☕️ REBOOTING ☙ Thursday, July 27, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

McConnell on-camera mystery injury; Hunter's plea deal blows up on the launch pad; new corporate media distractions around climate change terrors; and distracting reports from the UFO hearings.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: Mitch McConnell suffers awkward, on-camera, mid-sentence brain stutter; Hunter Biden plea deal falls apart; new corporate media scare campaign heats up to distract us from all the other stuff they don’t want us thinking about; and history-making reports from the UFO committee hearings, but maybe not for the reason you think.

Note: the Childers family is taking our annual summer vacation this week and next, 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 week after next.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Another week, and now another apparently vaccine-injured senior politician. The New York Times ran the story, gleefully headlined “Mitch McConnell Suffers an Episode at the Capitol, Freezing Midsentence.” The sub-headline added more context: “The 81-year-old Senate Republican leader, who had a serious fall earlier this year, was temporarily unable to speak during a news conference, raising questions about his health and future.”

Last weekend saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu racing in for an emergency pacemaker pit stop, on Sunday, in the midst of a national crisis, following a gentle encounter with “mild dizzyness,” supposedly. Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader and long-time Republican leadership fixture Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 81 years young, also was reported to have gotten “dizzy” when he had a sudden and unexpected on-camera brain reboot in the middle of a sentence during a live press conference. (Spoiler: He returned a few minutes later and seemed back to normal.)

The clip below features a painfully awkward several moments, while McConnell trails off, stares straight ahead without talking, and kind of sways back and forth a little behind the lectern. Nobody around him seemed to know what to do except stand there. Then, mercifully, a nice lady in a pink suit jacket led him away.

https://twitter.com/RaquelMartinTV/status/1684263785542844433

Happens all the time! Maybe McConnell was just dehydrated. It’s going around. Climate change, you know. But my best guess is that Mitch had some kind of mini stroke or seizure. Perhaps our medical C&Cers can add insight.

Fortunately, McConnell returned a few minutes later and took several questions from reporters — more than he usually does — and clearly answered each one. When asked what happened, Mr. McConnell only said, “I’m fine,” and stressed he could continue with his leadership duties.

You’ll recall that back in March, McConnell suddenly and unexpectedly fell down the stairs at a swanky fund-raising event, breaking a rib and getting a concussion. He was out for six weeks. If Mitch’s brain rebooted while he was walking down he staircase, that would explain it.  But yesterday, Senate Republicans rejected any suggestion McConnell’s mental capacity is impaired, why would you even ask that, and they confidently insisted that despite public hiccups, he is solidly in charge in private sessions.

For their part, Democrats didn’t really have much to say about it, since they are busy covering for their own vaccine-injured senators, including courageous shingles survivor Diane Feinstein and brave, hoodied stroke overcomer John Fetterman, whose brain is permanently rebooting. Not to mention the old basement campaigner himself, Joseph Robinette Biden, whose brain froze in the middle of installing an update somewhere back in 2019.

Even setting the jab issue aside, America’s government is looking more and more like a contentious bingo tournament at an assisted-living facility. How are these people winning elections? Have Americans discarded all standards except party affiliation? If so, we deserve what we’re going to get.

Anyway, then there were three. Three barely-functional senators. Out of fifty.

🔥 After a madcap “misunderstanding” involving Hunter Biden’s lawyers impersonating the Republican House Committee’s lawyers in a phone call to the court, Hunter’s plea deal experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly in the courtroom yesterday. The New York Times reported the story with the headline, “How Hunter Biden’s Judge Came to Have Doubts on the Deal.”

Indeed. Now Judge Noreika’s even with the rest of us who already had “doubts on the deal.”

As it turned out, there was another misunderstanding, which became painfully obvious yesterday during the hearing to approve the carefully-negotiated plea deal. The Times’ sub-headline explained, “In just a few hours, Judge Maryellen Noreika exposed a gulf in understanding between the president’s son and prosecutors on an agreement they had spent weeks hashing out.”

Oh, sorry! It wasn’t a “misunderstanding.” It was a “gulf in understanding.”

