☕️ INEVITABILITY ☙ Thursday, August 31, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Hurricane and multiplier updates; another McConnell mini-stroke; statistically-impossible rise in infection deaths; Obama chef story gets weirder; SADS director; Scalise myeloma; Ukraine woes; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Hurricane Cleanup Thursday! The Childers family is safe and sound at Coffee & Covid H.Q., ending up fifty miles outside the storm’s actual path. Aside from having a lawn littered with branches (some, admittedly, the size of small trees), we did just fine.

There were three bits of intensely good news about Hurricane Idalia. First, she was a speed train, moving up to 20 miles per hour across land, like a woman sprinting for the Black Friday clearance sale in the purses department right after Macy’s doors opened. The faster the storm, the less time is has to do its damage. You’d be surprised what a big difference that makes.

Second, there were no flying sharks of any kind, not Makos, Tigers, or even Nurses, and only a few airborne alligators (watch out below!). And even better, the human sharks from FEMA were far, far away in the Western Pacific at the time.

Just kidding. The real second item of good storm news was that the giant twister landed at nearly the most ideal spot, right in Florida’s damp armpit, where the swampy land is mostly uninhabited state and national park territory.

The standout exception was the quaint fishing village of Steinhatchee (STEEN-hatch-ee), which was well and truly flooded. Visit them sometime after the town’s been cleaned back up.

Finally, to his great credit, Governor DeSantis handled the hurricane response maybe better than any other hurricane I can recall, having lived in Florida my entire life. The staging of surge electrical teams had the power back on before many folks even knew it was off. The National Guard was clearing the roads to Steinhatchee for cleanup crew access within hours after the storm passed through.

An A-plus job.

For just one example, early yesterday afternoon a report of looting in Steinhatchee cropped up, and Governor DeSantis immediately got in front of cameras, reminding looters that under Florida law, citizens may use deadly force to protect their homes when they are inside.

https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1696965708838486061

While there’s no absolute right to use deadly force to generally protect property in the Wild West of Florida, non-deadly force is expressly permitted, such tasing or pepper spray. But there is a statutory ‘presumption of fear of death’ justifying use of deadly force if a stranger forcibly enters while you’re home. Better, deadly force can be used to protect private property to prevent a forcible felony, such as looting (burglary), no problem. (Law nerds: start with Fla. Stat. § 776.012.) (Not legal advice!)

Still, leave it to Grandma Garland and the DOJ to indict homeowners shooting looters for deprivation of civil rights or something. Depending on their political affiliation, of course.

We are grateful the hurricane was not worse, and pray for people in affected areas.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 MULTIPLIER UPDATE: On Tuesday I got some figures from last week’s Ray Smith multiplier. As of Monday, nearly 5,300 (!!) individual Coffee & Covid service members had given almost $170,000 in total. That’s fantastic! Take a moment to imagine having the ability to effortlessly stroke a check for that amount whenever an important cause came along. Well, with just a moment’s effort, working together, each giving small, affordable amounts, we duplicated the power of a well-heeled, big-money donor.

In other words, you can do the same thing. Well, we can. And we did.

At this point, Ray should be out of danger of being overwhelmed by Georgia’s state attorneys in their haphazard rush to a speedy trial. I will let you know if I can get hold of him for some details. And, I’ll continue to monitor the group of Trump-suit defendants in case any others need multiplying.

Now for the roundup.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 USA Today ran a ubiquitous story yesterday afternoon headlined “Mitch McConnell to consult doctor after freezing, struggling to speak for second time this summer.”

It was ugly.

Before I show you the video, which is bad enough, what was even worse was how Establishment Media broadcast the story on all channels within minutes of McConnell’s mini-stroke, or whatever it was. Compare this coverage to all the coverage of, say, Fetterman struggling to speak, or Biden wandering aimlessly off stages, enthusiastically shaking hands with invisible friends, or suddenly tumbling off stationary bicycles onto prepubescent girls.

Sorry. I mean, compare it to the non-coverage of Fetterman, Biden, or even Diane Feinstein, for that matter.

Here are just the first of dozens of stories that all popped up within the two hours after McConnell’s brief illness:

It’s nice the democrat party has an Establishment Media. The Republicans should think about getting one, too.

It’s de rigueur to roundly criticize McConnell these days, but I feel compelled to point out three important facts. First, without Mitch McConnell, Merrick Garland would be sitting fat and happy on the Supreme Court, and we would not have any of the great decisions that have come down in the last two years. As bad as Garland is at DOJ, a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court would have been infinitely worse, a prospect literally 1,000 times more horrifying than Gremlins multiplied by Sharknado.

