☕️ KILLING THE BLOB ☙ Thursday, December 19, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The Bureaucracy died a little yesterday, which outraged Democrats, of course. That and lots more in today's roundup.

Good morning, C&C, it’s NOT Friday! It’s Thursday! And NOW we are officially under a week from Christmas. So get crackin’. In today’s roundup: here we go again – one of the nation’s biggest states declares bird flu emergency and corporate fearmongering begins; latest get-rich-quick plan appears in New York Department of Investigations homeless services report; good news updates in the culture wars; and dramatic six-hour battle over horrible federal funding bill ends in triumph, changing the game forever.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Here we go again! Except this time, we’ve already read the script. CBS ran the story yesterday headlined, “California Gov. Gavin Newsom declares state of emergency over bird flu, calling it a "proactive action.”” Unleash the no-bid emergency purchasing powers!

So far, bird flu is just the same old recycled germ stupidity. (Replacing the first letter ‘b’ with a ’t’ provides a more apt descriptor.) “Common human symptoms of bird flu infection,” CBS reported, “are similar to the flu. The severity of the symptoms can range from none to severe.” Like flu. And, um, if symptom severity is “none,” then what are the ‘symptoms?’

And, if it’s similar to the flu, which we already live with, then how is it an emergency?

That’s just the beginning of the lost logic of bird flu. Even though it is bird flu, public health officials have aimed their gimlet eyes at cows. Californians, say goodbye to raw milk! Expect ranchers to be soon ordered to liquidate entire herds, so say hello to sky-high beef prices. Presumably, they will soon offer us sacks of “nut milk” and crates of cricket patties as greener alternatives.

Yesterday —the same day as California’s emergency declaration— the Washington Post reported, “CDC confirms first severe human case of bird flu in U.S.” It’s not the first case of bird flu. It is the first severe case. And the “first severe case” is an ailing old lady who “had been in contact with sick and dead birds in backyard flocks on their property.”

In other words, she’s elderly. She has comorbidities. She has been messing around with dead animals. But they haven’t told us exactly how sick she is. In fact, they have no plans to ever tell us, either. They refuse to say exactly how old she is or what other health problems she has. Is she 99? 104? This is for “patient privacy.” You know.

I suppose one good thing is that, after demanding we tattoo our vaccine status on our foreheads to order a small fry at the drive-thru, public health has suddenly re-discovered the virtues of patient privacy.

Guess who’s running the federal response? This highly qualified Biden appointee:

That’s right! He’s back. Biden’s “Monkeypox Czar,” leather festival aficionado, and tattooed occultist Demetre Daskalakis is now, apparently, heading the CDC’s Bird Flu response. Because they only want the MOST qualified scientists, not lawyers like RFK. The new Bird Flu Czar delivered the CDC’s Bird Flu briefing in Atlanta yesterday and said his dark master Beelzebub has not yet deigned to claim any victims.

More to the point, there have been 60 reported bird flu cases in humans so far, and they’ve all been mild, and nobody died:

It’s terrifically disappointing for public health. The lack of any serious and fatal bird flu cases is holding Big Pandemic back. Corporate media is hoping against hope that the comorbid granny from Louisiana might be the one, the golden infectee who actually expires from her bird flu infection, permitting headlines breathlessly declaring “the first fatality” from the flu-like disease.

During the briefing, Daskalakis correctly noted that, at this point, the risk to people is low. Even that might be an overstatement. ChatGPT’s smartest model agreed this morning that “it's fair to say that the risk of dying from anything else is higher than the risk of dying from bird flu for the general public.”

They might get away with dumping a bunch of “emergency,” no-bid money on their friends and relatives for a disease that has unquantifiably low risk. But they are not going to run another pandemic on us, because we will not tolerate it. Not this time.

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In 1936, Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich,” the nation’s first major self-help book. It became an instant classic, has withstood the tests of time, and still remains a best-seller, with “updated!” and “revised!” versions repopulating shelves every few years. It’s practically its own industry; Napoleon would be proud. (He’s long dead, of course.)

(What I would most like to know is why Hill’s parents decided to name him “Napoleon.” But I suppose that’s beside the point.)

To develop his classic enrichment method, Hill studied Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other millionaires of his day. The book offers readers who are yearning for riches Hill’s Thirteen Principles, including then-revolutionary ideas like building a burning desire, using positive self-talk, organizing a ‘mastermind group,’ and overcoming fear.

Hill didn’t specifically mention overcoming the fear of germs, but I assume that was included in the wholesale lot.

Sorry fans, but Napoleon Hill is old news. I have developed a better and much easier self-help method. If you want to grow rich in 2024, it is way simpler than it was in 1936. Forget about all that babbling encouragement to yourself, trying to bully your reluctant relatives into joining your mastermind group, and all that getting up early and working hard and stuff.

