☕️ CONFIDENCE ☙ Friday, July 7, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Americans lose confidence in institutions, for some reason; DARPA's new blood Roomba; SADS reports; Germans are back to studying the occult; military moves to integrate AI; lots and lots more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Already. Hope you enjoyed the short week. Your roundup today includes: new Gallup polls measures how badly our institutions have been damaged by the pandemic, and I have a little rant about it; DARPA has a new blood Roomba and you are going to love it, by which I mean hate it; SADS singer parked-car death; SADS jab nurse strokes out and leaves heart-wringing final message; SADS Egyptian actor faces curtain-call; SADS personal experiences; German researchers mount new effort to plumb the occult; scientists figure out it’s not your imagination, time is actually moving faster; Rasmussen poll shows most voters think Biden is a big fat liar; and the military moves quickly to turn over decision-making to AI, which might actually be an improvement.

🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞

💉 After the blaze of interest in the new Paul Alexander / Peter McCullough autopsy preprint that went online Wednesday, the Lancet fled the kitchen yesterday, and took their blockbuster study right back down.

You have to move fast these days to keep up.

Curiously, having been taken down, the article is receiving even more attention now than it was getting before. So.

🔥 The Hill ran a completely unsurprising story yesterday headlined, “Americans Continue To Have Little Faith In Major Institutions: Gallup.”

According to the respected pollster, Americans faith in the major institutions continued dwindling this year. The good news is that the two top most LIKED institutions, in which respondents said they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence, were small businesses (65%) and the military (60%).

It drops off pretty fast after that:

Nice job, Congress.

The Hill failed to mention Gallup’s related poll on general confidence in the government, which is a pretty big story. Among the top Western G7 group of nations, the U.S. and Great Britain have slipped from enjoying the highest citizen confidence in 2006 to now being seen as worse than the fat kid with broken glasses. Nobody wants us on their team.

The U.S. is first worst, having transformed its 2006 win into a loss, and is now scraping the bottom for citizens’ respect among the G7 group of nations:

Putting a brighter spin on it, you could say the U.S. is leading the world in citizens’ disrespect. Hey, at least we’re winning at something.

As noted, this is an inversion, a complete reversal from 15 years ago:

The U.S. should start giving lessons on the best way for countries to alienate their own citizens. But why? What’s happened?

If you argued that the U.S. has been under relentless cultural attack by crypto-marxists and other enemies since the early 2000’s, I would not disagree. But that’s been true since the 1950’s. Beyond the long, Gramscian “march on the institutions” — buh-bye, Boy Scouts! — are more recent phenomena that inarguably poured gasoline on the Walmart portable grill of national self-destruction.

Low Quality Representatives. First, the quality and character of people we’ve been sending to Congress has left very few people having any confidence in that branch of government:

Don’t make me list examples, it would take too long. But one telling example would rhyme with “Fetterman.” And I’m guessing the January 6th hearings didn’t help much to improve people’s respect for Congress, not because of how unfair it all was, but because it spotlighted democrat low-lights like clinically insane Adam Schiff, “Humpty” Jerry Nadler, and human walrus Bennie Thompson.

Fundamental Unfairness. It’s hard to keep up confidence in the government when the justice system fails. Exhibit A is this man, the mild-mannered, grandmotherly-looking human wrecking ball of civilizational destruction, Merrick B. Garland:

Garland squats at the very crossroads of lost institutional respect, tossing around “unequal justice for all” like breath mints at a leather festival.

Institutional Dishonesty. No tally of lost institutional respect would be complete without this mendacious human cockroach:

Health agencies — whose ONLY JOB is to protect us — man the frontlines of hyper-politicized failure. This week, for example, the CDC published suggestions for transvestite men to best “chest feed” infants using gender-bending hormones and other chemicals. I am not making that up.

How could anyone lose confidence in guidance like that? But still … since men don’t have functional mammary glands, where does the “milk” come from? I don’t think a silicone implant, no matter how carefully installed, is going to get the job done. Of course, I’m only a lawyer, not a trans doctor.

Science! It’s not misinformation since it comes from the government, dummy.

Transgressive Appointments. Joe Biden continues to appoint the very best and brightest that Harvard and Yale have to offer the country, which are indescribably humiliating picks too numerous to mention. Here are just two:

Now, how could Americans possibly be losing confidence in people so disconnected from reality they don’t even know what gender they are, not to mention how they’re liberating every ladies’ handbag they can get their leather-stained fingers on, but are somehow supposedly capable of running the country’s top-secret nuclear storage programs. Okay.

