☕️ EXPENSIVE THINGS ☙ Friday, August 9, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Stock market recovers as Middle East tensions recede; Vice President impersonates groundhog; Butler PD's eye-opening bodycam videos; Disney losing again as park suffers; great legal news; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup of essential news this morning includes: more good news, as Middle East tensions continued receding from the disastrous brink of an election-threatening stock market crash; VP Harris campaigns doing her best groundhog impression; Butler PD releases its July 13th assassination bodycam video, resetting the narrative again; House of Mouse sees slowing park attendance for some reason that is totally not because of how unbearably woke it has become; the think-tank problem; CNN, of all places, airs Tim Walz’s fake military history fracas; and a terrific decision banning trans mutiliations in Ohio.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🚀🚀 Judging by the headlines, the world seems to be slightly pulling back from the brink of a devastating Middle East War. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who noticed the lowered temperature yesterday. The Wall Street Journal ran this very encouraging headline:

The fact that “Iran can’t afford a wider war” was not nearly so evident just two days ago. There was more. News of potential discussions, or at least, news that potential discussions have not been rejected, appeared in the Washington Post yesterday, outside the paywall:

This was solid news of progress since, by agreeing to join cease-fire talks, Israel made its first overtures of concession. The markets also noticed the positive developments. Headline from the Wall Street Journal, this morning:

It’s not clear to me, and I don’t know how anyone would know, how much of the market’s recovery was actually due to government tinkering. Certainly some was; the last thing the Democrats need is hedge fund managers hurling themselves from their high-rise Manhattan office buildings, even if it might have boosted consumer confidence.

Nevertheless, the encouraging hints that the world may avoid a wider mideast war is indisputably good for business.

It’s not over. Iran must respond to Israel’s assassinations somehow, to, as they say, “restore deterrence.” But the environment for a measured, calibrated, perhaps even brokered response appears far more likely today than it did last Friday. If we continue on this trajectory we might all avoid wishing we’d built that bomb shelter that our wives always laughed maniacally at whenever we brought it up at dinner.

I use the generic ‘we’, of course. Present company excluded.

If we are truly headed for a soft landing, you can thank capitalistic self-interest. The stock market might just have scared everyone straight. It certainly got Democrats’ attention, even though to this day none of the many financial stories have mentioned the war.

🔥🔥 The New York Times ran a surprisingly snarky story yesterday headlined, “Kamala Harris Isn’t Giving Interviews. Any Questions?” Apparently, Vice President Cackle has adopted President Cabbage’s groundhog strategy of basement campaigning. Vice President Groundhog! She pops up at a rally, sees her shadow, and scrambles back down into her underground burrow.

The Times peevishly, but gently, chided the Democrats’ carefully selected nominee for avoiding unscripted media events. In other words, it looks like it will be President Cabbage’s teleprompter-bound life, all over again:

So yesterday, President Trump held a news conference, meeting journalists in an unscripted setting at Mar-a-Lago, to highlight how his opponent does not hold news conferences. “She doesn’t know how to do a news conference; she’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump repeated last night.

Pointing out the obvious, Trump noted that Kamala “won’t do interviews with friendly people because she can’t do better than Biden.” It is truly ironic that the Democrats selected a replacement nominee who is as at least as verbally impaired, albeit in a different way, than the candidate they already yeeted.

A conservative friend told me yesterday he thinks Kamala can hold her own in a debate, pointing to the 2019 primaries, in which Kamala apparently did okay. But I’m not so sure. If they thought Kamala could hold her own, they’d have her cackling in front of the cameras right now.

I suppose it’s possible the democrats are playing 4-D chess. They might be withholding Ms. Cackle to gin up this precise controversy, lowering her bar to the floor, before trotting her out to give a semi-conscious speech. Then the media can celebrate her wonderous performance. After all, that was the Biden Strategy, until it backfired.

But I doubt it. We won’t have to wait long to find out, though.

🔥 Yesterday, Fox ran a story headlined, “Fuming police officer says he told Secret Service to secure Trump shooter building days before rally: bodycam.” Once again showing a level of transparency the Secret Service could only dream of, assuming it could get to sleep in the first place, Butler County’s Police Department released its July 13th bodycam footage. Once again, the story changed. Once again, things got murkier.

CLIP: New bodycam footage from Butler County PD (3:16).

