☕️ MANMADE ☙ Saturday, July 29, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Corporate media prefers certain types of manmade disaster over others; Greek wildfire arsonists; NATO blamed for Ukraine's failing war; secret Chinese bioweapons lab pops up in California; more.

Good morning and welcome to the Weekend Edition!  Your roundup today includes: CDC mulls annual covid shots and its broken reputation; Disney loses key battle in lawsuit with DeSantis; Ukraine’s military failures are now NATO’s fault; US starts sending weapons to Taiwan;  Greek climate change fires started by mysterious arsonists; and secret Chinese biolab uncovered in abandoned California warehouse but corporate media could care less.

Note: the Childers family’s annual summer vacation continues this week, so posts may be shorter and later than usual. If it doesn’t show up on time, don’t panic! We’ll return to normally-scheduled programming next week.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

💉 New York’s Spectrum News ran a story yesterday headlined, “CDC likely to recommend annual COVID shot similar to flu, director says.” Ironically, the sub-headline explained, “One of  Dr. Cohen's goals at the helm of the CDC is to restore trust in the agency.”

New CDC Director Mandy Cohen caught with her hand in the mRNA incubator

Restore trust? Uh huh, sure.

In one sense, you can’t blame the CDC’s perky new director, Mandy Cohen, she’s making a fortune, having hit the big time from her previous position in North Carolina where she oversaw that state’s lockdowns. But she’s facing some resistance: the article explained House Republicans want to cut the CDC’s budget, especially in areas related to climate change and gun control, which have nothing to do with germs.

Climate change and gun control are connected to the CDC via a fuzzy, generalized definition of “public health.”  Try to follow Mandy’s logic:  Public health falls under the CDC’s public health jurisdiction. Public health is a matter of national security. Everything is public health. Therefore, everything is a matter of national security and under CDC jurisdiction.

That’s why Mandy, who replaced the odious Rochelle Walensky, would like to militarize the CDC, for safety. “Just like we have a military to protect us here and around the world, we need a CDC that can protect us,” Cohen explained. "We can’t see those cuts and have the national security assets we need here at the CDC,” she said.

The article focuses on selling two competing ideas. First, the CDC is carefully, deliberately, and cautiously evaluating whether to recommend annual covid shots along with annual flu shots. They are not going to approve them unless it’s absolutely necessary, and unless they confirm the shots are absolutely 100% safe and effective.

You believe that, right?

No. We all know that soon there will be two shots on the annual adult vaccine schedule. Then three — don’t forget RSV! — then four, then five, then seventy-two. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry in America needs an HPV shot because tomorrow he might decide to become Loretta. He wouldn’t want to get cancer in his cervix. You think I’m making that up? From the Mayo Clinic website:

To be honest, my biggest complaint with the paragraph above is that Mayo used the pronouns “he or she” referring to doctors, which ignorantly erased all the other genders. I bet Hitler would have used the pronouns “he or she” too. Mayo should have said: “whether they recommend.”

Anyway, the article’s second pitch was “restoring trust in the CDC,” an oxymoron, and which supposedly is Mandy’s main concern. But in spite of abundant hand-wringing over lost trust, the article schizophrenically downplayed the problem. It reported that a paltry 25% of Americans reported they have “little-to-no trust in the CDC for health information,” and a tiny (but convicted) core of 10% who told researchers they do not trust the agency at all.

Count me among the 10%. I would trust Generalissimo Idi Amin with my healthcare before I’d trust the CDC.

Anyway, I suspect the “untrusting” numbers are actually much bigger than the article lets on, a fact confirmed by loss of trust in the agency being Mandy’s top concern. So I say “no” to both. No, I don’t want any more annual shots. I don’t care whether they are subsidized by the government. And no, I don’t trust the CDC.

Defund the CDC!

💉 On Wednesday, the Senate voted on an amendment Senator Ted Cruz offered to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have reinstated any service member discharged for refusing to take a covid shot. There are about 8,400 of these unfairly-treated folks.

But the amendment died because three Republican senators joined democrats in voting it down. The Republicans were: Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Me.), and Mitt Romney (R-Ut.).

Yep. I know.

🐭 Yesterday, Reuters ran an encouraging story headlined, “Florida judge rules against Disney in feud with DeSantis.”

The lawsuit was filed by the new oversight district created by Governor DeSantis to manage Disney’s Reedy Creek area. The oversight district has sued to cancel a bunch of last-minute “backroom deals” that Disney made with itself to try to thwart oversight.

