☕️ FESTIVAL JOYS ☙ Tuesday, June 20, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Peter Hotez makes an eyesore of himself; docs and pharma; House R's fight trans treatments; Biden age poll results; Durham to testify; Proxy War roundup and analysis; festival joy; and lots more.

Good morning, Coffee & Covid readers, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: Peter Hotez exposed for the grotesque pharma schill that he is; you won’t believe how many docs earn their living from pharma payoffs; House Republicans push back on trans treatments for kids; poll shows Biden too old for office; John Durham to testify before Congress; detailed Proxy War Counteroffensive™ report as Ukraine starts running out of bodies; Biden’s Monkeypox coordinator makes startling admission; woke Pixar movies predictably bombs; and an internationally infamous bus line canceled by intolerant religious fanatics, or something.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 For folks who follow religion and artificial intelligence, I was included in last week’s Epoch Times article, “IN-DEPTH: How Religion Is Becoming the Latest Target of AI Revolution.”

🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞

💉 Bowtied wonder Peter Hotez is back in the public eye after criticizing Joe Rogan’s interview of RFK as spreading “vaccine misinformation.” Rogan responded by challenging Hotez to a debate, which led to a crowdsourced fund drive creating a $1.5M kitty to the charity of Hotez’s choice if he agrees to debate RFK on Rogan’s show.

Obviously Hotez won’t get anywhere near that debate. There’s a good reason why, too.

First of all, he’d have to explain why Forbes describes him as one of the richest scientists in America, with a $35M net worth largely derived from payments by health organizations and pharma companies.

Next, in the early pandemic, Hotez testified to Congress AGAINST coronavirus vaccines, saying that no coronavirus vaccine had ever succeeded, and that EUA approval standards were far too low to guarantee a safe vaccine for the general public. Hotez changed his tune right after Fauci appointed him to head up the NIH’s official Covid Vaccine Committee.

Here’s a twelve-minute mini-documentary on Hotez, exposing his shifting positions and other awkward connections:

https://twitter.com/VacSafety/status/1670491516593397760

In other words, he has way too much baggage and there is NO WAY Hotez is going to get on a debate stage with anyone with half a brain. It’s never going to happen. They might as well offer a billion dollars to the charity of his choice.

Peter Hotez is an unkempt gasbag decorated with a ridiculous bowtie, without which he would look remarkably like a serial killer.

💉 Speaking of doctors getting paid by pharma — just as a reminder — ProPublica ran a story back in 2019 headlined, “We Found Over 700 Doctors Who Were Paid More Than a Million Dollars by Drug and Medical Device Companies.”

The number ballooned to 2,500 doctors who were paid over a half million in 2019 by drug and device makers. In other words, even in 2019, tons of doctors were making more from their pharma connections than from treating their patients.

How do you suppose those numbers changed during the pandemic?

There might be an idea here. If doctors are so easily bought, maybe WE could start paying doctors to expose the problems with the jabs. Maybe it’s that simple. Maybe it’s just about who offers them a better deal.

🔥 The Wall Street Journal ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “U.S. Becomes Transgender-Care Outlier as More in Europe Urge Caution.” To better frame its narrative, the sub-headline explained, “Republicans seize on European doubts over medical interventions to call for restrictions.”

Republicans pounce!

Still, the Journal accurately reported that, after years of allowing gender treatments for kids, five European countries—the U.K., Sweden, Finland, Norway and France—now urge caution, stressing the lack of evidence that benefits to kids outweigh the risks.

In a congressional hearing last week, Republicans and their expert witnesses repeatedly cited European examples of increased caution, and said Democrats and the U.S. medical community have gone too far in making the treatments easily available for minors.

One-eyed Rep. Dan Crenshaw vowed, about transgender treatments for kids, “This is the hill we’re going to die on.”

After last week’s hearings, Democrats accused Republicans of “attacking transgender youth” for political points, and backing “dangerous bans and restrictions” on life-altering treatments and amputations because conservatives only want to hurt kids … on purpose!

