☕️ DEADLY FORCE ☙ Wednesday, May 22, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump trial rests and heads toward closings; FBI's shoot-to-kill orders; Lobster update; aging Klaus decamps from WEF's 15-minute city; extreme hail; solar records shattered; good Portland news; more.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Your essential roundup of news and events includes: President Trump rests in Manhattan trial and heads toward closing arguments; controversy firestorm as previously redacted FBI operational instructions show lethal force authorized for Mar-a-Lago raid; shrimpy Red Lobster update; prison-planet caricature Klaus Schwab makes a big move; extreme hail events seem to be getting bigger and terrifying insurers; space weather records still falling after the solar storm and worldwide aurorae; and more good news in the conservative counter-revolution from the unlikeliest place yet.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 The New York Times ran a Trump Trial update story last evening headlined, “Trump Chooses Not to Take the Stand, and the Defense Rests.” Probably a wise decision.

The prosecution’s airtight case rests on the testimony of upright citizens including: two women paid to have sex with strangers, a disbarred and convicted lawyer who admitted more new crimes on the stand, and a colorful tabloid magazine character named Pecker. We shan’t summarize the evidence further today, but there should be plenty to help a reasonable jury find reasonable doubt.

Closing arguments begin next Tuesday, May 28th. It’s easy to imagine Trump’s lawyers will want to let loose, but must restrain themselves. Normally, in closing the lawyers summarize the evidence and try to talk jurors into voting for or against conviction. But there are rules. For instance, lawyers may not refer to any facts unless they were admitted into evidence. Nor can they ask jurors to put themselves in Trump’s place.

Trump’s lawyers are likely to hammer on the fact that portly DA Bragg has not proved his case “beyond a reasonable doubt,” like most defense lawyers. If the jury convicts anyway, then the appeal grapples with an equally high “no reasonable jury” standard, meaning no reasonable jury could possibly have voted to convict on the same evidence.

In the meantime, the lawyers for both sides will work on proposed jury instructions and the verdict form. The wording can be critical. Jury instructions explain each legal concept and suggest how jurors should apply those concepts to the facts. The verdict form is a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ series of questions for the jury, leading them either to conviction or acquittal.

The precise wording of both the verdict form and the jury instructions can make or break the case.

At this point, Trump probably relates more than anyone to the Biblical character Job, feeling like it’s been one damn thing after another lately. Reading the comments to the Times article (not recommended) was a masterclass in how politics warps people’s perceptions of reality. Commenting democrats discard the details and view this trial as some form of ultimate justice for the many untold crimes of Donald Trump* (*sold separately).

Meanwhile, legal experts impatiently wait for the Supreme Court’s decision  on presidential immunity, which could easily and instantly erase any jury verdict against the President, since all the alleged “crimes” of writing the wrong words on check stubs happened after he took office.

The only way out is through.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, Newsweek — bless them — was the only corporate media platform to cover a shocking story broken by stalwart independent journalist and legal analyst Julie Kelly, with this dramatic and infuriating headline:

While we’ve all been distracted by the mad gutter fireworks in Merchan’s Manhattan joke of a p*rnopgraphic Soviet show-trial, much more momentous things have been happening down in Florida, where Federal Judge Cannon has ordered a lot of government documents to be unsealed and unredacted.

One document unsealed yesterday was the FBI’s "operations order” for the agency’s execrable, banana-republic-style Mar-a-Lago raid. The Operations Order included a long "policy statement" regarding the "use of deadly force," which provided in part: "Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary."

So it’s going to be like that.

The language wasn’t boilerplate, or at least, it wasn’t just boilerplate. The Operations Order also required attaching a medic to the search team, and even included a map and instructions to the nearest trauma center, presumably for people who got shot during the raid. The small army of FBI agents — 37 of them — was armed, and was also ordered to conceal their weapons and dress undercover, increasing the palpable risks of confusion and an ‘unfortunate accident.’

Grassroots reactions to yesterday’s disclosure were (and still are) incandescent. Julie Kelley demanded, “What country is this?” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), angrily tweeted “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.” Social media influencer Tim Pool opined in outrage, “This was either an attempt to kill Trump or incite civil war, maybe both.”

The media machine responded promptly, coolly arguing that the FBI was only following “standard procedure:”

I’m not an expert on FBI criminal procedure. But completely coincidentally, I once sued a city for excessive force over a militarized SWAT raid against my high-end commercial real-estate brokerage client. Not only were my clients completely innocent — they were never even charged — but the raid was just a document search, like the Mar-a-Lago raid, that could easily have been handled using an investigatory subpoena.

