☕️ PROGRESSING BACKWARDS ☙ Friday, August 16, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Ukraine flips script and invades Russia back; Team Biden negotiates Middle East into a paper bag; hackers nab everybody's social security number, so that's that; combo jabs stumble over sandbag; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Finally. In today’s dramatic, progressive roundup: we check in on the progress of the Proxy War, if ‘progress’ means a long, painful slide into abject failure; Middle East peace negotiations made progress yesterday, if ‘progress’ means they spent a lot of money and talked for a long time without agreeing on anything; progress in data security as all our social security numbers are in the wind after a massive data breach that ‘may’ have delivered our personal data to the Dark Web; and more good news for us, bad news for them, as financial and regulatory progress for covid shot makers salivating over fall combo shots ‘falters.’

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🚀🚀 Lately, trying to wrangle the horde of news can, at times, cause your humble blogger to feel much like how the Alligator Farm’s™ one-armed, in-house gator wrestler must feel on especially busy days. This is a poor excuse for neglecting the Proxy War, which until recently has been a constant breaking news story of “more of the same.” But yesterday, coming on the heels of its exclusive “real story” of the Nordstream bombing —it was a ‘real story’ all right— the Wall Street Journal ran a remarkable, long-form, magazine-style article under the headline: “As Ukraine Invades Russia, Kyiv’s Troops Are in Trouble on the Eastern Front.” Uh oh.

At the risk of boring readers who, like yours truly, follow the daily inch-by-muddy-inch Proxy War news, we must first backfill a little. Last week, Ukraine sprang a dramatic surprise attack. Using around 14,000 of its last, best troops, and a vast array of critical, impossible-to-replace war equipment, Ukraine tried to flip the script by invading Russia in a quiet, remote, sparsely populated area on the northeast corner of the map.

In other words, bantam-sized President Zelensky boldy let slip the dogs of war. But in this case, the dogs of war were more like the miniature poodles of war.

The most rational explanation for this desperate gamble is that Ukraine sought by surprise to snatch a Russian nuclear power plant lying about 70 kilometers from the two countries’ shared border. Had it worked, Ukraine could have traded the power plant back, forcing major Russian concessions. But Ukraine denies this was its objective, and so the “real story” remains, like so much else these days, murky and unclear.

It looks a lot like the Russians knew they were coming. So Ukraine’s most experienced units are now, a week later, rattling angrily around inside a killing box inside Russia, scores of miles from the power plant, far from reinforcements or supply lines, trying to … something. We don’t know yet.

Ukraine may have just served up its last remaining fighting force to Russia on a silver salver.

The bigger problem, as the Journal’s article soberly informed readers, was that, to scrape together 14,000 effective soldiers, Ukraine had to take them away from other places on the immense frontline. The predictable result is that Russia, already grinding inexorably westwards through Ukraine, is now skipping westwards in a sort of military frolic.

The Journal laid it on thick. The Ukrainian army is short of everything, people, guns, shells, tanks, air support, and ammunition. With scarce artillery shells on a strict budget, Ukrainians had turned to drones as a cheap alternative, but now the inexpensive drones aren’t working anymore “because Russian forces have increased their use of electronic jammers.”

But manpower shortages are the most critical shortfall. This ‘news’ (to Journal readers) has been the constant refrain that better-informed C&C readers have heard for over a year now. A military expert quoted for the story simply explained, “Ukraine doesn’t have enough reserves; they don’t have enough units to reinforce everywhere.”

So now it’s an old man’s war. In just a few months (“since the Spring”), the Ukrainians disastrously plunged from matching Russian troop figures one-to-one to an astonishing one-to-five ratio, and the few replacement troops are mostly seasoned citizens:

The article was a major narrative shift. I expected, but didn’t find, the usual litany of quotes from military ‘experts’ about how Ukraine still has time to turn things around, given a few more billions and steady NATO support.

But this time, there was no happy optimistic take to balance the bad news. It was just relentless bad news.

To be fair, other media, like the NYT and the Wapo, were yesterday still penning delirious headlines about Ukraine’s daring invasion, featuring a swimmingly optimistic narrative of a Ukraine public relations victory, even if it’s not any kind of actual military success. Absent from those articles was any analysis of the ethics of trading thousands of men’s lives to score a few days of favorable headlines.

But since the Journal just carried the deep state’s vodka by running that humiliating fantasy about the Nordstream debacle, it smells like team spirit, and it hinted that the Journal’s article signals the real narrative switcheroo. There were a few other signs.

A pro-Ukraine, pro-Harris op-ed in Wednesday’s Politico advised the ‘Plan B’ candidate to stop ignoring the war and take a hard line with Russia. But to create a sense of urgency, the article surprisingly predicted a looming catastrophe for Ukraine:

Might it soon be time for Zelensky to cheerfully take one for the team?

Good little doggie!

The Proxy War is the hub around which all 2024 geopolitics revolves. But the hub is increasingly being pulled out of its axle by the gravitational forces of the U.S. elections, which lie just around the corner. We’ve been fooled before, but it feels like something new and big is brewing. And it ain’t good for Ukraine.