Second, McConnell approved a record number of Trump appointments to federal judgeships, and Trump appointees made nearly all the decisions that eeked us out of the pandemic with our Constitutional skins mostly intact.

Finally, while lots of regular Republicans complain, with good reason, about McConnell’s lack of effective legislative action, and his somehow becoming fantastically wealthy on a Senator’s salary, democrats are grotesquely celebrating what — without some kind of miracle — will probably be the end of the Senate Minority Leader’s career.

In other words, democrats don’t see McConnell as ineffective.

Anyway, here’s the clip, if you haven’t seen it. Ironically, the humiliating and painful-to-watch freeze-up happened right after McConnell was asked about his running for re-election.

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1696940292954628555

McConnell does not look well. More than anything, even more than what it evidences about an obvious jab injury (thanks Pfizer!), this public medical catastrophe highlights America’s geriatric, brain-damaged leadership. It is a particularly bad time in world history to have a weak, ailing minority leader.

Despite appearances, he still sounds compos mentis. Earlier in the day, a frail-looking McConnell spoke fluently about a possible government shutdown and a possible short-term spending deal. USA Today reported the Senate minority leader will be “consulting a physician prior to his next event,” according to an anonymous McConnell aide.

We pray that Mitch will receive effective medical treatment and be relieved of the stress of his current office.

🔥 I have often reported about Ethical Skeptic’s excellent data-crunching of the CDC’s confusing and deliberately-obscured morbidity and mortality data. Since we have no reliable government data about covid and the vaccines, I think it is perfectly fair to rely on this long-standing independent source. Ethical always links to his sources, provides his data, answers questions, and over the last couple years many have failed to debunk him.

On Monday, Ethical added a new chart of great interest to C&C readers. He crunched CDC’s reported deaths from infections. In other words, he looked for evidence of population-level autoimmune problems. And guess what? You know the answer.

Here’s one of his new charts, of “Zoonotic and Bacterial Infections (all ages).” (Zoonotic means acquired by animal contact.)

The area marked “Covid Mortality Decline” is the recent period when the CDC reported falling covid deaths. That is significant to show these increasing infection deaths are not related to covid infections. Next, the steepest inflection in infection deaths started right after 2021’s Week 14 — when the jabs rolled out.  Currently, about +250 extra people are dying per week in this infections category, and the trajectory is headed up sharply.

The bottom line is reported infection deaths are up more than +40% over the pre-pandemic baseline, which is a statistical 14-sigma event.

If you’re not familiar with the lingo, 14 sigmas might not sound like very much, but just hang on. Here’s how ChatGPT described the statistical likelihood of a 14-sigma event occurring:

A 14-sigma event is extremely rare in statistics. In a normal distribution, a 14-sigma event would be more than 2.2 trillion standard deviations away from the mean. To put it simply, it's an event that has an incredibly low probability of occurring. In fact, such events are so unlikely that they often fall into the realm of statistical anomalies and might suggest something unusual happening in the data or the underlying process.

Wow! 2.2 trillion standard deviations from the mean! “It might suggest something unusual happening.” No kidding. Those kind of odds seem well beyond the realm of the ‘improbable,’ and are rather comfortably living in a giant McMansion somewhere in the neighborhood of impossibility. Something unusual is happening, all right, something unusual that a legitimate, well-funded public health agency should promptly investigate. If only we had a legitimate, well-funded public health agency, that is. Why haven’t we started one yet?

Oh. Never mind.

What does this new chart mean? We’ve previously speculated about increasing rates of weird, rare diseases like monkeypox, Hansen’s disease (leprosy), and others, all being possibly related to vaccine-induced autoimmune syndromes, colloquially called “VAIDS.” Ethical’s current chart adds more evidence supporting that hypothesis.

ERRATA: ChatGPT was wrong (again), 14 sigmas is not 2.2 trillion standard deviations but more like a 1 in 2.2 trillion chance. It’s still improbable to impossibility, but the distinction stands.

💉 The Obama chef story just got a lot more complicated. Judicial Watch published an article to its website late last week headlined, “Judicial Watch: Police Records Show Secret Service Reported Obama’s Personal Chef Tafari Campbell was Missing, Body was Found Using Sonar.”

Based on police documents obtained from public records requests, Judicial Watch added a bunch of new details, including that the Secret Service first reported Campbell missing, which is interesting, but one item stood out beyond that: the police found Obama chef Tafari Campbell’s clothes long before they found his body.

From the July 23rd police report:

Secret Service Agent [REDACTED]  advd best access is from the residence, they are deploying a rescue swimmer and a zodiac boat right now.

RP adv no lifevest was worn, they have recovered the paddle board and clothing. Still no contact with missing party. They still have a boat and rescue swimmers in the area. 

