☕️ COLLOSAL ☙ Tuesday, July 23, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

CrowdStrike still striking airlines; experts baffled by hole in the ground; Reuter's truth bombs the Proxy War; bipartisan roasting of Secret Service Director sparks bureaucratic outrage; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Thank goodness things seem to have calmed down, a little. In today’s essential news roundup: airlines still struggling to recover from CrowdStrike’s buggy security software; rumors of Biden’s return to the White House; giant moat provides evidence of 3,000 year old conspiracy theory; Reuters fires off some rare truth artillery exposing the real reasons Ukraine is losing the war; and Secret Service Director Kimberly ‘Blameless’ Cheatle gets roasted in Congress.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

📉  Five days later, the Great CrowdStrike Crash of 2024 is still giving IT managers headaches. CNN ran a story yesterday headlined, “Why Delta is still canceling flights as other airlines return to normal.” Many airlines are “largely” back to normal, “largely” meaning “not” back to normal, a clever bit journalistic sleight-of-hand intended to boost the flagging prospects of the deep-state’s anti-virus company. Delta canceled 1,000 flights on Monday and, according to CNN, has no idea where its crew members are. Maybe hiding out in Rehobeth Beach?

The good news was, with planes grounded, their wheels were not falling off in midair and no engines caught fire, although disappointed tarmac crews were unable to toast their S’Mores this weekend.

Predictably, stock shares in the “AI-enabled” security service company took a hit, even though Bloomberg managed to find a “mostly peaceful” bright side, running a story headlined, “CrowdStrike Outage Nets Short Sellers $461 Million Windfall.”  So, fortunately somebody made money, although one has a sinking feeling that when we discover who that somebody was, we’ll find their name rhymes with Crack Block.

CNBC ran a more straightforward headline:

Evidence that CrowdStrike is a deep state front company includes that corporate media is mostly making excuses for the most expensive, biggest, and most destructive computer bug in history. “These things happen,” reporters and experts soberly informed us. And so forth.

🔥🔥 The Associated Press ran a surprising story late last night (11:39pm) headlined, “Biden continues to recover from COVID-19, stays out of public view after ending his 2024 campaign.” The story resolved a frantic 24 hours of wild speculation over whether the corpse-like politician was an actual corpse or just plays one on TV.

It seems like these days, if it weren’t for anonymous sources, corporate media wouldn’t have much to report about. Anonymous ‘White House sources’ said Biden will be back in the office today, although it wasn’t clear whether he will be moving at all. Citing the same unidentified sources, the article also reported that Biden plans to keep his meeting with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.

We will believe it when we see it. And there’d better not be strings tied to his arms.

📖📖 Breaking news from thousands of years ago. Yesterday, the UK Daily Mail ran a story headlined, “Archaeologists uncover 3,000-year-old structure from the Bible.” They found a hole in the ground. To be fair, it was a big moat.

Starting in the 1960’s, “critical Biblical studies” focused on debunking the Bible, casting doubt on the reliability of thousands of years of copying and translation, and labeling most ancient Biblical history as fables and fairy tales, since experts assured us there was “no evidence” that ancient events actually happened.

Butt around the same time, a concurrent rennaissance in archeology started discovering one old coin after another broken tablet, each confirming ancient Biblical accounts. Such as its reference to a thirty-foot-tall moat that split Jerusalem in two, snarling rush hour traffic until Judean citizens wanted to drown themselves rather than wait another two hours to cross the bridge, an innovative approach to traffic management that governments still employ today.

So remember: There’s “no evidence” until the evidence appears.

🚀🚀 Occasionally, corporate media publishes a “truth dump,” where a long, well-written article admits a monumental fact that was, until that very moment, previously labeled a “conspiracy theory.” Examples from this year include CNN’s January piece on the real reason for the Mar-a-Lago raid (recovering the CIA’s Crossfire Hurricane binder) and the New York Times’s recent article admitting injuries caused by the safe and effective vaccines. These types of articles appear out of nowhere without warning, like a sudden flash of light in a dark closet. Then the light flickers out, corporate media dusts off its hands, and gets back to gaslighting.

