☕️ COMING UNTRUE ☙ Wednesday, January 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Hegseth confirmation in the bag; flag fracas symbolizes Democrats’ latest attempt to criminalize the President; massive Starbucks culture shift; incredible new peer-reviewed study tanks shots; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! We are officially five days away from the reality of hopes and dreams long prayed-for. I’m grateful to have wandered through the wilderness with all of you. In today’s wonderful Wednesday roundup: Hegseth’s confirmation hearing started with a lot of sound and fury but wound up being short and sweet; flag fracas symbolizes Democrats’ latest attempt to criminalize President Trump by twisting the law into a crooked pretzel; random, small Starbucks rules change signals massive culture shift; and an incredible new peer-reviewed study joins the small handful of undeniable studies finding fatal flaws in the mRNA shots.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Pete Hegseth’s contentious confirmation hearing was a spectacle that dominated cable news all afternoon yesterday. The New York Times ran the story headlined, “Four Takeaways From Pete Hegseth’s Confirmation Hearing. The article uncontroversially concluded that, “barring new developments, Mr. Hegseth is now on a path to winning confirmation by the full Senate.”

It was four hours of the Senate at its performative best. Democrats snippily hinted or outright enumerated Mr. Hegseth’s many alleged personal failures, such as a the media rumors of his being a common drunk (denied), a serial rapist (denied), and, in dark hints packaged in lighter words, an outright White Supremacist, also denied. Democrats discussed Pete’s unfortunate marital affair in delicious and salacious detail, and played “gotcha” by asking him to define all sorts of obscure geopolitical acronyms, like “ASEA”, which is Japanese, meaning either ‘a windowless cubicle,’ or else it’s the act of sneezing when someone offers you raw octopus. We aren’t sure yet.

Anyway, friendly Republicans asked Pete softball questions and tossed darts at their progressive fellow Senators, mainly related to their hypocrisy for voting in so many truly awful Biden nominations, which never troubled Democrats in the slightest.

As for Pete, he approached the hearing with humility. “I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real,” Hegseth advised. Annoying nearly every Democrat, the nominee bravely continued, “I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully I’m redeemed by my Lord and Savior Jesus.”

Senate Democrats tried to make a good show of it but they were lazy. Mainly, they leaned on a worn-out and anachronistic slander. A hundred and seventy years ago, long before Nancy Pelosi installed a wet bar under her Majority Leader’s podium, Democrats mined the “drunkenness” canard to smear Republicans’ very first competent military appointee, Major General Ulysses S. Grant, and here we are again.

It is said that, hearing the many chirping complaints and ceaseless calls to fire his only winning general for drunkenness, a frustrated Lincoln snipped, “then find out which whiskey he drinks and send a barrel to each of my other generals.”

While historians disagree on whether Lincoln actually said that or just thought it a lot, they now mostly agree Democrats invented or wildly exaggerated Grant’s drinking habits. It never made any sense; how could Grant have possibly performed as well as he did if he were constantly plastered? Still, it’s taken historians this long to un-slander President Grant’s name.

Then, as now, the Democrats hated Grant’s masculine habits, in his case his habits of smoking cigars, drinking whiskey, and standing around the neighborhood watching Jimbo Fischer rebuilding his stagecoach’s suspension.

The military’s only job is breaking stuff and killing our enemies. Much of what is wrong with our country was well illustrated in this single image from Hegseth’s confirmation hearing: a shrill Affluent White Female Liberal (AWFL) who hallucinates she’s an Indian shrieking at a competent male candidate, for not being sufficiently feminine, and lacking liberal characteristics that have nothing to do with breaking anything or killing anybody:

CLIP: Crowd laughs at Senator Sacagawea (aka ‘Buffalo Wife’) for dumbest question of the hearing (0:23).

The Senate adjourned the hearing after only four hours. That’s all they could take. Question time is over, and the Senate will almost certainly vote to confirm Hegseth on Monday afternoon following Trump’s Inauguration. In other words, it was always a done deal, from the minute the hearing started, and it was all a bunch of acting for the cameras.

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Is the flag half empty or half full? A silly non-controversy concealed the latest Democrat effort to criminalize the President. Yesterday, the Tallahassee Democrat ran a snarky story headlined, “DeSantis orders flags at full-staff in Florida for Trump's inauguration day.” In doing so, Florida joined Texas, Alabama, Iowa, Tennessee, and Nebraska, all defying Joe Biden’s executive order requiring flags to remain lowered through the Inauguration in honor of President Carter’s death.