In other words, Campbell was, apparently, paddle boarding naked. In Martha’s Vineyard. And a diligent search by Secret Service rescue swimmers failed to turn up his body.

As regular readers know, so far I’ve reported this bizarre story straight as a rail. Apart from suggesting an obvious connection with the jabs, I have not indulged any of the unverifiable but quite understandable speculation over chef Campbell’s untimely demise.

But this nude paddleboarding business doesn’t add up.

From the beginning, we were told police had been notified by an anonymous informant (whose name remains redacted) who said they saw Campbell “briefly” struggling in the water next to his board — with another paddelboarder.

Why wouldn’t the anonymous informant have mentioned Campbell was naked? Who was the other paddleboarder? Were they naked?

We’re talking about snooty Martha’s Vineyard. I refuse to believe that naked paddleboarding, or naked anything for that matter, is tolerated in that prude, swanky domain. They didn’t even tolerate a handful of illegal aliens shipped there from Florida — in spite of virtuously labeling themselves a “sanctuary city.”

A nude Tafari should’ve stood out like a sore thumb, or a sore whatever was sticking out. You know what I mean.

And then we get to the why. Nothing at all on his fairly-extensive social media suggested Campbell was a nudist. That only leaves a shameful, private fetish as the remaining semi-innocent explanation. But why would a married professional chef, who used to cook at the White House, whose livelihood depended on impeccably staying out of trouble, be paddling around in potential risk of being arrested for a sex crime at any second just because a nosy neighbor happened to look over in his direction?

I have no doubt the Martha’s Vineyard police are used the eccentric habits of high-net-worth residents and used to exercising a certain level of … discretion. But come on. This is the age of cell phones, NEST cameras, and P1000 zoom with night vision. Why take the chance?

The imagination boggles. What do you think happened?

💉 Netherlands NatchtKritic.de ran a story last week headlined (translated) “Director Stephanie van Batum passed away.” Curtain call!

Young theater director and actress Stephanie van Tatum, 34, died suddenly, unexpectedly, and mysteriously on August 13th AT HOME in the Netherlands. No information has been released about the cause of her untimely death. Young professionals dying suddenly happens all the time, I guess.

💉 Republican Majority Leader Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.), who a few years ago survived an assassination attempt by a woke liberal terrorist, announced Tuesday he's been diagnosed with a very rare type of blood cancer.

Coincidentally, Steve got and promoted the vaccines, often calling them safe and effective.

Representative Scalise made the announcement Tuesday on Twitter.

Multiple Myeloma is a type of blood cancer affecting bone marrow plasma cells, a crucial part of the immune system that produce antibodies to help the body fight off infections. In multiple myeloma, abnormal plasma cells start multiplying uncontrollably and build up in the bone marrow. This produces a plethora of other problems, including a weakened immune system, bone damage, kidney injury, and anemia.

The cause of multiple myeloma isn't fully understood. It’s baffling.

If caught early enough, the normal prognosis can be relatively good, after treatment with chemotherapy, stem cell transplants, and developing therapeutics.

We pray for Representative Scalise’s full and speedy recovery.

Oddly, Scalise’s multiple myeloma sits at the nexus of many well-known vaccine-related injuries: blood problems, cancer, and immune suppression. But it’s probably just a coincidence. Right?

But anyway, don’t worry! Hopefully Steve will benefit from Pfizer’s brand-new multiple myeloma drug. Headline from MedCity News, just two weeks ago:

So.

🚀 The UK Telegraph ran another contrary Proxy War op-ed last week headlined, “Ukraine’s army is running out of men to recruit, and time to win.” The sub-headline even more controversially suggested, “Victory may be in sight for Vladimir Putin.”

A win for Vampire Putin! Say it isn’t so. How did that get past the censors?

After acknowledging some minor wins for Ukraine in last week’s fighting, the author described the vast difference between the dwindling number of potential soldiers available to Ukraine versus the relatively huge, steadily-increasing numbers available to Russia:

It’s a brutal but simple calculation: Kyiv is running out of men. US sources have calculated that  armed forces have lost as many as 70,000 killed in action, with another 100,000 injured. While Russian casualties are higher still, the ratio nevertheless favours Moscow, as Ukraine struggles to replace soldiers in the face of a seemingly endless supply of  conscripts.

Volunteers are no longer coming forward in numbers sufficient to keep the army at fighting strength: those most willing to fight signed up years ago. The latest recruitment slogan is “it’s OK to be afraid,” but there are still many attempting to dodge being drafted to fight on the front lines.

