☕️ IMPROBABILITIES ☙ Tuesday, August 20, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Your daily DNC report (nothing happened); weird 2024 Dem platform foulup; freak weather sinks superyacht; super gay Star Wars show blasted; woke motorcycle company sadly surrenders; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup of today’s essential news includes: Democrat National Convention update with nothing much to report except media malfeasance; 2024 party platform includes a major oversight — the nominee herself; freak weather sinks superyacht in the weirdest weather story yet; conservative counterculture win as gayest Star Wars show blasted into one-season history; and famous American motorcycle company is forced to grapple with customer preferences.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

📈📉 If you’ve managed to avoid all the gushing media reports about last night’s buzzword-loaded but calorically empty speeches at the DNC in Chicago, you missed nothing. A series of far-left speakers pandered to the party’s partisan activists, including the vegetative Big Guy, there to get his 10%. The speakers studiously avoided every single issue regular people care about: the economy, the border, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, and barely even mentioned Gaza. Maskless, they repeatedly retconned the pandemic, bizarrely claiming to have fought lockdowns and mandates.

Corporate media slathered the Convention with delirious wall-to-wall coverage. Politico ran possibly the most honest story, headlined “Kamala Harris has rallied Democrats. But now comes the hard part.” In contrast to most other corporate media reports, Politico observed we’ve been here before. Kamala’s “2020 presidential primary run similarly started on a high note,” the article admitted, “before her campaign devolved into a slog.”

Politico reminded readers of Kamala’s 2020 problems, like her see-sawing message, a “lack of crisp deliveries” of her policy positions, and her “uneven performances on the stump.”

Inside the Convention, Kamala Harris was advertised as the next best idea the Democrats ever had. They got the idea to coup the party’s elected nominee after a night of scheming and hard drinking with some Ukrainian oligarchs, fresh off the Nordstream bombing. (Around 2am, the conspirators had first voted to replace Biden with an animatronic donkey, but some more votes unexpectedly came in while Nancy was in the bathroom, so Kamala won by a nose.)

The real race starts in three days, as soon as the Convention ends. Politico pointed out that Kamala still must bridge the Israel-Palestine divide (protestors outside the Democratic border wall called her “Killer Kamala”). She must face reporters, currently relegated to a tent outside the Convention hall, who are still waiting to ask her some questions. And her recently unveiled economic plan landed flatter than a French crepe.

🔥 A few other cracks appeared in the Democrats’ color revolution. For instance, the AP ran a story yesterday headlined, “Democrats approve a platform that mentions Biden's 'second term' despite his making way for Harris.” Last night, Democrat delegates unanimously approved the 2024 party platform. The problem was, nobody edited it since early July, before they yeeted Joe. So the official 2024 Democrat Party Platform describes Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris, as the nominee.

In fact, the 92-page document mentions Biden nearly 300 times, compared to only a couple dozen references to Harris. Walz’s name is entirely missing.

It’s almost like the platform doesn’t matter, and it was all just for show. Or maybe they’re leaving room for a last-minute replacement.

Does this seem like merely a minor oversight, a forgotten formality? Or is it more serious evidence of a lack of attention to detail, Democrats moving too fast, and a leadership vacuum? What else might they be forgetting?

🔥🔥 This could be the wildest weird weather story yet. Yesterday, AP ran a mysterious, submersive story headlined, “Search continues for British tech magnate and 5 others after luxury superyacht sinks off Sicily.”

The Bayesian was a $30 million, 184-foot superyacht owned by Mike Lynch, often described as “the British Bill Gates.”  In 2011, Lynch sold his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. The Bayesian spared no expense, offering guests comfort and performance, opulent staterooms, sophisticated social spaces, and cutting-edge technology, all powered by robust engines for long-distance cruising.

Yesterday, according to survivors and passengers on a nearby yacht, just after 4am local time, with the Bayesian quietly moored off Palermo, Sicily, it suddenly and unexpectedly sank. They don’t know why.

A wild thunderstorm hit Palermo around the same time, so the going theory is a freak waterspout appeared out of nowhere and swamped the massive ship. Just like that. A yacht moored nearby was unaffected, and helped with rescuing the 15 survivors taking an unanticipated night swim in the Mediterranean Sea.

Six people, including Lynch, 59, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, didn’t make it. They’ve only recovered one body so far.

