☕️ FOUR NDE’S ☙ Monday, December 4, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Middle East cease-fire ends; "Houthis" attack US destroyer; supernatural SADS; Pope Francis is sick again; NYT scared by medical freedom; Brand mocks Moderna; earthquakes and corona holes, more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Today’s roundup includes: the holidays are off and running; media obfuscates the end of a successful Israel-Hamas cease-fire; US military considers maybe thinking about responding to Yemenese missile attacks on the supply chain; SADS supernatural encounter featuring four near death experiences; second Pope Francis mystery infection this year; New York Times fears medical freedom activists; Russell Brand mocks dumbest pharma commercial ever; Chris Christie flames out; and a big list of weekend earthquakes and some unrelated space weather — or is it?

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🎄 Gainesville was bustling this weekend as I was out and about. Saturday featured multiple trips to Home Depot after Mrs. Childers made it clear that the front yard was not yet festive enough. The home improvement superstore was as busy as I can remember, and maybe it was just my imagination, but people seemed genuinely happy and quite seasonally friendly. Many Merry Christmases were exchanged with strangers. Last night, Michelle and I went with some friends to annual Christmas concert Sounds of the Season performance by the University of Florida Symphony Orchestra.

They said the Performing Arts Center sold out in twenty-four minutes. For a symphony orchestra performance. (Actually it was quite good.)

Is it just me, or is it maybe just Gainesville? Or, is there maybe a building, resurgent spirit of American resourcefulness that’s been squished and repressed for the last three years? Because that’s what it felt like. Do Americans seem ready to just have a happy Christmas season this year without any lingering pandemic nonsense despite the world’s chaotic condition? Let’s make it happen.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🚀 This morning’s Middle-East War update also informs us with a great example of a deceptive technique corporate media often uses to fool news consumers: the deceptive assumption.  The news was that the temporary peace deal between Israel and Hamas ended Friday.  Originally, Israel and Hamas had agreed to cease fire and exchange hostages and prisoners for four days, but diligent negotiation drew that out to a week without fighting. The tenuous, moment-by-moment agreement ended Saturday morning when hostilities resumed.

But corporate media tells a story of a cease-fire “collapsing,” even though the deal survived almost twice as long as originally planned.  For example, here is yesterday’s Fox News headline (Fox parroted the heterogenous language they’re all using):

It’s probably too much to expect corporate media to focus on the positive, that there were seven days of cooperation when even four seemed unlikely. That’s a problem, but not the worst one.

The problem is describing the cease-fire as having “collapsed” instead of “ended” distorts the truth in an unrecognizable narrative pretzel. Even though it was a miraculous accomplishment to double the original deal, the “collapsed” narrative includes an unstated assumption. The unstated assumption rewrites the past, suggesting everyone expected the cease-fire to last longer rather than shorter. But the exact opposite was true. Plenty of folks predicted it wouldn’t even last the original four days. Everybody was amazed it lasted as long as seven days.

If anything, it was corporate media that did the collapsing. Media collapsed the truth into a convenient but false lie communicated through a single word. Don’t fall for the media’s false assumptions. The week-long peace deal ended, successfully. It was never meant to end the war. It now represents a starting point, a sort of foundation for the parties to continue building from for the next one.

🚀 Late yesterday the AP ran a remarkable story headlined, “3 commercial ships hit by missiles in Houthi attack in Red Sea, US warship downs 3 drones.”

Yesterday, the Yemenese Houthis — a group nobody ever heard of before, from a country only one percent of college kids could find on a map — launched a barrage of missiles and drones at a flotilla of large commercial ships and a United States Destroyer, the U.S.S. Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer.

The Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah (Arabic for 'Supporters of God'), are a Shia muslim ‘political and military organization’ widely known to be supported by Iran (also Shia). In 2021, citing “humanitarianism,” Joe Biden promptly un-designated the Houthis as terrorists. One man’s terrorist and so forth. Instead, the Biden regime ‘sanctioned’ the group to try to get them to behave, but in light of current events, sanctions do not seem to be working. I’m only saying.

Also in 2021, team Biden stopped supporting the official Yemenese government (Sunnis), with whom the Houthis are allegedly fighting.

The USS Carney knocked down the Houthi missiles and drones and then launched a Hellfire missile racing straight back, blowing all the former terrorists into Kingdom Come.

Wait. Sorry. Scratch that. I just assumed we fired back. I should have said: the Carney knocked down the missiles and drones … and then did buck all. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.

Wait, wait. I still got it wrong. I should have said the Carney knocked down A MISSILE and A DRONE and then three more Houthi missiles blew into the three large commercial carriers the Carney was supposed to be protecting: the Unity Explorer, the Number 9, and the Sophie II.

And we just took it.