Not too good. But the vast mismatch between Ukraine’s available armed forces and what Russia can muster has been easily known from the very beginning of the conflict. So, why are op-eds appearing now citing how badly Ukraine is outnumbered? This tardy analysis mostly resembles a typical media narrative shift, where op-editors are recruited in the first wave to soften the blow and to provide some stuffing for a developing replacement narrative.

Here’s the Proxy War’s narrative timeline:

Stage 1: Russian victory is impossible.

Stage 2: Russian victory is unlikely.

Stage 3: Russia cannot be allowed to win.

Stage 4: Russia is winning, but at what cost?

Stage 5: Russian victory was inevitable.

Currently, we seem to have departed Narrative Stage 4 en route to Stage 5.

🚀 Now look at this article. Foreign Affairs ran a very interesting, detailed story around the same time as the Telegraph’s op-ed, which panned the other part of the war equation, the military technology. Put the two stories together, and Ukraine doesn’t have the men or material to win. Here’s the headline:

This article argued, as I have many times, that it was always misplaced to rely on “revolutionary” high-tech weapons — like drones, satellite guidance, and artificial intelligence — to turn the tide of war in Ukraine’s favor. Most fascinating of all, the article compared casualty rates from Ukraine’s Proxy War, such as in tank and infantry losses, against similar rates from World Wars I and II.

In short, looking at bare mutual casualty figures, the vaunted high-tech weapons have not produced any meaningful results different from what were achieved in 1918 using low-tech weapons.

The explanation for this seems obvious in hindsight. With each incremental advance in weapons technology, the adversary adapts and accommodates. It’s just a high-tech arms race. One example from the article was Ukraine’s initial use of sophisticated, expensive drones, which were destroyed in large numbers by Russia’s guided antiaircraft systems. So Ukraine adapted, switching to swarms of cheap, NATO-supplied drones — not much more than flying bombs or cameras. And the Russians countered with their own inexpensive antiaircraft artillery and handheld jammers.

And on and on it goes, cycle after deadly cycle, similar to the dance between computer hackers and anti-virus developers.

The article was a high-brow, intellectual analysis of the Proxy War’s surprises, or maybe non-surprises, and the reader is left with a disquieting conviction similar to the Telegraph’s simpler take: the Proxy War is just a grinding war of attrition that Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield. It also makes plain that military technology and strategy is rapidly advancing. Where it will end is anybody’s guess.

If the Telegraph’s op-ed is correct, Ukraine lacks the men to win. And if Foreign Affairs is right, Ukraine lacks any meaningful advantage in technology. Which leaves it where? Right where Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in Tucker’s interview yesterday: it’s time to make peace.

🚀 Related, this emotionally powerful clip of actual Russian war propaganda was making the rounds this week. This is the kind of thing that the State Department would like to prevent Americans from seeing at all. Why? What makes State Department employees better at evaluating information from foreign governments than anybody else?

Watch this short, Russian-produced clip and tell me what you think. Is it dangerous propaganda that could overpower your mental faculties or even hypnotize you? Or is it just one more data point in the broad tapestry of the Proxy War?

https://twitter.com/narrative_hole/status/1696213382943150182

😷 Finally, in terrific news, especially for people concerned about the threat of new covid mandates, local Texas CBS affiliate KENS-5 ran a story Tuesday headlined, “Texas law banning COVID-related mandates by local governments takes effect this week.”

Starting tomorrow, September 1st, local governments in the Lone Star State — including schools — will be prohibited from requiring covid-related masks, requiring proof of vaccination, or shutting down any businesses. (Private businesses can still make their own rules.)

After whining about “rising covid rates” in Bexar County, Texas, the last line in KENS-5’s story said it all:

“I haven’t admitted anybody with COVID in two years,” Dr. Neel said.

I rolled my eyes so hard I momentarily saw my own optic nerve. I guess it’s not exactly an emergency.

Anyway, that’s not all! The Texas Legislature passed over 800 new laws this year, and many of them become effective tomorrow along with the ban on covid mandates. Among many others, the new laws include:

— A ban on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices in colleges.

— Colleges may now fire tenured faculty for reasons like “professional incompetence” and “repeatedly failed to perform duties.”

— Courts may now remove local District Attorneys for picking which crimes to prosecute or not prosecute.

— New regulations on “sexually-oriented performances” (i.e. drag shows).

— Increased penalties for child porn.

— Requires college sports teams to limit participation by biological sex.

There’s a lot more. Here’s a more complete summary of the new laws, if you are interested.

It’s progress! It’s the counter-revolution at the Alamo. Texans, you may be a little late getting to the party, but welcome aboard the freedom express.

Have a terrific Thursday! And come on back tomorrow for another action-packed Coffee & Covid roundup.

Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

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