🔥🔥 In the other looming proxy war in the Middle East, the parties conducted peace negotiations all day yesterday, with an all-star cast featuring a crack team of Israeli negotiators, top mediators, dignitaries from Qatar and Egypt, and top U.S. officials including Antony Blinken, and CIA Director Bill Burns (for some reason). Much progress was made and key points of contention were close to being resolved, when a junior member of the Israeli delegation stood up and exclaimed, “oy vey!” And then they all suddenly noticed that Hamas wasn’t there.

Newsweek ran the story this morning under the headline, “Hamas says Netanyahu wants an even bigger war, not a ceasefire.” Apparently, although Hamas stubbornly refused to attend, “backchannel” communications facilitated some kind of discussion. Alas, the details are unclear.

According to Newsweek, the parties remain stuck on a hostage-and-egg problem related to the timing of releasing hostages and ceasing fire. Hamas wants Israel completely out of Gaza before it lets anyone go. Israel wants its citizens back before it stops fighting.

Shockingly, despite an entire day of negotiations facilitated by the best minds in the Biden Administration, the crowd of politicians and security state characters could not resolve the puzzling philosophical omelet of how the embryo could exist without the fowl, or in other words, where did the poultry come from? And how did she cross the road to lay the egg?

And what about the rooster?

It’s baffling, but don’t worry, they are still cooking. Talks will continue today, and I’m certain they’ll somehow work out a recipe without invoking time travel. Probably. Or maybe not.

🔥🔥 As if this prodigious year couldn’t get any loonier, right on the heels of the last disastrous computer failure, USA Today ran a consumer-interest story yesterday headlined, “2.9 billion records, including Social Security numbers, stolen in data hack: What to know.” As if that weren’t sufficiently alarming, the sub-headline piled on: “Every American’s Social Security number, address may have been stolen in hack.”

As always, there is much we don’t know. The breach allegedly occurred in April, and we are only finding out now because of a private class-action lawsuit filed sixteen days ago in the Southern District of Florida. The lawsuit claimed that a Dark Web hacking group has been selling a giant database of “personally identifiable information” (PII) including American addresses and social security numbers:

A ‘watchdog’ group, VX-Underground, reportedly requested and received a copy of the breached file, and confirmed its contents:

In mild good news, VX-Underground also said, “The database DOES NOT contain information from individuals who use data opt-out services. Every person who used some sort of data opt-out service was not present.” But it was not clear what those ‘opt-out services’ were.

Citing Bleeping Computer, whatever that is, USA Today reported that a hacker known as "Fenice" leaked the most complete version of the data for free on a forum in August. So although corporate media carefully used the word ‘may,’ it probably is out there. All over.

It didn’t come from the Social Security Administration. The data was allegedly stolen from National Public Data, a ‘criminal-background-checking’ company headquartered in Coral Springs, Florida. But the government is nevertheless involved. State and federal laws require background checks for all sorts of reasons, like for contractors entering public school properties.

Government created the market for background checking, and after that, a breach like this became inevitable, just a matter of time. Nor did government alert us; we had to wait for a lawsuit.

You should immediately freeze your credit score. Here’s a link explaining how to do it. The three credit-reporting agencies are required to offer the service for free. You can temporarily lift the freezes whenever you need to. It is occasionally inconvenient, but it forecloses the immediate risk of a bad actor secretly taking out a loan in your name. I’ve used it for years.

And for Heaven’s sake, don’t click links in texts or emails from people you don’t know, or even from companies you do know, because the hackers are getting very good at impersonations. Just go on the website yourself and do whatever you need to do.

Who knows what else they can do with our social security numbers? Maybe we should just abolish them, and go back to whatever we were doing before, because this isn’t working.

💉💉 Last week, Bloomberg ran a very encouraging story headlined, “BioNTech’s Loss Is Wider Than Expected as Vaccine Sales Hurt.” Poor babies. I wonder what could be hurting vaccine sales? Probably those wily anti-vaxxers again, misinforming everybody.

BioNTech is the German pharma company that partnered with Pfizer to produce the unsafe and ineffective covid mRNA shots. According to the article, it lost $886 million dollars last quarter. Almost a billion bucks, in one quarter. That shocking shortfall was over four times as much as the company’s $208 million loss from the second quarter of 2023.

Things seem to be headed in the wrong financial direction. Baffling.

But don’t worry too much about BioNTech. They are sitting on cash reserves of $20 billion dollars, and have a new slew of safe and effective mRNA cancer drugs ‘in the pipeline.’ And it plans for a robust fourth quarter this year, since it partnered with Pfizer on a one-shot flu-covid combo jab. It’s almost there, but not quite. Whoopsies:

Call me crazy, but even if they manage to get the FDA’s rubber stamp of approval, I’m not so sure the flu/covid combo shot will actually take the market by storm. Sure, there are a bunch of die-hard medical fetishists out there desperate to snap up a few doses, but as for me and my family, that is a hard pass. I would rather inject bleach.

Into my eyeball.

But you do you! Let me know in the comments if you can’t wait to get the new and improved, even safer, twice as effective, double mRNA shots this fall.

(PS—I really hate gloating like this, sort of, but I warned them, repeatedly and often, that this forced vaccine scheme of theirs would backfire. I told them so.)

Have a fabulous Friday! Then line up again tomorrow morning for another dose of essential news and commentary that will not, unlike some other products I will not name, give you myocarditis or monkeypox.

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