surprise of all; military hands Chinese spy balloon its beer and says 'watch this;' MAHA movement confounds corporate media; Florida triggers leftists with electives; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! For better or worse, we’re nearly through election season, just hang in there. Today’s roundup will help: surprising October surprise looms as 2024 unveils the middle Bingo box from outer space; Chinese war balloon fades into history as US military bases swarmed by mysterious drones that are definitely not UFOs but let’s get the UFO squad involved just in case; Kennedy gaining traction with MAHA movement and media struggles to cope; and Florida triggers leftists again as state universities revise course catalogs complying with new laws.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

👽👽 Is this it? Is the October surprise to be little grey men? We’ve somehow made halfway through October without the world ending. There are fewer than three weeks till the Election. And no new pandemic plagues of unlikely but totally natural provenance erupted near any more government biolabs, nor have any fresh World Wars wagged the electoral dog. It was just starting to feel too late for any events that could justify national martial law. But then, this guy showed up:

Might there still be a spark of life twinkling, not in a wet market this time, but somewhere deep in outer space, which could supply the kind of massive October surprise needed to reverse the momentum? Behold, the clock hands are at media midnight again: it’s Alien time. The warmup appeared in the UK Daily Mirror, which ran a story headlined, “Huge alien announcement 'within weeks' as professor says 'we've found it’.”

The colorful-looking gentleman pictured above, Simon Holland, is the headline’s eponymous ‘professor.’ He’s what you might call a UFO fanatic, which you probably could never have guessed from that hairdo.

According to Professor Holland, two competing teams of scientists —one in Oxford and one somewhere in China— have uncovered a signal of non-human intelligence beaming out of an extraterrestrial civilization. The scientists are just tapping down the final evidence before going public.

The Mirror soberly assured us the formal announcement that will change the world as we know it could come “at any time within the next month or so.” Actually, it was even more explicit; they meant it could come before the election:

It gets better. According to the story, the scientists were tipped off as to the alien signal’s pinpoint location in space by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (Facebook). It’s fitting since Zuckerberg looks like an alien. That guy doesn’t even have to dress up for Halloween. He can just go as himself.

But it’s also fitting it was Zuckerberg for another reason. It’s fitting since it was Zuckerberg who helped the deep state during the last presidential election, by burying the Hunter Biden laptop story and helping build up the pandemic. It’s probably just coincidental that Facebook is under DOJ investigation for antitrust violations.

Haha, you say, that’s just the bonkers UK Mirror romping into tabloid territory again. What would a month be like without another dramatic alien reveal in the Mirror? Just wait.

👽  Behold Friday’s sensational headline from the Wall Street Journal: “Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped.” Wait, it gets better. The subheadline added, “U.S. officials don’t know who is behind the drones that have flown unhindered over sensitive national-security sites—or how to stop them.”

This is a real story in the Wall Street Journal. I’m not joking.

The gist is that for 17 consecutive days in December 2023, “swarms” of small flying craft flew nightly over some of the most sensitive national security assets on the East Coast while the entire U.S. government stood impotently by and let it happen. The craft were undetectable by electronics, but military personnel saw and heard them just fine.

The Journal was meticulously careful not to call the baffling mystery craft anything but drones.

It extensively quoted no less a source than U.S. Air Force General, Mark Kelly, commander of the Langley, Virginia Air Force base. Why would the commander of Langley AFB talk to the media about national security threats? The Journal didn’t say. General Kelly is talking a blue streak now. Here’s how he described the ‘drones:’

It’s not just something that happened once and then, poof. It became a regular nightly feature down at Langley. “The show,” the Journal informed readers, “usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.”

The Journal assiduously avoided using the word “alien.” Instead the article said “drone” over and over. But it dropped plenty of hints. For example, the Journal quoted General Kelly casually dropping the phrase “Close Encounters”:

Uh huh. We got it. After reciting a long litany of excuses why the military can’t shoot down or capture the drones —it’s not safe— the Journal said local police and on-base bystanders managed to take some pictures of the devices. Ready to see some drones? Behold, the Journal’s very best ‘drone’ photo:

Drones? It looked less like drones and more like the usual grainy, blurry pictures of flying saucers.

Finally, the Journal told readers that the ‘drones’ caused an all-hands-on-deck response at the highest levels of government, including the Cabbage of the United States himself. And look what three-letter acronym the Journal managed to plop into the paragraph:

The UFO office. And now, nearly a year later, don’t be shocked, they still remain baffled. No leads. “U.S. officials,” the Journal said, “have yet to determine who flew the Langley drones or why.” The January 6th investigators can identify a retired firefighter from Florida based on two inches of exposed skin in a blurry cell phone picture, but after almost a year they can’t figure out who kept swarming our biggest navy base for almost three weeks.

Maybe they should assign some of the J6 team to the Langley Swarm team.

