☕️ KNUCKLEHEADS ☙ Wednesday, October 2, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Hurricane suggestions; debate fallout; Mideast fog of war; exposing NYT propaganda; random notions; meme of the week; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! As you noticed, today’s post is running late, but better late than never. Or so they say. Enjoy!

🗞 C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖🪖 This morning, the Trump Authorized GoFundMe for Helene victims surged past $3,700,000 — more than double where it began yesterday morning. Great work, team C&C!

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🌪️🌪️ In 2005, nearly 1,400 people died after New Orleans’ levees collapsed during Hurricane Katrina. Katrina holds the morbid record for top storm deaths in the modern era. Before that, you must reach all the way back to 1900 to find a more destructive storm. So far, Hurricane Helene remains far short of Katrina’s deadly peak, but reported deaths are increasing fast. We are beginning to see the signs of possible Katrina competition in headlines like this one from CNN this morning: “Desperation grows to find unaccounted for in wake of Helene.”

Helene landed in Florida, after scrubbing Florida’s West Coast during most of its northward trek. But Florida didn’t even make the top three states for reported deaths. So far, North Carolina has the most (73). South Carolina is a distant second (36), followed by Georgia (25).

The problem was all the water.

Last year, I reported on the Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption — the most significant climate event in modern history, which you never heard of since corporate media is utterly useless. I included all the evidence in my July, 2023 post “Overheated” (though many of the links have since been deleted or fact-check bombed, it’s all there.).  The short version is, a massive underwater volcanic eruption in the South Pacific boiled off literally unimaginable amounts of water, measurably increasing water vapor rates worldwide.

Water in the air (“humidity”) creates heat. So my point in 2023 was about the record hot summer that year. Studies I linked in the article (now very difficult to find) forecast elevated temperatures for years from Hunga Tonga moisture — worldwide.

But there was a bigger concern than a couple degrees of extra temperature: What goes up must come down. All that extra vaporized water has been showing up in recent extreme weather events.

Gorilla hail and record worldwide flooding are both signs of boiled sea water returning to ground. North Carolina’s damage wasn’t because of high wind speeds. Helene had slowed considerably by the time it traveled that far north. No, the worst damage was from floods, rockslides, and mudslides.

In other words, from the water.

Note for HAARP watchers: I’m suggesting that Hunga Tonga is where all the water came from. How turbo hurricanes start, and where they go after they start, is a completely different question.

Regarding government policy, yesterday’s top suggestion was to give Hurricane Helene survivors protected refugee status, like the Haitians. In other words: free cell phones, debit cards, monthly allowances, food stamps, health care, home-buying credits, rent subsidies, and all the rest. Just for 12 months.

I’m wondering, could we do that for our own citizens? What if they dressed up in colorful native garb? Do they have to eat the cats?

🔥 He actually said this: “I’ve become friends with school shooters.” The Vice Presidential Debate flashed across CBS last night, closely watched by political partisans, and completely ignored by everyone else. The tone was civil and noncombative; the moderators were not allowed to ‘fact check’ anyone; and the corporate media seems unable to pick a ‘winner.’ It was Vance. Vance won.

CLIP: the moment when Walz proved he’s crazier than a sprayed roach (1:10).

J.D. Vance won the debate because he is wicked smart, well-spoken, and was unburdened by the necessity of pretense. He could just be himself. Walz carried the burden of two different jobs last night: he had to debate Vance, but at the same time he also had to pretend to be a living cartoon of a folksy, rural conservative Democrat instead of a marxist tool who’s been to China over thirty times.

Walz’s China fetish procured one of the many laugh-out-loud moments last night. Headline from USA Today, last evening:

The boring backstory is that Walz lied about being in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre. It only became news when somebody found some old newspaper reports putting Walz at home during the event in question. After one of the CBS moderators asked Walz to explain the discrepancy between his claim and news reports about him being in the US during that time, Walz gave a little speech about his China policy.

To her credit, the moderator didn’t let him get away with it, and pressed Walz to answer the question. Walz folded. He basically admitted he lied. "I have not been perfect,” Walz explained, “and I'm a knucklehead at times."

A “knucklehead” is one way of putting it.