Yesterday the Florida judge denied Disney’s motion to dismiss, so the lawsuit will continue. Dismissal is the first major test of a lawsuit and is the gate plaintiffs need to survive in order to start discovery.  Disney is not going to enjoy discovery over their skulduggery.

This is not Disney’s separate federal lawsuit arguing Florida’s new law violates Disney’s corporate First Amendment rights, and claiming Florida deleted its special tax district as punishment for politicking on behalf of LGBTQIA++ issues.

Let’s get that discovery going.

🚀 Let the Proxy War blame-shifting begin: It’s NATO’s fault! From this week’s Newsweek:

The article begins by recycling the new narrative, which is that the much-hyped Glorious Spring CounterOffensive™ never really had a chance anyway. But Newsweek added a new twist — it’s not Ukraine’s fault, it was NATO:

While there are numerous reasons for this relative lack of success, including the strength of Russian defenses, some experts are pointing towards a less obvious influence: NATO. The alliance pushed an arbitrary deadline for the counterattack, they say, and then failed to fully prepare Ukrainian forces to carry it out.

Reading that paragraph, you could be forgiving for thinking it was NATO’s war, and Ukraine is just providing a few troops to help out. After all, why would NATO set war deadlines instead of Ukrainian generals? And why should NATO prepare Ukrainian forces to “carry out” the Ukrainian counterattack? I mean, if it’s Ukraine’s battle plan, shouldn’t Ukraine prepare its own troops?

Don’t bother answering that. Newsweek must pretend that Ukraine is running the war, which makes its war reporting incomprehensible.

Newsweek reported that in the first two weeks of Ukraine's counteroffensive, up to one fifth of its battlefield equipment was damaged or destroyed. But western officials are carefully dancing around directly criticizing the war, preferring oblique euphemisms to accuracy. One American official told CNN on June 23rd that the offensive was "not meeting expectations" on any of the three fronts.

“Not meeting expectations” is what you tell the new employee who isn’t working fast enough. The term seems a little mild to describe dead and dying Ukrainians making useless charges against entrenched, battle-hardened Russians.

That’s where blaming NATO shifts into gear. "The timing of the summer action was driven by arbitrary NATO timelines, not Ukrainian," military analyst Allan Orr told Newsweek. Orr bitterly complained about everything: that NATO hasn’t given Ukraine enough weaponry, and the paltry weaponry it has given Ukraine isn’t advanced enough.

You just can’t please some warmongers.

This type of thinking suffers from at least two unstated, incorrect assumptions: first, that NATO has some kind of duty to provide weapons for Ukraine’s war. Ukraine isn’t a NATO member.  Second is the faulty assumption Ukraine can’t say “no” to weapons that are too old, underpowered, or ineffective. NATO doesn’t have to give weapons, and Ukraine doesn’t have to take the weapons if it doesn’t like them.

Another war analyst quoted for the story got closer to the truth when he admitted to Newsweek that, "I think we pushed too much on the technological side of strategy hoping that just by giving Ukraine advanced Western weaponry, that would be sufficient for them to overcome Russian forces which have lesser equipment.”

That’s probably right. U.S. generals (and their corporate media lapdogs) are head over heels in love with technology. Our entire war strategy is built on having better, more advanced weapons and defenses than our enemies. Call it the “new and improved” battle strategy. But that strategy has never been successfully proven. Apart from deposing Saddam Hussein, we haven’t clearly won much lately. Just look at Afghanistan.

So … what happens if the core, untested assumption is wrong that the higher-tech army automatically wins any conflict? Then what?

🔥 Here we go again! The Hill ran a highly-suggestive story yesterday, headlined “Biden directs $345 million in weapons for Taiwan.”

The Hill reported that yesterday President Biden announced $345 million in military assistance for Taiwan. It seems like a lot, but on the other hand it’s not really that much, not compared to the billions we’ve sent to Ukraine. But unfortunately for Ukraine, all the hardware sent to Taiwan is hardware that can’t be sent to Ukraine.

Team Biden may be starting to shift its focus from Ukraine to Taiwan for the 2024 election cycle.

🔥 The UK Guardian ran a narrative-snarling story yesterday headlined, “Most fires in Greece were started ‘by human hand’, government says.” Oops. The sub-headline explained, “Official blames arsonists for the majority of 667 blazes that have spread in the extreme weather.”