I’m almost there, but I suppose it still a smidge inaccurate to say we just took it. We did something. We promised to think about responding, which counts as doing something in the map rooms our woke, high-heeled admirals infest. Per the Associated Press:

The U.S. vowed to “consider all appropriate responses” in the wake of the attack, specifically calling out Iran, after tensions have been high for years now over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

See? We’re carefully considering an appropriate response. What could that be? Well, first of all, not launching missiles back at the Houthis, dummy. That would be an inappropriate response, which is obviously the opposite of an appropriate response. I mean, when has violence ever solved anything? Apart from Slavery, Nazism, Communism, and two World Wars. But other than those ones, I mean?And, don’t you agree we wouldn’t want to respond inappropriately? That’s how inappropriate Russians like VLADIMIR PUTIN act, and just look at how things turned out for Putin. He’s died of cancer six times now. So.

Still not convinced? Gosh, you’re like a dog with a bone with this missile idea. Okay, smarty-pants, where are we supposed to get missiles to fire back at the Houthis? The Carney? Are you kidding? We’re saving those missiles for attacks. Please. Don’t try to be a Navy admiral. It’s very, very complicated.

Only slightly more seriously, the U.S. Central Command did actually respond to the attacks with a media statement.  The CentCom statement did nothing militarily, but arguably raised the stakes diplomatically, hauling Iran partly into the spotlight with a hyper-careful bit of diplomatic word-salad: “We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran.”

So exactly when does considering options stop and using options begin? I suppose the good news is that, despite how frustrating it is to watch, cooler heads are in charge of things over there in the spicy Middle East and are not responding to obvious attempts to provoke a wider conflict.

💉 L.A.’s KTLA-5 ran a spooky story this weekend headlined, “‘Supernatural’ actor Mark Sheppard survives ‘six massive heart attacks.’”

Hollywood actor Mark Sheppard, 59, played in the popular long-running occult series Supernatural, as well as in Battlestar Galactica and other TV series over the years. But on Saturday, Mark posted on Instagram that on Friday, he’d collapsed in his kitchen and then endured what sounds like a pretty painful ordeal: “Six massive heart attacks later, and being brought back from dead 4 times,” Mark explained in the post, which included a picture of him laying in a hospital bed with tubes and wires coming out.

“I apparently had a 100% blockage in my LAD,” Mark said. And he never saw it coming. No symptoms. ‘LAD’ refers to the left anterior descending artery, the largest coronary artery. Mark’s was apparently all blocked up.

So far we have a normal SADS story with a happier ending than most. But now, check out this unexpected paragraph that suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the KTLA article, and then try to convince me the reporter wasn’t trying to tell us something without actually saying it:

Days before being hospitalized, Sheppard posted that he had lost nearly 40 pounds in another Instagram post, writing, “Never felt better.” He also shared in a video posted Tuesday that he was going through a “recovery period,” but didn’t explain any further. In July, Sheppard shared about a “nasty little bout with skin cancer” that left him with a “wide gash in belly.”

Isn’t that fascinating? That paragraph was kind of like one of those secret hand signs hostages use to alert people to call the cops.

Anyway, Mark has now literally been to ‘the other side’ and back — four times. It’s almost supernatural. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Within six months Mark has survived skin cancer and a heart attack. Sorry, six heart attacks. Despite never feeling better at the start of the summer!

I wonder. What could be going on?

During the frenetic heyday of summer, 2021, Mark was one of the jab campaign’s fully-vaccinated citizen volunteers:

We’re glad Mark is doing okay, and we pray for his complete recovery from everything that’s afflicting him.

💉 The AP ran a story yesterday headlined, “Pope Francis says he's doing better but again skips his window appearance facing St. Peter's Square.”

Pope Francis, 87, skipped mass for his second Sunday in a row yesterday, citing his bout with “infectious bronchitis.” He also skipped a Friday appearance at the gala COP28 annual climate conference in Dubai, where he was scheduled to speak to the usual suspects, goofy world ‘leaders’ like King Charles and Klaus Schwab.

For the life of me, I have no idea what the Pope has to say about climate science. His involvement makes one suspect that the whole climate thing might be more fairly described as religious instead of “scientific.” But I digress.

Earlier the Vatican described Francis as suffering from ‘lung inflammation’ and ‘the flu.’ On Thursday, Francis more specifically described his intractable condition as “a very acute, infectious bronchitis.” And, this is his second go-around with bronchitis this year. Pope Francis also had an acute bronchitis in the spring, when he was hospitalized for three days.

It’s almost like his immune system is weak. Could be his age. You never know.

💉 Yesterday the New York Times ran another breathless, nearly-hysterical article headlined, “‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates.”

The Times was badly triggered by what you and I might consider to be good news. Back in July, a federal judge overturned Mississippi’s strict childhood vaccine requirement, requiring the state to start accommodating parents’ religious objections to jabs, which the Times thinks is totally outrageous. But even worse, now parents are starting to apply for the exemptions, even after watching a mandatory, Clockwork Orange-style, government-produced video explaining in detail the benefits of vaccination.

They just won’t listen to The Science.

The Times thinks this could be the end of civilization. The article quoted Mississippi’s state health director, Dr. Daniel P. Edney, who darkly warned that, if the increasing exemptions crosses the 3,000 mark, Mississippi will again face the catastrophic risk of dreaded diseases that are now, thanks to jabs, only a distant but painful memory, like measles!