But that wasn’t even close to Walz’s worst moment. Ultimately, it wasn’t hard to pick, though his claim that “abortion is a basic human right” was a close second place. But Walz claimed the top knucklehead prize after being asked why he opposed assault weapons bans before he supported them. Walz then said this:

I’ve sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents. I’ve become friends with school shooters… This idea of stigmatizing mental health; just because you have a mental health issue doesn’t mean you’re violent. We end up looking for a scapegoat. Sometimes it just is the guns. It’s just the guns. And there’s things you can do about it.

What? Sometimes, it’s just the guns? The guns do it? Are the guns hypnotizing people? Was Walz talking about some newfangled, high-tech, AI-driven DARPA autonomous weapon?

At the same time Walz was arguing for some kind of gun control for regular citizens, he also seemed to be arguing for giving crazy people easier access to firearms to avoid stigmatizing them. You can’t make this stuff up.

Whatever squirmy misfire in Walz’s cranium caused him to give that fruity answer earned the gaffe of the year award. Touché, brain worm.

I suppose the moral of the story is: pick replacement VPs for your selected VP in haste, and repent in leisure.

Soon, Walz will be campaigning from the basement like the rest of the faux candidates.

🚀 A massive fog of war covers the Middle East. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “A Wider War in the Middle East, From Hamas to Hezbollah and Now Iran.” The article was penned by David Sanger, who is so security-state connected that he might as well be romantically involved with CIA Director Bill Burns. I bet his electronic surveillance has little electronic surveillance of its own.

Something is happening in the Middle East, it’s just not clear what or how big or small it is. But we do know that Israel is now involved in kinetic conflicts with at least four opponents: the Houthis in Yemen to the southeast, what’s left of Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north, Hamas in Gaza, and now Iran, to the east.

Only a few days ago, Israel ‘decapitated’ Hezbollah. Yesterday, media reported Israel ‘invaded’ Lebanon. But the scale of the invasion isn’t clear. Reports vary. There is no agreement even on whether any invasion happened at all. Some platforms just call the activity on Israel’s northern border an “incursion,” and others describe it only as small scouting raids by Israeli special forces.

Yesterday, Iran electrified the media by firing between 180 and 300 missiles at Israel. Again, reports on the number of missiles vary. Media coverage exists but seems oddly muted. Unlike last time Iran attacked Israel, this time saw no six-hour, play-by-play media circus tracking the  momentary movements of missiles between the two countries.

Nearly a full day after Iran’s newest missile attack, nobody can agree about precisely what happened. Israel’s government has apparently imposed strict information controls. Some reports said Iranian missiles soared right through Israel’s Iron Dome. But other, like David Sanger, said the Iron Dome mostly succeeded in shooting down Iranian missiles.

Miraculously, Israel said that almost nobody died or was even injured by any Iranian missile. Only one unlucky Palestinian gentleman was killed when an empty rocket casing fell on him — an unbelievably improbable event that was even more improbably captured on video.

Iranian sources conflict with each other over whether the US and Russia received advance notice of the attacks. Some Iranian officials say yes, others say no.

The Iranians claimed to have destroyed dozens of insanely expensive F35 fighter jets in the attack (don’t even ask), as well as an oil platform or oil processing facility of some kind. Israel won’t say what has or hasn’t been damaged or destroyed, apart from one empty school building. We just don’t know; that might be all.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has promised to retaliate, but only he knows what for, since all reports say Iran’s missile strikes were ineffective. Maybe just for the attempt, which seems like a legitimate reason.

The bottom line is we know more about what Tim Walz likes to eat on his China field trips than what is actually happening in the Middle East right now.

🔥🔥 Yesterday, the New York Times ran an insidious and troubling straight news story headlined, “Trump’s Consistent Message Online and Onstage: Be Afraid.” The deeply deceptive sub-headline added, “Donald Trump has long used fear as a tool to stir up his conservative base. He’s taking his doomsday approach to a new extreme, predicting World War III and other catastrophes.”