Marco Tilotta, a specialist diver from Palermo's fire and rescue service, told Italian newspaper Il Messaggero that the superyacht was “practically intact” on the seabed, 48 meters below the surface. "It is resting on its starboard side. It has no gashes, no signs of impact," he reported.

I did a little digging and found nothing comparable to this story. In 2015, another superyacht, the M.Y. Yogi, sank in the Aegean, but it was at sea amidst a terrible storm and took hours to sink.  Before this, superyachters never needed to worry about freak waterspouts striking in the middle of the night while they were sleeping and minding their own business.

Fueling online conspiracy theories, Lynn’s cruise was meant to celebrate winning his criminal fraud trial. In June, a San Fransisco jury found Lynch not guilty of inflating his company’s value when he sold it to HP back in 2011. But in even more news of the weird, Lynn’s co-defendant, Autonomy’s former vice-president, also died mysteriously, two days earlier on Saturday morning. A still-unidentified driver ran him over while he was minding his own business jogging in England.

I don’t know what the odds are, but it is queer. Ironically, the Bayesian Theory, after which the yacht was presumably named, is a famous statistical device for calculating the probability of very improbable events. Despite the yacht’s advanced technology and safety features, it apparently fell victim to an extremely improbable weather event, and even more implausibly wasn’t even damaged. Weird.

🔥🔥 Speaking of queer things, yesterday the Hollywood Reporter ran a schadenfreudey Star Wars story under the headline, “‘The Acolyte’ Season 2 Not Moving Forward at Lucasfilm.” Disney’s woke new Star Wars show got the old light saber. Slice! It infamously featured a weird but super-diverse group of lesbian space witches as the heroes and cast the Jedi as villains. In a flash of creative stupidity, the queer space witches used magic to make babies without men. It was the non-patriarchy of the distant future/past, “a long time ago in a gay galaxy far, far away.”

CLIP: “People have told me it’s the gayest Star Wars!”

Star Wars fans hated it. They rebelled worse than the ones who blew up the Death Star. Risking personal cancellation, they even dared to call The Acolyte, “gay.” Lesbian producer Leslye Headland, who hasn’t produced anything else you’d recognize, wanted the show to be gay. She wistfully said she gets “sad that people would think that if something were gay, that that would be bad,” adding that she considers the Acolyte “the most important piece of art that I’ve ever made.”

Art’s meaning, as they always tell us, lies in the eye of the beholder. A beholder of art can’t be wrong. In this case, the beholders were sci-fi fans. And the beholders didn’t like it. So the beholders stopped watching it.

Maybe Leslye’s show was too gay. Or maybe audiences don’t want atypical sexual ethics launched down their throats like photon torpedoes into the Death Star’s ventilation port.

But … has Disney yet learned its lesson? Or will its next Star Wars show be even gayer than The Acolyte? Add your predictions to the comments.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, CNN ran an even more encouraging story headlined, “Harley-Davidson is dropping diversity initiatives after right-wing anti-DEI campaign.” It’s been a tough summer for woke termites infesting historically red corporations. First Tractor Supply and now this.

Harley Davidson was sad, just like Leslye Headland. “We are saddened by the negativity on social media over the last few weeks, designed to divide the Harley-Davidson community,” the company wrote in its mea culpa posted on Twitter/X.

The motorbike company growled, “we have not operated a DEI function since April 2024, and we do not have a DEI function today. We do not have hiring quotas and we no longer have supplier diversity spend goals.” The classic American brand promised to focus only on motorcycles and to avoid getting involved in other shiny, distracting virtue signals, like its now-defunct relationship with the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ activist group.

One person created change. Influencer and conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck went to war with Harley Davidson at the beginning of July. “It’s time to expose Harley Davidson,” Starbuck’s July 23rd post said. He listed twenty examples of how the company has “gone totally woke.” Such as Harley-Davidson’s ‘bootcamp’ for LGBTQ entrepreneurs, its donations to the United Way, and its public promise to increase employee diversity.

Just this year, Starbuck also successfully challenged Tractor Supply and John Deere, causing them both to publicly repent and ditch DEI. It’s a story of how just one persistent person can push back the battle lines in the culture war. I’m not saying Starbuck is like homemaker Phyllis Schlafly, who single-handedly derailed the awful 1972 Equal Rights Amendment, but it’s encouragingly similar.

Progress! Keep pushing.

Have a terrific Tuesday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning with all your essential news and commentary, not least of all with an update on the DNC, so you can peacefully ignore the corporate media’s codswallop.

We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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