☕️ CONTEMPTUOUS ☙ Thursday, June 13, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Cuban Missile Crisis, redux; Team Biden vows to send China to Hell; House holds Garland in contempt; giant post-covid study finds no benefits from gov't meddling; weather wave washes Florida; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! As the week creeps along, here’s your quick from-the-road roundup of essential news: new Cuban Missile Crisis infests the Caribbean as Russian flotilla heckles U.S. fleet; Biden official threatens Chinese with “project hellscape”; House holds Merrick Garland in contempt, but the AG smugly started knitting another sweater; biggest post-pandemic study yet finds worldwide government response a washout; Republicans shoot for the moon with federal anti-DEI bill; and the extreme weather wave washes over Florida.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 The mystery has been solved! I’ve finally gotten some feedback from Facebook over why I am close to being back in its high-tech social media jail: spam. After four years of posting free C&C roundups to Facebook, not selling anything, and delighting many thousands of Facebook followers, suddenly, in June 2024, the anonymous platform censors have concluded that my daily free roundup of corporate media news is — not misinformation this time — but is a disguise or an impersonation:

They are really clutching at straws these days. Onward.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🚀 Somebody needs to send Joe Biden a copy of Diplomacy for Dummies. The UK Daily Mail ran a totally predictable story yesterday headlined, “US sends destroyers to track Russian nuclear sub and warship carrying hypersonic weapons after flotilla passed 25 miles off America's coast towards Havana in chilling echo of Cuba Missile crisis.”

Yesterday, Russia’s nuclear sub Kazan and its newest warship Admiral Gorshkov made waves, enjoying a scenic Bahamas cruise. The two floating weapons and their support ships conducted “training exercises” just off Florida’s east coast, and simulated missile launches at hypothetical targets within a 300 mile range.

In response, the U.S. Northern Command deployed three destroyers, the USS Truxtun, Donald Cook, and Delbert D. Black, plus a submarine tracking plane to keep tabs on the wily Russians. Democrats pointed out the good news, which was that since the Kazan runs on nuclear energy, it has a small carbon footprint. Unlike cows. (Eat more crickets.)

Needless to say, the Kremlin’s scheme to send a small naval fleet cruising around the Caribbean followed right behind President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to launch U.S. weapons against Russian turf. Russian media, more relaxed than humorless Western media, reported the story under their counter-headline, “Russian Ships Entering Cuba Give US a Dose of Its Own Medicine.”

The Russians also noted that, a couple months ago, Biden ran a nuclear war exercise simulating an attack on Moscow — a first since the Cold War:

So, tits and tats. Still, showing some measure of mature restraint, the Russians said they did not practice any nuclear strikes on U.S. soil. That’s all well and good, but as they say, ship happens. The reason the Cuban Missile Crisis is so well known is that putting all those paranoid sailors together in the same pond is a recipe for a very spicy bouillabaisse, in which we become the boiled shrimp.

🚀🚀 Apparently, the Biden escalation escalator goes all the way to the top floor. It’s not enough to keep poking the Russian Bear; like a deranged hobo lashing out at anyone who walks by, Biden also insists on prodding the Chinese Dragon. On Monday, Business Insider ran a story headlined, “The US military has a plan to turn the Taiwan Strait into an 'unmanned hellscape' if China invades, top admiral says.”

U.S. Admiral Samuel Paparo, who leads the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the Washington Post that America’s cunning plan is to attack China with secret weapons. "I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities," Admiral Paparo warmly warned.

Hellscape file photo; not to scale

When Admiral Palpatine, I mean Paparo, said “unmanned,” he meant drones. Apparently, the Navy is smarting after getting their flowered hats handed to them by cheap Yemen drones. Speaking of Yemen, our drones aren’t doing too well against the nomadic desert warriors. AP headline, two weeks ago:

Another one! But don’t worry, they’ll work against China. Paparo chided the Chinese, promising our unmanned drones would make the military giant sorry.  “I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything,” he vowed. I did not make that up.

Admiral Paparo enjoys a candid moment laughing like a hyena with VP Harris

The idea, if you can call it an idea rather than a fantasy, is that the U.S. will overwhelm the Chinese navy using thousands or tens of thousands of fully autonomous drones, unleashed in an angry swarm of flying explosive ordnance so awesomely unimaginable that they call it Project Hellscape.

There’s one teeny tiny problem though. One reason it’s unimaginable is that it is literally imaginary Admiral Paparo’s secret weapons don’t exist yet. They’re still being planned:

When the Chinese heard the Admiral’s boasting, the Chinese laughed harder than Kamala Harris after ironically saying “time moves forward because it’s time for movement” for the seventh time in the same sentence. Headline from China’s Global Times:

Chinese military experts noted that what Admiral Paparo was really saying was that the U.S. lacks any current weapons that can defend Taiwan, but instead must rely on invisible friends, secret weapons that don’t exist yet, which have never been tested in battle, and wishful thinking.

Back in 1979, the United States recognized China’s communist government, and signed an agreement saying we “acknowledge” China’s position there is only “One China,” meaning China thinks Taiwan is officially part of sovereign Chinese territory. But ever since, at least until this week, the U.S. has always maintained what it calls “strategic ambiguity,” which is a fancy way of saying having it both ways.

Admiral Paparo just launched strategic ambiguity out the forward missile bay.

I’m only a lawyer, not a military expert. Maybe you can explain this to me: Does it make sense to press for Taiwan independence, threaten China with Hellscapes, and jettison decades of successful strategic ambiguity, at a time when we are simultaneously flirting with nuclear war with Russia, sinking all our air defense batteries into the Ukrainian mud, while simultaneously fending off Iran and its proxies in the Middle East? I’m just asking.