To be clear, democrats insisted the ONLY possible way to help kids is through amputations, extreme body modifications, and powerful hormone treatments.

I’ve been thinking about this and I had an idea. One way we could make sure that juvenile affirmation treatment supporters really mean what they say could be to make them test out every one of their proposed “affirming” treatments, before those treatments can be approved for kids.

We can “affirm” them. Let’s “affirm” the people who support child amputations. Let THEM go first. Choppy choppy.

📉 The Washington Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Seven in 10 Voters and Nearly Half of Democrats Say Biden Is Too Old to Run Again, Poll Shows.”

The UK Daily Mail poll reported that 71% of surveyed voters already believe Biden, currently 80, is “too old to be president.” Among the parties, half (49%) of Democrats said he is too old, most (71%) independents agreed, and nearly all (94%) Republicans are sure.

Even more worryingly for democrats, 43% of all voters, and half of people 45+, said they are “a lot worse” off since Joe Biden took office.

Biden needs to get back to his basement for the rest of the campaign. Hey, it worked last time. If you believe that.

🔥 Fox ran an intriguing story yesterday headlined, “Durham Faces Congress After Finding DOJ, FBI ‘Failed to Uphold Their Mission’ in Trump-Russia Probe.”

After releasing his blockbuster report widely condemning the weaponized agencies, Durham is scheduled to testify in Congress this week. Specifically, his report delicately concluded that the Justice Department and the FBI had “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law” by launching the ‘Russia-Gate’ probe against then President Trump.

Durham’s damning report explained there was “significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” particularly Hillary Clinton. Even worse, “The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them, even when at about the same time the Director of the FBI and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence.”

Most observers concluded the Durham report, as carefully worded as it was, exposed political weaponization within the federal law enforcement agencies.

Today, Mr. Durham testifies in a closed-door hearing at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Tomorrow, Durham will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in a public hearing. I expect we’ll have something to talk about on Thursday morning.

🚀 The major corporate media headlines about the Proxy War this morning focused on last night’s mostly-repelled Russian drone attacks against the Ukrainian capitol, Kiev, and against Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine near the Polish border.

There was nothing about the Spring CounterOffensive™. And if Russia is out attacking Kiev again, instead of focusing on defending its captured territories, it strongly suggests the counteroffensive is over. Or at least paused to regroup or something.

If it is in fact over, it would not be too surprising. Over the last weeks, we’ve seen very few claims of Ukrainian victories by U.S. corporate media propagandists, who surely would have inflated the tiniest scrap of victory into a spectacular patriotic musical. Instead, over the last two weeks we’ve had constant reports from Russian military and warbloggers citing devastating losses for Ukraine, culminating in reports of a massive weekend assault in the Zaporizhzhia region that the Russians described as a “slaughter,” with claimed Ukrainian losses up to a staggering 50%.

Scattered through the last week there were also regular reports of Ukrainians surrendering, often in groups, sometimes in large groups and bringing heavy equipment with them. On the other hand, there were no credible reports of Russians surrendering.

The Russians were also scoring victories on the political front. News emerged over the weekend that, after the Russians had nearly captured Kiev in 2022, the Ukrainians had agreed to a peace deal that would have kept their territory intact, but precluded NATO membership. A draft treaty had even been circulated.

But, according to newly-released documents, the Biden Administration interfered, and the Ukrainians were committed to endless war.

Many Russia hawks confirm that Ukraine is struggling; it is difficult to find any claims of Ukrainian advantage except for small incursions into various townships that nobody ever heard of. Here’s an example of what could be called the current “consensus:”

The reason the counteroffensive is failing is unexpected. It’s not weapons. Reports suggest Ukraine is overflowing with high-tech weaponry and heavy armor. Instead, Ukraine is running out of experienced military commanders. Russia is said to have done a very good job of targeting battlefield leaders and taking them out one by one.

Now that we can look at it over the course of the last year, Ukraine’s war strategy appears to have been a test of the United States’ modern military theory. Our generals have bet on technology. They just love it. Contemporary American military strategy depends on an integrated, wirelessly connected, computerized battlefield designed to wipe enemies out long before they can gain any ground.