This time, it was Reuters. Last Friday, Reuters ran a long, photo-rich, magazine-style “truth dump” headlined, “Years of U.S., NATO miscalculations left Ukraine massively outgunned.” Now they tell us. It explained, at great length, the real reason that Ukraine is losing the Proxy War, not because of U.S. delays in forking over high-tech wonder weapons and pallets of shrink-wrapped hundred dollar bills, but —and you have to wade through pages of chatter to find it— because of environmentalism.

As you might imagine, explosive chemicals like nitrocellulose and TNT —gunpowder— are very helpful in manufacturing boring, low-tech, and unprofitable battlefield staples like bullets, missiles, and artillery shells. These chemicals help the ordinance ‘explode,’ so to speak, causing distressingly loud noises and generally breaking enemies and their weapons into smaller, much less useful pieces.

But starting in the late 80’s, America’s military acquiesced to activist demands to make “cleaner” weapons for killing our enemies. So they began pulling the plug on most U.S. factories that manufactured explosive chemicals. So did our Western allies:

Reuters explained that only one remaining facility in the United States still makes the stuff that goes ‘boom,’ and that factory is a creaky 1941 museum piece staffed by senior citizens, who are the only ones who remember which buttons to push.

Instead of making the most important part of artillery shells ourselves, the explosives, since they are so toxic, the U.S. military outsourced that environmentally-destructive process mainly to —and I am not making this up— Russia and China.

You can probably already see where there could be some problems with that arrangement.

Since things began heating up in Ukraine in 2014, U.S. generals put aside their makeup mirrors for a minute and focused on the TNT problem. They knew that being unable to build the basics would be a wartime disadvantage. So, knowing conflict in Ukraine was coming, they came up with the terrific idea of making new kinds of high-tech, expensive, profitable, and most important, environmentally friendly explosives:

One struggles to adequately convey the warped irony of focusing on environmental impact when building stuff intended to kill people at scale. But I digress. Anyway, the new high-tech wonder explosives cost billions, didn’t work, and were also toxic. Brilliant.

Apart from our enemies, two other major international plants make military-grade TNT. One is in Poland, now running 24x7 shifts, and the other was in eastern Ukraine. The Russians captured that one about ten seconds after the Proxy War started, proving once again just how far ahead of the game Russian generals are than NATO’s woke warplanners.

Our generals knew all about the TNT problem. But they assumed that if a real war ever started, they could just build whatever they needed, like more TNT factories, scaling up quickly on demand:

Haha! Passive voice alert. It was assumed industry could surge. Mistakes were made! But you know what they say about “assuming.” Assuming means you can shift the blame to somebody else, which is an incredibly attractive feature to career bureaucrats.

The bottom line was that it takes years to build new TNT and artillery plants. And even that assumes you can somehow bypass environmental reviews and federal climate regulations. In fact, in 2012, the army spent half a billion building a brand-new, high-tech TNT plant to replace the 1941 relic, a project that was wildly successful along the lines of the army’s half-billion dollar Gaza pier:

Apparently, that new high-tech TNT plant is now a write-off, probably appearing in a footnote in six-point font somewhere deep in the Army’s financial statement.

Our inability to make our own gunpowder is catching up with us, and mostly harming the Ukrainians. What Ukraine needs most, even more than air defenses, drones, F-16s, or high-tech wonder weapons, are 155mm artillery shells. But our generals are infected with high-tech wonder weapon fever, and scolded the Ukrainians to quit crying about artillery, man up, and figure out a whole new war strategy based on the high-tech weapons that we do have:

Coming up with a revolutionary new military strategy in the middle of a war is a neat idea and everything, but the problem is that just when you get your new, AI-powered, BLASTA-90 mobile drone launch array set up, the nefarious Russians drop an old-fashioned, TNT-packed artillery shell right on top of it, and then you have to scrape up the pieces and start all over again.