The controversy centered on Hunter’s undeniable FARA violations. FARA is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a process felony the Obama/Biden DOJ has been wielding against Republicans ever since Trump took office. For example, they prosecuted General Flynn under FARA for a single phone call. Similarly, the DOJ is pursuing Biden Bribery whistleblower Gal Luft over an alleged FARA violation, also for a single phone call.

Meanwhile, even people who live in Portland know Hunter has been hauling in millions from foreign actors, for years and years, not just with one phone call, but with many calls, meetups, tweets, handoffs, and WhatApps, and who knows what other unsanitary forms of communication, in exchange for explicit help getting the foreigners’ policies advanced in the U.S.

It’s not even in dispute.

According to corporate media, Hunter’s plea deal was supposedly always only about his income tax problem and his gun possession charge. But ever since the story broke, I’ve predicted it would somehow wind up with Hunter getting complete immunity for everything, including his much more serious FARA problems (especially serious in light of how assiduously the DOJ has been applying FARA to the eensiest contact between any Republican and a foreign citizen).

It was a three hour hearing. The simple version is that, while the judge was preparing to approve Hunter’s deal, she discovered — buried deeply in the fine print, so deeply it would have been trivially easy to miss — a lone citation to an odd statute number of a much broader type of release, a statute so broad and so universal that it is almost never ever used. As a result, the judge variously described the proposed Hunter plea deal as “not standard, not what I normally see,” possibly “unconstitutional,” without legal precedent, and maybe even “not worth the paper it is printed on.”

Since nobody could seem to agree, Judge Noreika asked the government to state on the record whether or not the single reference to the global release statute would give Hunter complete immunity from all possible crimes. She specifically mentions as an example any potential FARA violations. The Judge also asked the DOJ’s lawyers whether there were any ongoing investigations that might be affected by the release.

Curtly admitting only that “yes,” some kind of investigation continued, the DOJ lawyers explained the government did not intend for Hunter to get a complete release. They said their deal was only for a limited release as to just the tax issues and the gun charge.

That’s when the S.S. Hunter Biden capsized.

According to the Times, right after the government insisted FARA wasn’t included in the release — in spite of the way the deal had been written — Hunter (who should have let his lawyers talk) broke his silence, angrily snapping at the judge that he would never agree to a deal without broad immunity. Around the same time, his lawyer was jumping up and barking that the deal was now off, “null and void.”  Hunter’s lawyer said the deal was not only for the tax and gun issues, but insisted the agreement was also for all other potential crimes related to Hunter’s financially-rewarding “consulting deals” with foreign companies in Ukraine, China and Romania.

A chaotic courtroom scene ensued, delighting the 30-odd reporters in the gallery, who’d been hoping for some kind of fireworks, but never dreamed of a courtroom field event like this. All the involved parties were upset. The DOJ lawyers were upset their sly trickery was exposed. Hunter and his lawyers were upset that they lost their sweetheart deal. And the Judge was upset that the DOJ and Hunter tried to fool her into making a giant error.

At the end of the day, Hunter formally withdrew his “guilty” plea and pleaded “not guilty” instead. Then Judge Noreika entered a sensational pretrial release agreement ordering Hunter to comply with a bunch of standards requirements like reporting international travel plans, avoiding drugs and alcohol, and getting a job. This is the kind of thing that can happen after the judge starts to hate you for impersonating the other side and involving the court in a fraud.

Still, it could have been worse. But not much worse. Hunter and the DOJ attorneys will now try to reboot the plea deal into something the Judge will accept. There’s no way they will ever try this case.

🔥 We have two official distractions to discuss this morning. The first is the compliant corporate media’s recent pivot to climate doomblogging. After a year of twiddling their thumbs, or re-tooling the office, or whatever skullduggery they’ve been getting up to, the nudge unit is back in operation and turning the corporate media dials up to the setting: maximum terror.