Recently Greece has been suffering from a nationwide wildfire crisis like Canada’s. Last week, in a single day nearly 20,000 tourists were evacuated from hotels on Rhodes, the island worst affected by the fires. It was the largest evacuation in Greece’s history.

Yesterday, Greek minister of climate crisis and civil protection, Vassilis Kikilias, told reporters that “During this time 667 fires erupted, that is more than 60 fires a day, almost all over the country. Unfortunately, the majority were ignited by human hand, either by criminal negligence or intent.” Kikilias pointed out that in many places, blazes had broken out close together and at the same time, suggesting multiple arsonists were working together to ensure the fires took and spread further.

Ignoring the much more interesting fact that the evidence seems to show there’s a vast, coordinated conspiracy to burn down Greece, officials preferred pretending the fires were caused by “emissions,” and took full political advantage. Never let a good crisis go to waste! For example, UN secretary general António Guterres hysterically called for “bold and immediate measures” to cut planet-destroying emissions, explaining “The evidence is everywhere. Humanity has unleashed destruction. This must not inspire despair, but action.”

At least he’s not exaggerating or anything.

The paper was no better. Two-thirds of the Guardian’s article was devoted to general climate change hysteria that had nothing whatsoever to do with the wildfires. Bizarrely, at no point did the article even begin to speculate about who might be setting up to 60 fires a day in Greece. There was not one word about the identity of the arsonists or even any investigation.

And don’t even get me started on corporate media. For some reason, corporate media is completely uninterested in THIS manmade climate disaster.

🦠 Another bizarre story corporate media is busy ignoring appeared in the California Globe yesterday headlined, “Mysterious Chinese COVID Lab Uncovered in City of Reedley CA.”

It sounds just like a made-for-TV script. A female Reedly code enforcement officer was sent out to an abandoned warehouse to check on a suspicious garden hose suggesting someone might be illegally using water on the wrong day of the week. By the time it was all over, that garden-hose call wound up involving a dozen federal agencies and exposing what looks just like a secret, low-budget Chinese bioweapons lab right.

“I’ve never seen this in my 26-year career with the County of Fresno,” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado.

When local officials entered, they found a Chinese staff allegedly making Covid-19 test kits, plus: 900 genetically-engineered humanized mice, over 30 freezers and refrigeration units, incubators, blood, 800 different chemicals, tissue and other bodily fluid samples, thousands of vials containing unlabeled fluids, and over 20 potentially infectious bacterial, viral, and parasitic agents like: coronavirus, HIV, chlamydia, E. Coli, streptococcus pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, herpes 1 and 5, rubella, and malaria.

From what I can tell, the warehouse didn’t even rate a biosafety level at all. Based on what they found, it should have been biosafety level 4, but instead it sounds more like it was biosafety level zero, unless there’s something lower than that. This one made the other Chinese bioweapons lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, look like something so clean and germ-free you could eat a steak dinner off of it.

And, needless to say, the kinds of dangerous, infectious biological agents they found in the warehouse require special federal permits. But the biolab operation had no permits of any kind, not even a local business license. It was figuratively and literally invisible; you couldn’t even tell it was open from the outside, apart from the hose, of course.

Code inspectors returning with a warrant found workers inside the lab who identified the owner as Nevada-based Prestige Biotech, Inc., and lamely claimed the lab was being used to make covid and pregnancy test kits. Covid and pregnancy seem like an odd combination.  And despite repeated attempts by state and federal officials, as far as I can tell, nobody has managed to get a straight answer or figure out who or what owns Prestige Biotech or even where its headquarters are.

"The other addresses provided for identified authorized agents were either empty offices or addresses in China that could not be verified," an NBC report on the story explained.

NBC’s article suggested federal investigations continue, but didn’t identify which agency was investigating what. It’s not even clear that NBC knows whether or not there’s an investigation at all.

You’d think this kind of thing would be big news these days, what with corporate media’s fascination with pandemics and infectious diseases. But, while it appears to be obsessed with “manmade” climate change, corporate media ignores manmade fires that are causing climate change. In the same way, corporate media is disinterested in manmade pandemics caused by rogue Chinese agents or even crappy biosafety conditions in secret California labs, no matter how dramatic the facts.

That’s why you have Coffee & Covid.

Have a wonderful weekend! C&C will be roaring back on Monday morning to start the new week and month off right.

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