That’s old-fashioned.

No, the new method for getting rich is: form an NGO aimed at a progressive policy goal and get yourself a generous government contract. Indeed, New York’s local The City ran an explosive story a couple months back headlined, “Homeless Shelter Execs Make Huge Salaries and Hire Family Members, DOI Report Finds.”

According to a very detailed report (linked here), the selfless progressives who run New York City’s government-funded homeless shelters get by on meager salaries of at least $500,000 a year and up to $1 million dollars. A year. (Video of city meeting; 0:58..) And these humanitarian icons also hire their friends and their relatives to work at the NGO, and pay them outsized salaries using taxpayer money.

The best part is, so far as I can tell, the government also pays for outsourcing all the actual work to subcontractors.

There was lots more. The Department of Investigation’s report ran 75 pages. But you get the idea. It is a gold mine of OPM — other people’s money. Just keep digging! And you never have to get your driving gloves dirty or even see a homeless person or drug addict. Subcontractors interface with the “customers.” The government gives you the money to pay the subcontractors. See how awesome it is?

It’s up to you whether you want to ‘negotiate’ kickbacks from the no-bid subcontractors who are doing the work. It can’t fail! You never have to fundraise or sell anything and you can even work from home.

Forget about Napoleon Hill. The new bestseller is NGO Hill. And you can collect your cool mil a year from the comfort of your home while simultaneously virtue signaling. You aren’t a greedy capitalist monster. You are a caring humanitarian selflessly laboring in the trenches of the progressive human desert that somehow keeps expanding every year.

They’ve subsidized homelessness and every other human vice. And now, unsurprisingly, vice is increasing. Which is exactly what you’d expect a subsidized sinful behavior to do.

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This week’s news delivered a few big wins in the culture wars. First, the New York Times reported that “Disney Pulls Transgender Story Line From Pixar’s ‘Win or Lose’ Series.” It only amounted to removing a few lines of dialog, but they were awful lines, and the concession itself was a cannonade against the trans lobby.

The entertainment giant has somehow discovered a lane that it should stay in. “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience,” Disney disclosed in a statement, “we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”

It sure has taken the kid-focused company a long time to realize parental preferences. Or maybe the truth is that Disney is starting to mind its own business. We’ll see whether they can keep it up.

💉 Second, on Tuesday the UK Daily Mail reported a great story headlined, “Australian Doctor who was banned from practising after warning against Covid vaccines gets his licence back.”

Self-represented (!) Queensland Doctor William Bay took on his governing medical board’s legal team in a multi-year battle that just ended. On Monday, the province’s Supreme Court reinstated Dr. Bay’s license, canceled all current investigations, and said the allegations against the doctor were “entirely unfounded.”

Dr. Bay, whose license to practice was suspended over his public statements about the risks of the covid vaccine, was ecstatic. “I was able to get through this loss of career, loss of income, marriage breakdown, the whole nine yards of intimidation from the bullies of AHPRA,” the doctor explained, “because I have strong faith in God.”

Thank the Lord. It’s happening slowly. But it is slowly happening, all around the world. The madness of covid is slowly receding and Sanity is re-taking her throne. Stand by for the “retributive justice” phase.

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Yesterday, the Washington Post wrote perhaps the most politically significant story in the modern era, headlined “Republicans scrap spending bill, under pressure from Trump and Musk.” The Bureaucratic Blob did everything it could to stop exactly what happened, but it happened anyway. In other words, they can’t stop it anymore. Let me explain.

CLIP: Fox News reports that Elon Musk shut down Franken-Resolution (2:26).

“Democrats,” the Post began, “were outraged at the collapse of their deal.” (Well. Outrage is their defining characteristic, besides arrogance.) Outraged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) darkly warned, “an agreement is an agreement.” He vowed that “House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited upon the American people.”

Their deal? You can probably already sense, if Democrats are this flummoxed, the outcome was something really good, and it was.

I wasn’t exaggerating when I described yesterday’s climactic battle as perhaps the most politically significant story in modern history. The timeline fits into a single workday. Wednesday began with an early-morning release of a 1,600-page proposed budget that had been kept secret until yesterday—the day of the vote. Except for party leaders and backroom participants, most lawmakers only saw it for the first time around 7am, with a vote scheduled for later that afternoon.

Initial reactions from Congress were furious. Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) took a quick look and tweeted that there were nine (9) pages of continuing resolution —the part needed to keep the federal government running at current funding levels— followed by more than 1,550 pages of new spending over prior levels. Other lawmakers wondered how they were supposed to read and vote on a 1,600-page bill in less than one day without even advance notice.