Here’s the apocalyptic headline of horror run by the BBC yesterday:

The ridiculous article reported on a study — paid for by some obscure climate-related government agency or another, unless I miss my guess — recently published in the “journal” Nature Communications. The study’s researchers did no experiments or field work. They took a database of sea surface temperature measurements going back to 1870 and created a model of Gulf Stream current strength over time. Their model hysterically estimated the famous current will “collapse” (stop flowing) sometime during a 70-year period between 2025 and 2095.

So of course, even though under the model it could take 70 years, all the headlines ran with ‘could collapse by 2025.’

The BBC article was actually one of the more honest of the several articles reviewed for this post. After the scare part of the story, it got around to admitting that many “other scientists were skeptical.”  Further down the article was this reluctant admission:

The reasons for many scientists' reservations is that they say the study's authors made a series of assumptions about how to understand . But the climate system is extremely complex and experts do not have all the evidence they need to fully understand the .

The predictions that it could collapse as early as 2025 or by 2095 should be taken with a large grain of salt, says Jon Robson at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading.

They’re back: scientific models and their assumptions. Most of us recall the horrifying but false covid models that were used to justify mandates and lockdowns. Now they’re back again, and for some reason modeling is still considered “science” instead of what it really is: “guessing.”

Anyway, the Gulf Stream is not collapsing. Don’t fall for it.

🔥 Our second official narrative distraction — aliens — was illustrated by yesterday’s Congressional UFO hearings. The Guardian ran two pieces yesterday, a live blog published during the subcommittee hearings headlined, “UFO hearings: whistleblower David Grusch says ‘non-human biologics’ found at alleged crash sites – as it happened,” and an article published afterwards headlined, “UFO hearing key takeaways: cover-up claims and Pentagon denials.”  The AP’s version was headlined, “Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing ‘multi-decade’ program that captures UFOs.”

Anyway, it was big corporate media news.

Social media chatter about the hearings also streamed in furiously and fast from unexpected sources. For instance, Charlie Kirk tweeted about the sworn testimony by a former intelligence analyst who claimed captured UFOs holding “non-human biologics.”

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1684223086399479813

To be clear: so far there is no tangible physical evidence — zero, zip, none — of anything described by the witnesses. Whistleblower David Grusch has not, himself, seen any craft, bodies, or any other physical evidence. He has only testified about things other people have told him, so it would be difficult to convict him of perjury. The evidence to date includes only witness testimony plus a handful of short, grainy videos of weird-looking flying objects.

So what is really going on? To me, the Guardian accidentally fingered the most important implication of the story when it essentially argued that the government has flung open some kind of Overton window that was only cracked open for a long, long time, and now there’s no going back:

The legitimization of UFO discussion has been propelled in part by claims from US military pilots of UFO encounters, along with leaked military videos showing inexplicable happenings in the sky.

“There’s a sort of critical mass building now,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defense (MoD). “And I think even though it’s easy to portray some of the politicians as mavericks, the fact that Republicans and Democrats are lining up, are united in their stance on this … I think we have crossed a line.”

Indeed. For most of my life, UFO talk was just wacky conspiracy theory of the highest order, close to Santa Claus for grownups. When the Guardian babbled about “legitimization” of the “UFO discussion,” it meant that UFO speculation is officially not disinformation any more. Which is exactly what makes a lot of us extra skeptical.

There are plenty of other things we could speculate about — like, say, jab injuries — that are much more tangible than UFOs, but which remain squarely in the official disinformation category. Still, apart from big-audience pundits like Charlie Kirk who appear fascinated by the UFO talk, a slew of ordinary social media commenters were skeptical expressly because the government suddenly seems to be endorsing the UFO phenomenon. Here are a few of last night’s examples:

And this snarky one:

Finally, this tweet neatly summed up the situation:

And there it was, exactly how I feel, succinctly stated in a single, short declarative sentence. The real uncounted wages of the pandemic is the mounting global skepticism of any kind of authority, a deep loss of trust not just in agencies like the CDC and the FDA, but in “the government” writ large.

People are starting to believe what President Ronald Reagan said forty years ago: Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.

Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow for another great roundup.

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