Here’s my hot take: The FBI’s “standard procedure” argument stinks. There was nothing normal about the Mar-a-Lago raid. It wasn’t like the FBI was raiding a Harlem crack house. The FBI was raiding a high-end luxury property secured by the Secret Service where the most recent former President lives with no intent to arrest anybody. The FBI knew that people with guns would be there — Secret Service agents — and yet proceeded with its “surprise” raid in undercover clothing.

It is also difficult to credit the lethal “boilerplate” to simple negligence. The layers of required approvals ran all the way up to Grandma Garland herself. Under no circumstances should deadly force have been authorized. The Secret Service should have had prior notice. The agents should have been unarmed to exclude any possibility of an accident.

As I said, based on the limited amount we know, it stinks. The already historic raid on a former president by his campaign opponent just became even more historic and disgraceful.

🔥🔥 A shrimpy update. Last week I reported on Red Lobster’s bankruptcy, in a story comparing all-you-can-eat shrimp and Biden’s not-jumbo, shrimp-sized economy. But there is more to the story because, based on the chain’s bankruptcy filing, the seafood giant had been badly mismanaged for years.

Just to pick three points, the chain has had five CEO’s in the last five years, a red flag approximately the size of Austin, Texas. One of the newer owners, Thai Union, is a seafood seller, and suspiciously became the restaurant’s sole supplier of shrimp at above-market prices. And a former hedge fund owner forced the chain to sell off its highly-valuable real estate to a closely-connected company, which leased the land back to the restaurants at much higher lease rates.

On one hand, it looks more complicated than a simplistic explanation of inflation, sour cocktail sauce, and a bad economy. On the other hand, the creamy sauce of a good economy masks many rotten financial fish, and we would expect weaker restaurants to fall first.

We inform, you decide.

🔥 Bloomberg tearfully ran a swan-song story yesterday headlined, “World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab Stepping Down by 2025.” WEF founder, globalist, and Bond-villain caricature Klaus “you will own nothing and be happy” Schwab, 86, is finally throwing in the towel, evacuating his post, and shuffling off the world’s stage to make room for the next ridiculous, taxpayer-funded, fascist, open-borders buffoon.

But not till after the election. Only then will spry octogenarian Schwab “transition” to a “non-executive role,” whatever that means. Maybe he will finally merge with the machine. He's getting out while the getting is good.

The WEF has not offered any explanation for the switcheroo or suggested who might next take the helm and advocate for fifteen-minute prison cities, mandatory cricket cakes, and trans-humanist nano-vaccines. Obviously, Schwab — a failed engineer until he dreamed up his swanky Swiss conference gig — has now become a public relations liability.

I would like to nominate Futurama’s Bender the Robot as the WEF’s next Chairman, which goes right in hand with the group’s fetishistic fascination with transcendant transhuman technology.

To be honest, Klaus isn’t getting any younger. Maybe he should look into having his head preserved in a high-tech brain vat, so he can keep advising the WEF until we’ve finally made it so politically toxic it will join Red Lobster in bankrupt shrimp shame.

Even though his slow-motion retirement won’t be effective till he turns 87: Goodbye Klaus! We won’t miss you. Still, say what you like about odious nitwit Klaus Schwab, but at least he could string a sentence together and didn’t claim his relatives were consumed by cannibals. Just saying.

🔥 Fox Weather ran another record-shattering story yesterday headlined, “Second destructive derecho in a week slams central US with 100-mph winds, baseball-sized hail.” I never even heard of a ‘derecho’ before. Is it Mexican? The historic storm is still raging like a slow-motion hurricane across the Midwest.

Apparently the ‘derecho’ is a thing. The problem with reporting on extreme weather events — whatever their cause — is that inevitablely some smart-aleck pundit will pop up in the comments saying something like “I live in Penciltuckee and we always get these big storms around this time of year.”

In other words, weather’s rhetorical battlespace is so polluted by the fog of war and bull puckey that it’s nearly impossible to figure out whether the wild weather is really remarkable or is just a deranged figment of our conspiracy-minded imaginations.