For folks in Portland, artillery is important in war because it stops the other army from moving forward. It seems that when you keep lobbing gigantic explosive bombs at an army, it tends to reflexively pull back out of range. But if only one side has those bombs, let’s call that side “Russia,” and the other side, let’s call it “Ukraine,” has none, the “Russkies” can keep pushing the “Ukrainers” back forever and ever, amen.

And that is exactly how Ukraine is losing the Proxy War. The Russians keep pushing the Ukrainians back, by bombing the ever-loving borscht out of them. And since the wonder weapons haven’t helped, there is no realistic solution, except waiting for several years until the West can figure out how to rebuild its scrapped TNT factories without offending environmentalists, who are probably funded by the Russians to begin with, but that’s a different story.

Ukraine does not have years. It might not have months. Its army is vanishing (Reuters: “Ukraine faces a critical and growing shortage of troops compared to Russia.”) Soon, Ukraine won’t have enough soldiers to load artillery shells into cannons, even if it could get the shells, which it can’t.

Thus, NATO is desperately scrambling to plug the TNT dike. The Army toured Reuters around its latest robotic TNT factory in Dallas, which has yet to come online. In its article, Reuters finally told us the truth: we can not make enough weapons to help Ukraine. It was a truth that explains all the weirdest elements of the Proxy War, such as the desperate strategy of launching guided missiles at Russian cities, trying to score a political victory where a tactical victory on the battlefield is clearly impossible.

Reuters’ article hinted at but never grappled with the much bigger problem: How can NATO possibly win any major territorial land war with Russia or China if it mostly depends on those same countries for basics like gunpowder? Biden’s neocons are infected with a Strangelovian sort of wonder-weapon madness that is going to get somebody killed one of these days.

🔥 Yesterday, Secret Service Director and DEI administrator Kimberly Cheatle testified before Congress about last week’s assassination attempt. CNN ran its story on the fiery spectacle headlined, “Takeaways from the congressional grilling of Secret Service Director Cheatle on the Trump assassination attempt.”

CLIP: Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) castigates Director Cheatle (4:52).

The “takeaways” were that Director Cheatle, under withering, bipartisan, rhetorical crossfire, insisted she is still the very best person in all of America to continue leading the Secret Service, and also, she doesn’t know squat. Don’t blame her, she explained, since at the time of the shooting, she was only holding the Secret Service for a friend.

Under pressure, Cheatle admitted July 13th was a colossal failure and “the most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades.” But it wasn’t her failure. Mistakes were made.

Then, late yesterday, Florida Representative Greg Staube (R-Fl.) introduced historic articles of impeachment against Director Cheatle, as the Hill reported in a story headlined, “Florida Republican says he filed articles of impeachment against Secret Service director.”

No Secret Service Director has ever been impeached in all of U.S. history.

Also yesterday, Senator Josh Hawley sent a strongly-worded letter to Director Cheatle, who received it fresh off her grueling Congressional testimony, in which Senator Hawley reported that it appears someone had, in fact, been assigned to the Trump shooter’s roof, but abandoned their post because it got too hot. Never mind the slope problem:

As a Floridian, I can sympathize, but the dry, 90-degree weather on July 13th in Butler would be considered temperate in the Sunshine State. It also didn’t overheat the snipers stationed on the other roofs, or the shooter, for that matter. Just saying.

Fortunately, President Cabbage is still relaxing in covid quarantine (but he’s fine!). So he has adroitly avoided answering any questions about the Secret Service’s collossal failure, why he hasn’t asked for Director Cheatle’s resignation, why he remains mentally fit to run the country, why he mailed in his de-nomination announcement, where Jill Biden gets her fashion advice, or anything else.

Joe Biden is not taking questions.

Have a terrific Tuesday! And get back here tomorrow morning, whether or not it’s 90 degrees outside, for more essential news and commentary.

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