The first new fact revealed in the story is that they still don’t know how Crooks got onto the roof. The bodycam shows officers wondering whether Crooks used a thin wooden pallet leaning against the warehouse wall to scale the side of the building (carrying a rifle). But more than that, it became clear they only have theories for how Crooks got up there without help.

In other words, the officers: (1) could not get onto the roof without help. So how did Crooks do it without help? (2) They still don’t know how Crooks got up there, it’s all guesses. (3) The ladder Crooks bought at Home Depot is still missing. Could it have been removed by someone?

The second major development was that one of the officers at the scene can be heard repeatedly and angrily telling others that days before, he’d warned the Secret Service to put someone on the roof. “I told the Secret Service, post a f---ing guy over here. I told them that f---ing at the meeting on Tuesday,” he said.

Several minutes of the bodycam video are available at the article’s link, starting at the top and then scattered through the article. See what you think.

🔥 Question asked! The New York Times ran a story this morning headlined, “Is a Disney Theme Park Vacation Still Worth the Price?” Does the Pope wear a funny hat? Does Putin eat babies for breakfast? Does Joe Biden take calls after 6pm? I don’t know, probably not, but to answer the Times, ‘no.’ The Most Magical Place on Earth is now the Most Expensive Place on Earth. And also the most Woke.

Alas, poor Disney is struggling. The Times reported that, with skyrocketing admission prices and nickel-and-dime charges for all kinds of previously free perks, many holiday goers are opting out of visiting Rodent HQ and opting instead for European vacations.

He thinks it’s expensive for two adults? Trying adding a few kids. You’re looking at thousands of dollars. “At some point a Disney vacation starts competing with ‘Let’s go see Europe’ and I think that’s what a lot of people are doing,” Disney tour agent Len Testa told the Times.

As a Floridian who grew up 90 minutes from the park, my Disney experience began in early childhood. Over the years, many of our friends kept annual passes and some even got Disney character tattoos. At some point, I started taking my own kids. I immediately learned a family visit first required a trip to the bank to exchange several years of collected coins and fill out a loan application. I also learned the Disney Swap: trading an hour of your life standing in line for seven minutes of entertainment.

Seven hours in the park —more than ordinary humans can endure— yields about 49 minutes of ‘fun.’

And you should never go during the summer months. Disney is located in swampy Central Florida, where the humidity gets so dense you can wash your clothes in sweat. (For some inexplicable reason, Walt Disney hated shade.) Walking around the park is an adventure by itself— the closest terrestrial equivalent to walking on the surface of the Sun.

Without a Sun-suit.

As naïve visitors stream into the park through the massive turnstiles, innocently anticipating a relaxing day of fun and amusement, they are instead immediately thrust into the Disney Race, an involuntary competition involving Olympic fast-walking from one attraction to another, trying to beat the other unlucky souls to preferred placement in the next line.

Making the experience even more adventurous and competitive, Disney squeezed out a dizzying array of not-so-magical apps (* sold separately), in which visitors can play a fun and expensive all-day game on their phones, frantically trying to book ‘fast pass’ tickets for rides and restaurants reservations faster than the other rubes, beginning precisely at 6am in the morning when the starting gun fires.

Your day of Disney adventure begins early!

For players, the ride-booking game continues throughout the day, since guests may only book one or two rides at a time, and must ‘check off’ their previous selections by actually riding the damned things before booking another one:

The Times reported that in this week’s earnings call, Disney managers admitted to a slowdown at the parks. They blamed the poor economy (which Joe Biden and a dozen mendacious government agencies deny). The Disney executives explained to analysts that lower-income visitors are ‘financially stressed’ (how could that happen??), and more well-heeled guests are choosing slower-paced international travel, which offers more value for money.

It might be the economy. I’m sure the economy doesn’t help. But I wonder … how much help are headlines like this New York Times headline from June:

Racists! Thank goodness Disney is helping reeducate its racist customers who loved Splash Mountain. Next consider this headline, from November’s Daily Citizen:

How else do you know what to call them? Next, behold this Fox News headline, from 2022 (related video clip, 1:06):

‘Boys’ and ‘girls’ are so 2019! And let us not forget Disney’s highly-public battle with Governor Ron DeSantis, after the ratlike House of Mouse waded into the debate over pushing trans curriculum onto school kids in the Sunshine State. After protracted legal wrangling, Disney ultimately lost, losing control of its own special taxation district.