The most ironic part was how the extremely long article ended — with more drones swarms. You’d think they would have started the article with that:

The experts, baffled again when you need them the most. So many questions! If these were high-end commercial or racing drones, why weren’t they identified from the pictures and traced back to manufacturers? Why can’t military radar, designed to track everything from supersonic missiles to UAVs, track these drones back to their source?

Most of all: the Langley Swarms happened over ten months ago. Why are they telling us about it now, right before the election? Why is the military so chatty about it, when they usually never talk about this kind of stuff?

If you were intrigued by the Journal’s mysterious drone story, you might also want to check out the Daily Mail’s version. Unlike the Journal, the Mail happily invoked the space brethren and highlighted the more baffling elements. The Mail’s story ran under the garish headline, “Drone swarms targeting US military bases are operated by 'mother ship' UFO, claims top Pentagon official.”

Do you think this is all warming up an October surprise? Is it aliens?

🔥🔥 The LA Times ran an unintentionally revealing op-ed late last week headlined, “Why Trump and RFK Jr. won't 'make America healthy again.’” Corporate media is struggling to deal with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been making the interview rounds describing his plan to Make America Healthy Again. The problem for the media is that Kennedy is getting traction. For instance, in this fascinating clip, Kennedy described how the various federal agencies could be reformed through executive action without needing Congress.

CLIP: Robert Kennedy describes agency reform plan (1:36).

A couple bigger points emerge. Obviously, the immediate political significance for the upcoming election is how Kennedy is drawing disaffected Democrats to the Trump campaign. Since Harris isn’t talking about health reform at all, it’s a wide-open field for Trump.

But that’s not nearly all.

Perhaps even more critical is how the health issues are being mainstreamed. Some political genius obviously devised a plan for Kennedy to pivot from vaccines to food integrity. It’s working astonishingly well. It’s given Kennedy a kind of instant credibility. Nobody’s calling him a kook now. The best they can do is desperately try to ignore the former independent candidate.

Ignoring Kennedy is best. It’s nearly impossible to argue against MAHA. Even the LA Times’ anti-Kennedy op-ed was forced to admit that Kennedy main premise is right.

Even though the op-ed’s author, Christopher Cook, tried to obfuscate by spreading the blame around, Kennedy is the only candidate talking about what could be the single most important issue for the country. What could be more important than our own health and the health of our kids?

The op-ed was repeatedly forced to concede Kennedy’s main points. It even had to admit Democrats’ culpability in poisoning the nation:

Cook’s complaints about Trump’s liability were silly and generic, ranging from Trump not taking covid seriously enough, his requiring regulations to be rolled back, and failing to “drain the swamp.” (At least that argument tacitly admits the swamp is a big part of the problem.)

MAHA has legs. Kennedy is mainstreaming MAHA. The mainstreaming of MAHA is a massively encouraging development.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, Politico ran a completelt outraged story headlined, “Florida universities are culling hundreds of general education courses.” You’d think they canceled algebra or something. But just wait.

Last year, Florida’s legislature passed a law requiring state universities to stop paying for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also banned classes from being included in general education credits —credits used for earning degrees— if the classes “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics.”

That might seem totally reasonable to you. But the first person Politico quoted for the story, far-left activist Katie Blankenship, described the new law as “state overreach” and darkly warned it “could spell disaster.”

Well. It could spell ‘disaster,’ if students learned how to spell “disaster,” instead of learning about the complex gender identities of indigenous people groups.

This year, Florida’s state universities have begun revising their course catalogs. Some classes are being recharacterized as electives instead of qualifying for general education credits that count toward a degree. Other classes, which administrators apparently conclude can’t succeed as electives, are being cut.

All of this has badly triggered the left, which has worked so hard for so long to employ a bunch of useless nitwits as tenured professors.

You’d think, to prove how much like Nazis are Florida’s Republicans, Politico would have found some example of class cutting that might, if you squint the right way, look something like imminent educational disaster. But no. Laughably, examples provided by Politico included courses with names like, “Humanities Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality,” “Chinese Calligraphy,” “Women in Literature,” “Social Problems,” “Magic, Witchcraft and Religion,” and the “History of Food and Eating.”

The “Easy-A” has wandered a long way from basket weaving.

Other downgraded classes had more benign-sounding names, but still, when you scratched them, they bled wokeness. For instance, the University of Florida electivized “Religion and Social Movements,” which sounds like it might have a scrap of utility until one discovers it focuses on “protests against police violence.”

Anna Peterson, a religion professor at UF who teaches the virtue-signaling class, complained bitterly about its being relegated to elective status. “That basically kills that class,” she sobbed.

Preparing this story, it occurred to me that if college kids are forced to work harder, they won’t have nearly so much time for protesting and being indoctrinated. Could the solution really be as simple as tightening the academic standards? Let me know what you think.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning with another satisfying serving of essential news and commentary. See you then.

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