I could have gone on for pages and pages. It’s a target-rich environment. But you get the idea.

Rant over. Whew.

🔥 In our ‘News You Can Use’ category, the Debrief ran a story yesterday headlined, “DARPA’S New SHIELD Program Plans To Purge Your Blood Of Pathogens, Roomba-Style.”

At first I thought it was a joke. It’s not a joke. The Debrief linked to the DARPA press release, and here it is. The release starts this way:

Fungal and bacterial pathogens can cause bloodstream infections (BSI), [and] are a persistent and deadly threat to both civilian and military populations… These infections can be uniquely challenging due to delays in diagnosis, antibiotic resistance and toxicity of treatments, especially for fungal infections. But what if you could have a Roomba-like treatment circulating within your blood that whisks away pathogens before you get sick?

As I noted yesterday, TwitterGPT diagnosed me as a “contrarian,” and maybe I am, but NO THANK YOU. Seriously, DARPA, a Roomba? In my bloodstream? Roaming around inside my heart, sucking up stray Legos?

I have LOTS of questions. Who empties it out when it gets full? Where’s the base station? Does it run on rechargeable batteries or do you have to replace them? Can it go down stairs? I have so many questions.

The press release was low on details. Is the blood Roomba mechanical, biological, or nano-molecular? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? They didn’t say.

They’re calling the blood Roomba project “SHIELD” — no relation to the Marvel superhero group — which stands for “Synthetic Hemo-technologIEs that Locate & Disinfect.” They cherry-picked the “IE” from the end of “Hemo-techologies” to get to their cute, friendly-sounding acronym.

But don’t worry. The press release reassured citizens that, “SHIELD performers will engage with U.S. government and defense stakeholders, as well as appropriate regulatory authorities, to ensure safety and efficacy.”

Whew! That’s a relief. The FDA will be involved. Safe and effective!

Hopefully it will be as safe and effective as the last military-industrial health product, the mRNA covid genetic therapy. Ominously, the blood Roomba is described as being a battlefield tool, meaning it’s for military service members who, as we know full well, aren’t allowed to refuse shots.

Debrief asked DARPA for a timeline and they answered: Four years to complete animal safety trials. Which means they already have the blood Roomba. They are ready to start testing the damned thing.

Maybe I’m overreacting, just being my normal contrarian self. What do YOU think? It probably doesn’t matter what WE think. If we’ve learned one thing from the covid shots experiment, there is a good-sized group of people who will enthusiastically line up — along with their kids — to join the human trial groups.

💉 Hit German party singer and celebrity DJ Sascha Loudovici, 57, died suddenly and unexpectedly this week after losing a battle with his heart. The busy singer died IN HIS PARKED CAR from sudden-onset cardiac arrest. Never got to the hospital.

Sascha’s group, Chaos Team, completed over 90 performances per year with its live DJ party shows. Ironically, Chaos Team’s Instagram page advertises the group is “A Life for the Party.” Now, not so much. It’s more like “a sudden death for the party.”

💉 Nashville nurse, TikTok star “smugnurse,” pro-vaccine activist, and anti-disinformation keyboard warrior Kaleigh Zimmerman, 34, suddenly and unexpectedly had a cerebellar and brainstem stroke and massive infection in May.

After her strokes, Kaleigh was admitted to the ICU three times, but was discharged with a PICC line to treat her sudden and unexpected cranial staph infection. Here’s one of her last updates:

It’s even more tragic that the young nurse is “not religious.” At least her fear and pain is over. And we can pray she finds salvation.

UPDATED July 8, 2023: A prior version of this post incorrectly stated Kaleigh had passed away. Happy to be wrong. Corrected.

💉 Popular Egyptian actor Ahmed Abdel bowed out after his last curtain call when he died suddenly and unexpectedly on Monday from a heart attack.

I couldn’t find any more details on the young actor’s death, except that his mother also died seven months ago. So.

💉 A short personal report. Just in the last thirty days, my circle has experienced three sudden and unexpected medical traumas. First, my best friend from high school’s father had a hemorrhagic stroke (after six shots). He is carefully and tentatively recovering at home, having lost some of his vision and now requiring a walker.

This week, Michelle’s step-father suffered two brain aneurisms and the doctors are discussing hospice. We think he may be better off in managed care. The situation is developing and we remain hopeful.

Prayers for both parents are welcome and appreciated.