But in authorial self-defense, here are a few recent headlines to buttress my argument that things are not as normal as some weather-watchers would have us believe. First up, Bloomberg, headlining Monday’s long-form, magazine-style article:

Giant hail? Bloomberg told readers that on May 9th, hailstones the size of baseballs blasted San Marcos and Johnson City, Texas, taking down power lines and cracking car windscreens. In mid-March, grapefruit-sized hail battered Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, causing damages exceeding $4 billion.

I never heard of grapefruit-sized hail before. You? I wonder how much they weigh. Whatever it is, it would probably smart. Have you heard about hail drifts? This new hail phenomenon is wreaking havoc on insurance company wallets. Independent reports abound. For instance:

But predictably, someone will come along and pooh-pooh all this, confidently claiming that grapefruit hail is rare but it happens all the time where I live. Which doesn’t explain why insurance companies are freaking out. Nor does it explain this deliciously ironic development. Headline from Fox, in late March:

It wasn’t just one installation, either. A growing number of reports all over the world describe how giant, ugly solar “farms” are being rendered instantly inoperable by a single hailstorm. It seems logical that if it really does happen more often than you think, multi-million dollar solar installations would already be protected from simple weather events.

How ironic that these fabulously expensive, inefficient climate mitigations are being destroyed by the same climate they are intended to preserve.

🔥🔥 Similarly, the data crunching on last week’s dramatic solar storms continues, and it looks like we weren’t over-selling its historic nature after all. Monday’s record-setting headline from Space.com:

According to a preliminary NASA statement, the auroral displays that enthralled sky-watchers worldwide two weeks ago may have been the strongest since record-keeping began. In other words, grapefruit-sized solar hail shattered another record.

And it proved these kinds of solar storms don’t happen all the time.

In another dramatic Space.com headline, also published Monday, we learned that deep sea detectors measured the Earth’s magnetic field’s strongest response to these storms:

The readings were so strong they first thought it must be earthquakes:

"I looked into whether it was potentially an earthquake, but that didn't make a lot of sense because the changes in the data were lasting for too long and concurrently at different locations," Slonimer said in a statement. "Then, I looked into whether it was a solar flare as the sun has been active recently."

It was indeed solar activity that influenced the compasses beneath the sea — some situated as deep as 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) beneath the surface.

It was so unusual that they initially didn’t even consider the storms could cause strong deep-sea readings. But the same scientists will swear on a stack of Q’rans that all this extra solar energy has no effect on Earth’s climate, because science. Shut up! Don’t ruin it for everybody.

🔥🔥 In even more good news from the most unlikely places, and further evidence of the conservative counter-revolution, behold a story from the most unlikely place of all: Portland! Let’s begin with Politico’s headline from early yesterday, before Portland’s District Attorney election, when media was still being honest about the shift’s significance:

Yesterday, voters in Multnomah County — a hyper-liberal county that has not picked a Republican presidential candidate since 1960 — considered whether to replace their woke, anti-law-and-order incumbent district attorney, Mike Schmidt, whose over-funded campaign benefited from multiple millions from malignant Soros NGOs. His challenger is veteran prosecutor Nathan Vasquez, who was a Republican until just recently, when he changed his registration to unaffiliated in order to run.

According to Politico, Portland’s DA race is a stinky microcosm of national politics, the unsightly rotting fruit of democrat excess. A short four years ago, overjoyed liberals applauded the success of Soros’s national plan to capture local district attorneys and sheriffs for pennies on the political dollar. Having their hands firmly on the law-enforcement wheel in many areas, democrats promptly drove their local economies right off the hipster road into the fire swamp of anarchy.

It’s all connected; high crime doesn’t just make people anxious, it also makes for a terrible economy and nowhere to shop. Only democrats think you can stop prosecuting criminals (of a certain melanin content) and expect everything to shine with social success. It didn’t work. In Soros-DA jurisdictions, crime rates have exploded, as unprosecuted criminals not only commit more crimes, but they also commit crimes more often and more daringly because they feel emboldened.

Politico fretted that the Soros strategy of making everyone miserable might eventually backfire, erupting during the upcoming election like a painful rash in an embarrassing spot:

As of early this morning, independent conservative journalist Andy Ngo predicted Portland’s Soros-funded DA is going to lose badly to the former Republican in a political landslide:

Even in Portland, most Americans who vote liberal still want to live like conservatives. Congratulations, Portland! You’re hauling yourself off rock bottom. Keep it going.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! And dodge the derechos to get back here tomorrow morning for another jam-packed Coffee & Covid roundup.

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