For comparison, the previous continuing resolution passed by Congress only ran to 21 pages. Here’s Rep. Mace comparing the two bills:

Despite having frittered away months to get it done, Speaker Johnson scheduled the critical vote toward the end of the final week right before Christmas break and two days before federal government funding runs out on Friday afternoon. No pressure.

You might ask how in the name of Benjamin Franklin are hundreds of Representatives supposed to read 1,600 pages of dense statutory text in a few hours and then vote intelligently? What about informed consent? Why not give them at least a week?

Everyone knows: these mega-pork bills are deliberately released late, under pressure, with no time for reading, so that nobody can read it and tell the public what’s in it before it is too late.

In the clip linked above, yesterday morning, well before the bill died on the operating table, terrific Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna complained about being forced to vote on a bill without understanding it: “I don’t know how else to say it. This is a sh— sandwich. We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.”

Or as bionic-hipped Nancy Pelosi once quipped through slipping dentures, “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”

The bill itself was terrible. It was a dreamlike Festivus grab-bag stuffed with Democrats’ worst progessive ideas. You’ve probably seen the lists. Had it passed, hundreds of progressive fantasies would have been fulfilled, everything from replacing the word “criminal” in the Federal code with “justice-involved individual,” to funding “at least twelve” new secret biolabs for “pandemic prevention.” Uh huh. It had $70 billion more for Ukraine, funding for government censorship, and would have expanded government pandemic powers.

This Franken-pork bill offered everyone something to hate. Personally, I was outraged that the bill would have —at this late date— finally cut off many vaccine-related powers given to the HHS Secretary — right before Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s arrival. I’ve been reassuring you that Kennedy can fix the latest crazy covid declarations from HHS. But this bill would have “fixed” Kennedy, leaving the incoming HHS Secretary newly powerless to stop the covid state of emergency till after Trump’s term.

No. Thank. You.

In return for this progressive nuclear disaster, Republicans “negotiated” two priorities for conservatives. The bill included funding for disaster victims —who should have already been funded, by FEMA— and funding for farmers, who are amidst the latest farming emergency of some kind, which always seems to pop out of its disaster box every budget cycle and which helps many distressed Hollywood celebrities and progressive politicians smart enough to buy small farms to get in on the game.

It remains unclear why Republicans gave Democrats so much pork to get two items in return, since Republicans are in the majority and can pass a budget without Democrats.

By mid-morning, a war of words had exploded on X. It was the war the Frankenfunders hoped to avoid. Users started posting excerpts and summaries from the bill. Elon began reposting critical comments.

Trump, who’d kept silent till then, posted three unusually well-drafted comments on his Truth Social platform. The President-Elect wanted the House to do its job, and pass a continuing resolution without all the Festivus presents for Democrats. Most importantly, he wants Republicans to raise the debt ceiling so he won’t have to do it as soon as he gets into office.

They literally have more Republicans in the House now than they will have in 2025. Why not now?

By mid-afternoon, the continuing resolution was taking on water, but it was still afloat and remained viable for a vote. At 1:17pm, just hours after the 1,600-page monster first became available to read, Government Efficiency Czar Elon Musk tweeted a threat to GOP lawmakers: if they vote for the bill, he hinted there would be primary challenges against them in their next election cycle. That threat seems to have been what did it. As the WaPo reported, the bill, already on life support, coded and joined the Ghost of Christmas Past. Headline from the Hill:

Elon didn’t say he would fund primary efforts against porky Republicans. But he did, after all, just shepherd the most successful political turnaround in history. So.

🔥 As the WaPo reported, Democrats are outraged. They were so close. On CNN last night, mole-like former Representative Adam Kinzinger sneeringly called Elon “President Musk” and called DJT “Vice-President Trump.” Nobody laughed:

CLIP: CNN interviews primaried Representative about Elon’s free speech (1:10).

To give you an idea of just how far we’ve come, back in July CNN introduced Kinzinger as a “future Republican president.” (I know.)

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. The Bureaucracy obviously thought it could pass this bill. A lot of work went into drafting and backroom-negotiating that 1,600-page monster. Don’t conclude this was anything new, Congress has been playing budgetary brinksmanship games for years now. These tactics are as old as Napoleon Hill’s self-improvement advice. But Twitter and AI just ended it for good. The last-minute bill-drop technique is dead. They can invent something else, but they won’t try this again.

We are truly entering a new, more transparent era of politics. You might even say more democratic.

Have a terrific Thursday! Squeeze a little time out of your Christmas preparations tomorrow morning and C&C will update you on everything you need to know, so that you can get back to the fun stuff and family.

Don’t race off! 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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