Biden’s executive order was unnecessary, a childish dig at Trump. The federal Flag Code, 4 USC § 7(m), already requires the American Flag to be flown at half-staff for 30 days following a former President’s death. Since former President Carter croaked on December 29th, flags should be cranked-down until January 28th, which unfortunately throws a depressing wet blanket over all of Inauguration week.

But on the other hand, the immediately preceding section of the Flag Code, 4 U.S.C. § 6(d), titled ‘Time and occasions for display,’ provides that “The flag should be displayed on all days, especially on … Inauguration Day, January 20.” Sane legal readers interpret the word “displayed” to mean “at full staff.” So, in highly unusual circumstances like this one, § 6 creates potential tension with § 7.

Lawmakers never considered this type of flaggy conflict arising between living and dead presidents. I mean, what are the odds?

In any case, the statute was meant to provide a reliable list of common flag standards, not create a legal quagmire. The U.S. Flag Code is not enforceable. It has no penalties for violations, neither civil nor criminal (as flag-burning protestors know well). Plus, the Code expressly allows a sitting President to modify any of the flag rules, 4 U.S.C. § 10, so Trump could immediately order the flags raised right after being sworn in.

Similarly, under § 10, Biden could easily have modified the rules in his executive order to allow full-height flags on Monday, but he didn’t — a deliberate oversight. Since there’s already a flag law, Biden’s executive order lowering the flag was wholly redundant — he did it intentionally, just to show he could have modified the rule but didn’t.

Biden was tilting the flagpole toward dishonoring the incoming President.

But even Biden’s symbolic middle finger isn’t enough for partisan Democrats, who would surely complain if they were hung with a new rope. Probably too scratchy or something. Yesterday’s Miami Herald headline:

(What do I always say about headlines that ask questions? They never answer them.) They are making a big deal about this because Democrats are trying to gin up a stupid narrative that, true to form, Trump’s term began with a crime. But it isn’t going anywhere because, as always, it isn’t illegal, and Trump did nothing anyway.

Yesterday, it was Florida’s great Governor Ron DeSantis who joined several other Southern State governors and ordered state officials to raise the flag everywhere in Florida to its full, glorious height on Monday, to honor President Trump. Flags will return to half-staff on Tuesday for President Carter. DeSantis wrote, “In light of the importance of this day, and on this patriotic occasion, I hereby order all flags to be raised to full-staff at the Florida Capitol and across all state buildings, installations, and grounds for the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”

And as for the Capitol grounds, where President Trump will take the oath, House Speaker Johnson suspended Carter's 30-day mourning period to allow flags at the U.S. Capitol to fly at full staff for Trump's inauguration next week. Everywhere else in DC they’ll remain at half-mast.

I hope that President Trump orders them right back up.

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Sometimes, it is the little things that tell us the most about where the culture is headed. If so, this is terrific news. The New York Times ran a very encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Starbucks Reverses Its Open-Door Policy for Bathroom Use and Lounging. Our long national nightmare is finally over. It started in 2018 when two black guys were arrested for loitering (which the Times laughably euphemized into ‘lounging’) and otherwise hanging around in Starbucks without buying anything and using the bathroom. At the time, Black Lives Matter was just getting started, and apparently they were spoiling for a racist bathroom fight, and the rest is surreal history.

In 2022, Starbucks started closing some stores because of what its then-CEO euphemistically called a “growing mental health problem.” In other words, crazy homeless people were hogging the bathrooms and literally taking sponge baths in the sink, which is a sight you’ll never forget, believe me.

Since “the unhoused” were camped out in there for hours, paying customers had to hold it. And some Starbucks started to seem more like soup kitchens than places where folks pay $7 for “coffee.” And they stank, which might not be homeless people’s fault but it didn’t help sell sugary caffeine drinks and mediocre baked goods.

But the point is, the climate in this country was so woke that Starbucks would rather close stores than be called “racist” and “heartless,” by simply requiring people to buy something to access its bathrooms, and by restricting the rooms’ use to architecturally intended purposes.

Meaning, not taking sink showers or shooting up heroin in there.

Two years, one triumphant election, and a new CEO later, Starbucks now dares to lock its bathroom doors and discriminate against race-hustling homeless people. That lone decision signals a significant shift in the zeitgeist.

But it’s so much bigger than that: just look at the universally uncritical coverage:

The closest thing to even a hint of criticism appeared only in far-left Axios’ headline, but I clicked through to see, and it had already changed the actual headline to something consistent with the new homogenous narrative. This is the current, bland Axios headline:

“Among the changes,” Axios reported, “will be the posting of signs banning discrimination and harassment, violence or abusive language, outside alcohol, panhandling, drug use, and other disruptive behavior.” In other words, seven years of tolerant coffeeshop management later, Starbucks will call the cops on you again, and corporate media is too chicken to call them racist.