“It’s a dangerous game we’re playing,” warned Dr. Paul Offit, FDA vaccine panelist and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. Dr. Offit thinks this is all a game. He pleaded for mandatory childhood vaccines with no upper limit. “If we eliminate school vaccine mandates, measles will be the first vaccine-preventable disease to come back, and it will come roaring back,” Offit explained. “Why would we want to put children in harm’s way again?”

Um. You might have that backwards, doc. Or I think you might have meant to say, “why would we want to put profits in harm’s way again?”

It’s not like mandatory childhood vaccines are a popular policy. As the Times noted, only five states — California, Connecticut, Maine, New York and oddly, West Virginia — still refuse to recognize religious exemptions to vaccines.

The tiresome article ended on a surprising note. It quoted a lady the Times called a “medical freedom activist,” MaryJo Perry.  I was gratified to see that, like me, Ms. Perry said she feels like we’ve entered a new phase now, a new “climate” (no pun) that the pandemic helped to bring about:

Ms. Perry said Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights was working to elect candidates who are “pro-medical freedom.” She said she saw the (July) court ruling as the culmination of a decade of her hard work, coupled with a new political climate.

“We’ve had many parents for years wanting to sue, and it was just not the right time,” she said. “Covid kind of set the stage in the judiciary for it to happen.”

A new political climate. I’ve told you. There’s a sea-change happening. It can be hard to perceive sometimes, since most of the current is running below the surface. But I believe that a critical mass of people — including judges — are finally waking up from their covid nightmares and finding reality. It’s been sitting right where they left it three years ago.

💉 Social media mega-influencer and British comedian Russell Brand (6.7 million subscribers) ran a new segment of his popular, now de-monetized YouTube show this weekend titled, “Vaccine BOMBSHELL - 973% Increase In HEART FAILURE?!” It has a half-million views so far.

YouTube: Russell Brand segment on vaccine injuries (8:24).”

The segment started with military myocarditis, moved to teenage myocarditis, then Russell mercilessly mocked the new Moderna SpikeVaxx commercial, which features the incomprehensibly awful slogan: “SpikeVaxx that body!”

What?

That’s for real. I would love to talk to Moderna’s marketing department and ask them a few questions. Like, what they are smoking, and do they have a medical marijuana card for it? My gosh. Could that be the worst slogan that anybody ever came up with since Fetterman Formalwear’s “dress for the job you want?”

Nothing about “spike vaxxing” my body sounds appealing. How on Earth did they come up with that one? Are they trying to go out of business? Is that how they’re going to escape liability?

Anyway, you can argue Russell’s audience is already anti-establishment, but this kind of messaging feel like we’re reaching a new frontier, like Russell is pushing the envelope further and farther. It’s progress.

🔥 The UPI ran a telling story Saturday headlined, “Chris Christie fails to make it onto Maine's GOP primary election ballot.” Apparently Christie may be prosperous in other respects, but he was only able to scrape up 844 out of 2,000 valid signatures required to get onto Maine’s 2024 presidential ballot.

So, it looks like Chris Christie’s fake presidential campaign is over.

🔥 Over the weekend, earthquake reports tumbled in from what felt like a whole lot of places: the Philippines (7.6 magnitude); Indonesia (6.3); northwest Turkey (5.1); Pakistan (4.8): Iceland (which is still waiting for that volcano to blow); Madison, Ohio (2.3); southern Utah (3.9); Bangladesh, India (5.5); Imperial County at the California-Mexico border (4.8); and Banning, California (3.2).

I may have missed some. And, someone else will have to say whether that’s really a lot of reports, since I’m just a lawyer, not a geologist or whatever. Coincidentally, there was also some pretty significant solar activity over the weekend too, featuring giant coronal holes in the Sun, which are not the same as sunspots (although I can see why you’d confuse the two. Not me. I didn’t confuse them. That is not why I looked it up. You can’t prove that.):

Coronal holes are dark, irregularly shaped areas on the Sun that are cooler than surrounding areas, or at least, less super-hot. Don’t ask why. These ‘holes’ occur where the Sun's magnetic field temporarily tears wide open, allowing supercharged particles from the Sun's corona to stream into space.

Right now they’re streaming towards the Earth, which if you live in Portland, is the planet that we all live on. Plus resident aliens.

Despite the dramatic photos, space watchers don’t appear to be more than usually excited about the weekend’s glorious corona holes. News reports suggest that, because of the holes and the particles and such, auroras may be visible tonight or tomorrow in many locations far south of where they’re ever normally seen. So keep an eye out.

Anyway, the reason I mentioned the space weather is that some credible-sounding independent observers have been claiming this kind of solar activity can cause earthquakes. Again, don’t ask how. It’s complicated. To be fair and balanced, the U.S. Geological Survey says there’s ‘no evidence’ of any link between the Sun’s supercharged magnetic particles and earthquakes.

I’ll let you decide whether you’d rather believe random twitter accounts on the Internet or the official government earthquake agency. As for me, I’m still thinking it over.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll have a great new roundup for you tomorrow morning somewhere around the regular time. See you then.

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