In a first for my legal career, opposing counsel mysteriously disappeared from one of my cases early last month. This week I spoke to the partner who took over the case. He explained that the previous attorney had a bizarre medical incident while driving. He suddenly and unexpectedly went blind. While driving! He had to somehow carefully pull the car over and wait for help, which is extremely painful to imagine. Now, the former lawyer has recovered his sight but is on permanent disability, owing to a crippling vertigo that causes him to completely lose his balance whenever he moves his eyes.

I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying.

🔥 Those rascally Germans are at it again. Archaeology Wiki ran a story last week headlined, “New Methods For Ancient Texts.” The subheadline added, “MagEIA - Magic between Entanglement, Interaction, and Analogy.”

I assume it’s pronounced “Magi.”

The German Research Foundation (DFG) announced at the end of June that it paid 3.5 million Euros in initial grants to set up a new Centre for Advanced Studies including the MagEIA department, which will study ancient magical texts to “take the study of magic in antiquity to a new level.”

Maybe it’s nothing. But the last time the Germans got heavy into the occult, and tried to take the study of ancient magic to a new level, things didn’t turn out so well.

Here’s the image that was attached to the article:

The picture is probably significant to archaeologists, and it’s unfair of me to criticize, but my first thought was: nice mark on the forehead.

It’s Science! Not magic, dummy.

🔥 Physics.org ran a story last weekend headlined, “Quasar ‘Clocks’ Show The Universe Was Five Times Slower Soon After The Big Bang.”

The article reported on a new study published in Nature Astronomy, wherein “Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein’s expanding universe.” So that’s good.

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1676306347132874773

“Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower,” explained lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

I could really use a little of that slower-moving time.

People have long assumed that time is a constant, that a minute today is the same as a minute thousands of years ago. But science now thinks that time used to move slower than it does now. You know how people always say it seems like time flies faster as you get older? Maybe that’s not just your imagination. Maybe older people notice time speeding up because they were alive back when time DID move slower. They have a frame of reference.

How fast could time possibly go?

🔥 Polling service Rasmussen ran a story yesterday headlined, “BidenGate: Most Voters Don’t Believe President’s Denials.”

Weird!

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that 58% of Likely U.S. Voters think Joe Biden is a big fat liar. They responded to the survey saying it is likely the Resident was involved in Hunter’s foreign business deals, including nearly half (44%) who believe it’s Very Likely he was involved. A third (33%) say it’s not likely Biden was involved in his son’s business deals, including 19% who think it is Not At All Likely. Presumably those are the hard-core democrats

Another 10% — who haven’t been paying attention and don’t know how to read the time from a round clock — said they are just not sure.

So.

🔥 In AI news, Bloomberg ran a story yesterday headlined, “The US Military Is Taking Generative AI Out for a Spin.”

Two guys in camo working on computers

The problem is that currently, urgent requests for up-to-date military information can take several staffers hours or even days to complete, as they jump on phones, dig through reams of documents, and rush to make slide decks. And, obviously, while they’re answering one question, they can’t get to the others.

But in one recent test, an AI tool completed an urgent, top-secret military request in only 10 minutes. And it didn’t take any medical marijuana breaks or secretly play Candy Crush when no one was watching.

Bloomberg explained military researchers fed the AI with classified operational information. The long-term goal is to upgrade the U.S. intelligence services so they can use AI-enabled data in decision-making, sensors and detectors, and ultimately battlefield firepower. The article said the DoD is already working with tech security companies to help test and evaluate to what extent they can put their trust in the AI-enabled systems.

The researchers demonstrated the AI’s capabilities to Bloomberg’s reporter. They loaded sixty thousand U.S. and Chinese military documents into the system, then the reporter asked it who would win in a conflict over Taiwan. Among other suggestions, the AI calmly predicted “Direct US intervention with ground, air and naval forces would probably be necessary.” It warned that the U.S. would not easily paralyze China’s military. Ultimately, the system wasn’t confident about our chances, concluding: “There is little consensus in military circles regarding the outcome of a potential military conflict between the US and China over Taiwan.”

That’s not going to go over too well, since the Biden administration has been saying the exact opposite, that the U.S. is “confident” that it can defeat the Chinese in a Taiwanese dustup. So, like they way they keep two sets of budget books, the military is going to need two different AI systems, one for public consumption that hews to the narrative and maintains political correctness, and another secret one they can use behind the scenes to get the real scoop.

To tell you the truth, I’m starting to wonder whether AI-powered keyboard warriors might actually be an improvement over the drag-show rejects currently making military decisions. Still, at the end of the day, you know what they say. Garbage in, garbage out.

Either way, it’s a brave new world of AI.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with more delicious news roundups and a virtual shot of espresso.

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