So, we sent Ukraine lots of high-tech toys, starting with our HIMARS missile systems, and initially it appears to have worked. In 2022, the Ukrainians halted Russian gains and caged the Russian bear in the East. But the Russians have adapted, they are learning countermeasures, like jamming U.S. communications signals and GPS locators.

The truth is the fighting has devolved into murky, smoke-fogged trench warfare, with brutal hand-to-hand combat, with artillery blasts landing overhead. It seems European warfare has not, in fact, evolved much since the last two World Wars.

It seems to always eventually come down to this.

With the usual caveats about the fog of war, official disinformation, and absence of any fully reliable source of news, it seems likely that the Proxy War is running out of immediate options and the status quo is untenable. The longer the Russians have to secure their positions in occupied Ukraine, the harder it will become to dislodge them.

Assuming that Zelensky is a non-factor who just takes orders from the U.S., which seems like a safe assumption, Biden’s team will soon be forced to make some difficult decisions about whether to escalate or evacuate. If I had to bet, I would bet on them doing the dumbest, most irrational thing imaginable, and whatever they finally do will fail badly, exploding in a shower of unintended but completely predictable consequences.

🔥 Biden’s Monkeypox advisor Demetre Daskalakis interviewed on MSNBC over the weekend and said some remarkable things. You’re going to think I made it up.

https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1670433692312018944

Daskalakis says the Biden administration’s goals are to “support peoples’ joy” as opposed to stigmatizing them as “risky.” He explained, “One person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or a Friday night.”

Festivals! Well, Demetre would know. Here he is at a festival with his puppy. He doesn’t look very joyful though. Maybe he keeps it locked inside.

It’s Biden’s best and brightest! Remember, this is your modern democrat party, the grand experiment to give political power to people who historically would have been shunned and kept as far away from the wheels of influence as possible, if not locked away.

It’s kind of like handing out permanent markers to a pre-K classroom, except the stakes are even higher. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.

📉 Disney’s woke new kids’ movie featuring a “they/them” gender non-binary character pronouns has, sadly, bombed at the box office.

The movie is titled ‘Elemental,’ and is a story about how its characters ‘tackled’ racism and xenophobia. The protagonists metaphorically represent an interracial, multicultural relationship, since one character is fire, and the other is water. Everyone knows that fire and water don’t go together…Unless you put aside your ignorant biases!

And then, fire and water can happily coexist, even marry each other. (As for having kids… well, that’s a different story.)

The movie has earned its place as one of the historically lowest box office debuts for a Pixar movie. The studio spent nearly $200 million making the movie, but it has only earned $29.5 million so far. It’s not looking too good.

I hope they earned at least $170M in ESG points.

🔥 The final bit of variety news making the rounds this weekend was captured in the Fox News headline, “‘Spreading Satanism’: Poland’s 666 Bus Route to Hel Gets Number Change.”

Hel, Poland is a quaint, picturesque maritime village and popular resort destination. It’s nowhere near as hot as you would expect.

You can even walk down the streets of Hel without being prodded by pitchforks. That’s all fine, as far as it goes, but the friction started with a tourist bus line, which somehow happened to be assigned the number ‘666.’

So, it became Route ‘666 to Hel.’ If they have an express bus, it would be Route 666, express to Hel.

The ironic combination of the town’s name and the route number delighted international atheists, who appear to enjoy taking the bus route, much slower than the train, just for the bragging rights. The whole affair isn’t quite as interesting to the Poles, who don’t really get the joke, since their word for the Biblical hell is ‘pieklo.’

Anyway, the private bus company has now decided to change the route number, in order to avoid offending some Christians who take the symbology seriously. So it will change the number to “669.” This has caused an earthquake of outrage among secular folks and lefty reporters who think the bus line must have caved in to “pressure” from wacko religious fundamentalists who just can’t take a joke.

They should all calm down. They can still go to straight to Hel, and even take the express. They just won’t be able to ride the 666.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Meet me for a fresh round of Coffee & Covid, on the house, starting tomorrow morning right back here.

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