Using fear as a tool? Trump? Please. You must be kidding me. After four years of steady pandemic fearmongering, this article —ostensibly about the politics of fear— was deliriously ironic and hyper-hypocritical. Still, at least superficially, the paper held true to brand. But the article’s real purpose was much more sinister and subversive. So let’s rip off the elegant mask of journalistic trickery and reveal the gruesome demon of deception underneath.

You won’t believe how low the Times sunk this time. (Well, you’ll probably believe it, but it’s still shocking.) Here was the narrative you were meant to understand:

Pause for a moment and consider how profoundly ironic that the Times spent two full years on daily doomsday prophesying —over a moderate flu season!— just to suddenly reverse fifty years of its anti-nuclear activism and wave away the clear and present dangers as though looming nuclear disaster was more made up than covid.

I needn’t offer any evidence of this self-evident fact, but I will anyway. (Lawyer’s habit.) As recently as January —before Russia’s expanded nuclear policy and before Iran attacked Israel twice— the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its iconic “Doomsday Clock” at 90 seconds to midnight. In the Atomic Scientists’ scheme, midnight is no bueno. It’s game over, finito, plug pulled. In their own words: “the deteriorating state of the world … is ... the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.”

To take the Times’ story at face value, we must assume that mendacious reporter Michael Gold is blissfully unaware of the Doomsday Clock, and that Gold honestly thinks Trump is stitching together the threat of nuclear annihilation out of whole cloth, as a political prop, rather than Trump reiterating what some of the smartest people alive believe to be an established fact.

Reporter Gold didn’t even bother asking any experts to agree that Trump’s World War III claims were exaggerated. What do nuclear strategists and international relations scholars say about the current risks of global conflict? The Times just expected us to take their word for it.

The lack of experts quoted for the article, and the omission of context like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, reveals this disturbing article isn’t journalism at all. It’s a psychological operation.

The Times sought to paint the prospect of global thermonuclear war as merely a hyperbolic political cartoon. But don't be deceived; this article was not actually intended to chide Trump for fearmongering. Or at least, that wasn’t its main objective. The article was a psyop, intended to teach the Times’ liberal readers what to think about the Biden Administration’s nuclear brinksmanship. The writer wants readers to conclude that nuclear red-lining is not, in fact, an altogether new and disastrous development, but that our leaders' pugilistic dancing across Russian red lines is sound policy.

In other words, this article was not meant to associate Trump with fissile fearmongering. It was the other was around. It was meant to associate concerns about nuclear war with deplorable former President Trump. The Times knows its readers hate Trump and reflexively hate and doubt whatever Trump thinks. So if they mock Trump for his WWIII concern, most liberal Times readers will line up and clap like trained seals. Haha! World War III! Like that could ever happen! What a moron!

In other words, the Times is trying to close the Overton Window on criticism of U.S. military policy. Anyone who questions whether the Administration’s military policy is sane will be just like Trump.

Why do they do this kind of psychological manipulation? There are several reasons. It desensitizes people to real escalations in military policy. It discredits any opposition to new military escalation in advance. It makes Biden warmongering look reasonable when contrasted with Trump fearmongering. And it controls the narrative by masking legitimate concerns over Biden foreign policy decisions.

You might ask, what kind of foreign policy decisions does an article like this help to sell? How about a decision to help Ukraine launch U.S. missiles at Russian cities? Or what about a decision to escalate the Middle East conflict?  There’s no telling. It’s less clear than ever who is calling the shots. From Newsweek, two days ago:

In other words, Biden told reporters that “no” more troops would be sent to the Middle East one day before the Pentagon sent thousands more US troops there. It’s like they’re not even trying that hard to pretend Biden is still running the show.

🔥🔥 Nobody understands the dangers of institutionalized censorship than Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya, so he tweeted a compelling point in the wee hours last night, perhaps ruminating over the Vance/Walz debate:

We’re having trouble processing it too, Jay. Believe me.

🔥🔥 Finally, I hope the meme of the week gives you a chuckle:

How someone like Tim Walz with his crazy Sanpaku eyes got elected dogcatcher is a mystery I will never understand. I mean, am I wrong?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading too much into Tim Walz’s bug eyes. Let me know what you think.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Coffee & Covid will be back tomorrow morning with another terrific roundup of essential news and commentary.

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