There must be a plan, surely, or at least part of a plan, even if it is so secret that nobody knows it. And I bet it’s packed with super top-secret weapons, too, that soon — just you wait! — we’ll deploy onto the barren hellscape of Biden’s diplomatic ignorance.

🔥 Yesterday, NBC reported a story headlined, “House votes to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt over Biden audio.” The sub-headline added, “Republicans had demanded that the Justice Department turn over audio of President Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, saying transcripts weren't sufficient.”

The contempt resolution carried narrowly in a 216-207 party-line vote. One Republican, Ohio’s David Joyce, joined every Democrat in voting ‘no.’ (Seven Democrats and one Republican abstained.)

Representative Don Bacon (R-Neb) explained that Americans should be able to hear the audio of Biden’s deposition for themselves. Biden’s poor performance, or perhaps lack of performance, caused Special Counsel Robert Hur to conclude Biden shouldn’t be prosecuted for keeping confidential records in boxes in his garage.

Hur explained that, since Biden is a frail, forgetful, old man, he would garner the jury’s sympathy, thus making prosecution useless, because sympathetic juries never ever do the right thing. Anyway, Republicans seemed to think the American people deserve a chance to consider Biden’s mental status for themselves, since after all, Joe is allegedly running the country:

After the House discovered Biden’s deposition written transcript had been “edited” by the White House “for clarity,” the House asked and then subpoenaed DOJ chief Merrick “Grandma” Garland for the original, unedited audio. Garland raised the stakes by classifying the deposition audio as one of the Nation’s top secrets and defiantly refusing to turn it over.

Garland isn’t the first. Two previous Attorneys General were also held in contempt: Republican William Barr and Democrat Eric Holder. Since the DOJ is responsible for enforcing contempt orders, predictably, it didn’t amount to much in either case. House Oversight Chair Jim Jordan has vowed to take Garland to court, in essence recruiting the third branch of government against the Executive Branch.  I wish Jim luck with that, but in reality, it will take a miracle to ever get hold of that audio at this point.

🔥 StatNews ran the latest bad news for the government’s pandemic response last week, headlined “100,000 models show that not much was learned about stopping the Covid-19 pandemic.” In the biggest, broadest study yet, they still can’t prove the lockdowns improved anything. Science!

The StatNews story was written by an author of a new study published in the Journal Science Advances, titled “Epidemic outcomes following government responses to COVID-19: Insights from nearly 100,000 models.”

The authors conducted a “multiverse analysis” of nearly a hundred thousand different computer models. The models compared government mandates like lockdowns, school shutdowns, and mask mandates, against local covid outcomes in cases, deaths, and excess mortality. They crunched data from 181 countries.

The result: 42% of the comparative models suggested stricter government responses improved covid outcomes, while 58% suggested that outcomes got worse after mandates.  In other words, they would have gotten better results by flipping a coin.

The authors, both in the study and in the StatNews article, were careful not to condemn anybody, or even label anything a ‘mistake.’ But the article’s conclusion sounded remarkably like the talk I recently gave to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, where I called for government to embrace “truth, transparency, and trust:”

It’s fine and dandy to call for truth, transparency, and trust, but is anybody listening?

🔥 The Hill ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Republicans introduce measure banning DEI in federal government.”

Tracking terrific new laws in various states — including Florida — yesterday, Senator JD Vance (R-Oh) introduced the Dismantle DEI Act. If passed, which is a huge ‘if,’ it would immediately cancel all federal DEI programs and ban all DEI-related funding for federally funded agencies, contractors, organizations, and educational accreditation outfits.

House co-sponsor Michael Cloud (R-Tx) explained, “This bill is a necessary step to restore merit and equality, not equity, in America’s government institutions, and eliminate the DEI bureaucracy that sows division and wastes taxpayer money.” Cloud continued, “It’s absurd to fund these divisive policies, especially using American tax dollars, and it’s time for Congress to put an end to them once and for all.”

Absurd is one polite way of saying it.

There’s no chance this bill is going anywhere until after the election. So you can chalk this terrific bill up as another example of why we need to see a red wave in November. But it’s progress that the Overton Window has shifted this far, to where it’s no longer political suicide to correctly call DEI absurd. Thank Governor DeSantis for blazing the trail.

🔥 In a weird coincidence, what with the Russian flotilla floating by around the same time, the derechos plaguing the country’s middle finally debuted in the Sunshine State yesterday. The unexpected storms transformed South Florida into the world’s first inland scuba diving capital. The Associated Press ran its story on the extreme weather this morning, headlined “After rare flash flood emergency, Florida prepares for more heavy rainfall in coming days.”

Florida’s usually sunny East Coast experienced its second annual historic flash flooding, causing the Governor to declare a snap emergency, and causing insurance executives to start throwing their bugout bags and suitcases of cash into the back of the jeep. Fortunately for them, WFLX reported just before the storm hit this week Florida Man hasn’t been paying his premiums:

After receiving up to 25 inches of rain in 24 hours in some places, South Florida — which is already a swamp with beachfront access — first began more closely resembling the impassable Everglades National Park, then as the water continued flowing, quickly started looking more like the Sunshine State’s navel, Lake Okeechobee. (Say that three times fast.)

Anyway, it was a mess:

For new Floridians, here’s an important public safety alert: alligators can swim. They can swim underwater. Just saying.

Last year, the National Weather Service (Miami) predicted April 2023’s historic flash floods would be “long remembered.” The rainfall record stood for twelve months! Here’s last year’s announcement:

They say records are made to be broken. CNN blames SUV’s. I blame the Russians. How about you?

Have a terrific Thursday! The Childers family vacation is drawing to a close, bringing us closer to our return to normally-scheduled programming. But get back here tomorrow morning, for another quick on-the-road roundup.

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