It’s not just a welcome change in overpriced coffeeshop policy. It’s the great unwinding of a terrible and destructive narrative shoved down our throats during Trump’s first term. It is a reversion of woke, the unfolding success of the conservative counter-revolution as the enemies’ battle lines collapse.

It is even more Trump Effect.

At the risk of reading too much into it, I can’t help but recall the end of Lord of the Rings. Sam asked Gandalf, “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?” And then:

“A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.

I also feel like a great Shadow has departed. What do you think? Am I imagining things?

And speaking of bad things coming untrue, wait till you read the next story.

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In the post-pandemic period, there were two particularly appalling and incontrovertible studies about the mRNA jabs that more than anything else started the slow reversal of science’s great stampede toward genetic therapies. The first was actually a group of studies, led by Kevin McKernan, confirming the shots were contaminated with DNA fragments of bacteria normally found in human waste. (Literally, “s— shots.”) The second was a gold-standard study finding “frame-shifting” (mutational drifts) in the induced spike proteins. Yesterday we received a third seminal study to help sink the shots and the Frankenstein’s nightmare called mRNA technology.

The peer-reviewed study published yesterday in the prestigious Nature Biotechology, titled “Nanocarrier imaging at single-cell resolution across entire mouse bodies with deep learning.” It had forty authors. There’s safety in numbers. They cautiously avoided criticizing the covid shots directly, but the implications were unavoidable.

This study investigated lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are the tiny globs of fake fat that deliver mRNA into cells. They tracked the LNPs’ distribution and effects throughout the body—which they found far beyond the injection site. The researchers found that even at very low doses, LNPs wander far afield and worse, they accumulate in unintended organs, triggering immune disregulation and metabolic disturbances.

The study’s carefully documented conclusion upended the government’s original claims the mRNA vaccines would remain “localized at the injection site” (i.e. that they’d quickly and harmlessly dissolve in your shoulder). The findings also provided a plausible explanation for what causes serious known side effects like myocarditis.

These findings aren’t altogether new. They align with earlier findings from a widely ignored 2022 Japanese biodistribution study. The difference now, though, is these scientists used cutting-edge imaging technology to track LNPs in mice, and they used A.I. to analyze very complex data sets (such as systemic effects with multiple variables) and for modeling simulations at various LNP dosages.

There are several levels here. Superficially, the FDA should urgently re-examine the biodistribution issue and immediately require the shotmakers to confirm these findings and study the long-term effects and implications. Of course, we all know the benighted FDA will do nothing of the kind, at least not for five more days.

Next, and more significantly, the study further undermined the foundations not just of the covid shots, but of mRNA technology writ large. This week, Moderna —a pharma firm that only develops mRNA drugs— lost a fifth of its stock value on news of actual sales far below original, conservative projections.

But now we also know that Moderna’s stock plunge preceded the publication of this new biodistribution study by a single day. That timing was probably not coincidental.

The study’s findings reveal the third structural problem with mRNA. Until those structural problems are solved, or even addressed, mRNA risks becoming nothing more than a forgettable footnote in the sordid history of scientific failure: a tragic tale of overpromised innovation and blind faith in cutting-edge technology, calamitously unraveled by unmet safety and efficacy standards.

And that is assuming things don’t get any worse. Which is the point—we don’t know. This study provided no reassurances. And it probably poisons all mRNA projects.

Take, for instance, the long-promised vision of using mRNA to deliver customized cancer cures. The concept involves encoding the mRNA with some protein from your specific cancer, in theory prompting the body to mount a targeted immune response. But so long as the treatment relies on lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver its mRNA payload, this study suggests a potentially catastrophic risk: the cancer protein could unintentionally transfect major off-target organs like the heart, liver, kidneys, and spleen, potentially spreading cancerous material throughout the body while simultaneously disrupting the immune system.

Needless to say, that would be a bad combination. Unless we are missing something, the future of targeted mRNA cancer treatments does not look bright. As for respiratory viruses, that ship has already sailed.

The truth continues to dribble out. This study presented an unavoidable obstacle to all future mRNA development, a new reveal that joins and combines with the first two major revelations. This most terrible idea of mRNA is not yet dead, not quite, but all of mRNA’s major organ systems have been infected, and it’s been moved to hospice, leaving its loudest proponents languishing in the denial stage of grief.

This study is extraordinary progress. It really does seem like everything sad is coming untrue, slowly perhaps, maybe bit by bit, but it is happening..

Have a wonderful Wednesday! As we continue counting down this historic pre-Inauguration week, come back here tomorrow morning, for the latest installment of essential news and commentary.

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