Now Disney can only push its trans curriculum in its own park.

I wonder how much of the recent price inflation at the park is due to its harebrained decision to go to war with the State of Florida, on behalf of the tiniest part of its customer base?

Went woke, going broke.

🔥 RELATED: Speaking of Disney, we face a big problem with ‘think tanks.’ For a deeper dive into the outsized role of big corporations like Disney in the lawmaking process, you might be interested in Brian Berletic’s recent video (or article. I’ll link both).

YouTube: Brian Berletic explains how think tanks draft nearly all federal laws (34:13).

Brian Berletic, who lives in Thailand, is a heterodox geopolitical commenter whose thoughts frequently challenge conventional narratives. He provides alternative perspectives on global events, especially related to U.S. foreign policy, international conflicts, and the roles of various countries in global affairs. He has been a Proxy War critic from the jump.

Berletic’s article (linked below) and his companion YouTube video (linked above) are both titled, “Who Really Controls US Foreign Policy? While he focused on foreign policy, it is all true for U.S. domestic policy as well. The gist is that over 1,000 NGO ‘think tanks,’ like the RAND Corporation and a dizzying array of Soros-funded groups with banal, helpful-sounding names, constantly lobby Congress, which winds up rubber stamping  spoon-fed legislation, often without Congressmen even reading the bills they happily sponsor.

It’s not clear at this point whether any meaningful legislation was actually drafted by Congress, as opposed to non-transparent, unelected, billionaire-financed elites infesting DC think-tank groups.

To be clear, I do not agree with all Berletic’s opinions.  But this article is a great start in understanding the precise mechanism of how leftwing oligarchs and captured corporations (Disney) pull the levers of power in Washington. Helpfully, Berletic also offered some suggestions for what to do about it.

🔥🔥 CNN, of all places, aired some gentle questions yesterday about VP nominee and impeachment insurance policy Tim Walz’s “stolen valor” problem:

CLIP: CNN commenter admits, “there is no evidence Walz was ever in a position of being shot at (0:39).

There is no evidence that Tim Walz was ever in a position of having an intelligent thought, either. Thank goodness the Democrats picked him to run under Kamala. I wonder if they rushed the vetting process a little too much?

🔥🔥 In more great legal news, local Cincinnati WCPO-9 ABC ran a story yesterday headlined, “In the wake of ban on gender-affirming care, Ohio families contemplate leaving the state.” They’re contemplating.

On Tuesday, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook ruled that Ohio’s new law banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth, HB 68, is constitutional, and is therefore in full force and effect. (The new law also bans boys from playing in girl’s sports.)

“Upon careful review and consideration of the evidence, the Court finds the Health Care Ban reasonably limits parents' rights to make decisions about their children's medical care consistent with the State’s deeply rooted legitimate interest in the regulation of medical profession and medical treatments," Holbrook wrote.

Ohio’s legislature passed the terrific new law over Governor DeWine’s veto, which I reported earlier this year. It’s been tied up in litigation since then.

State Attorney General’s Communications Director Bethany McCorkle said, "The Attorney General applauds the trial court’s decision. This case has always been about the legislature’s authority to enact a law to protect our children from making irreversible medical and surgical decisions about their bodies. The law doesn’t say 'no' forever; it simply says 'not now’ while the child is still growing.”

One of the affected trans families interviewed for the story included the contemplative ‘Amanda’ Mendon (a trans dad), and ‘her’ partner Helena Bryant. The couple met at a pride parade back in the day. They agreed with ABC’s reporter’s prompted question, saying now that ABC mentions is, they were contemplating moving out of the state with their autistic transgender ‘son’ (daughter), ‘Mark’. (What are the odds?)

To be precise, they said they were contemplating moving from Ohio to Minnesota, which, thanks to its Governor Tim Walz, is a transgender sanctuary state where kids can be removed from mutilation-hesitant parents. “[Mark] has already looked into the worst-case scenario,” Ms. (Mr.) Mendon stressed. “I have family in Minnesota, and Minnesota is a sanctuary state.”

On Wednesday, the ACLU (of course) appealed the decision to Ohio’s appellate division. We shall see.

In the meantime, it’s progress!

Have a fabulous Friday! I’ll be back tomorrow morning with all the essential news and commentary, much cheaper than a European vacation, for the Weekend Roundup.

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