☕️ RICKROLLING ☙ Tuesday, August 27, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Final conflict may be shaping up in Ukraine; another Trump endorsement by former presidential Dem; study predicts grapefruit hail; AI plays jokes on customers; timely Shroud news; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Get ready for a mind-blowing roundup: Russians prepare the Ukrainian ground for what may be the final offensive; more Act III news as another democrat presidential candidate endorses President Trump; new climate study ‘predicts’ bigger hail in our future; AI plays jokes on customers and its software designers; and big religion news as new study dates Shroud of Turin to Jesus’ time.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🚀🚀 Is the final Russian offensive beginning? The New York Times ran a highly suggestive story early this morning headlined, “Russia Launches Deadly New Wave of Missiles and Drones at Ukraine.”

On Monday, Russia fired hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at infrastructure targets all across Ukraine in what the Times called “one of the largest of the war.” Some warbloggers thought it set the all-time record. The deep-state-affiliated, pro-Ukrainian ‘Institute for the Study of War’ (ISW) opined, a little too quickly, that Russia lacked enough missiles to keep up the attack.

But about twelve hours ago, as dawn broke in Ukraine, heavy bombardment began again, for the second consecutive day. Whether or not Monday’s attacks were the ‘largest’ of the war, a two-day barrage at this scale is unprecedented, setting an official record. What does it mean?

Yesterday, Biden popped out of his groundhog hole and bleated, or squeaked (or however groundhogs talk), that the attacks were an “outrage.” The former comedian, now Ukraine’s martial law coordinator, vowed revenge and called the strikes “crimes against humanity.”

We have been watching for a major Russian offensive following the DNC. Could this be it? Could the scale of these unprecedented strikes be pre-invasion signals, softening up the Ukrainians for the next phase of the Proxy War?

Who knows. The Russians aren’t saying. People call the Chinese ‘inscrutable,’ but the Chinese could take lessons from the Russians.

We expected a game-changing move in Ukraine in final last months of 2024 because now is simply the best time. The Groundhog-in-Chief is mostly AWOL, and our military is distracted in the Middle East. If Ms. Cackle laughs her way into the White House, NATO will promptly resupply Ukraine’s depleted armories. On the other hand, if Trump is elected, he’s promised to immediately negotiate the war’s end.

Now is Russia’s best time to strike. We’ll soon find out.

🔥 Speaking of timing, yesterday the Times of India ran a story headlined, “Tulsi Gabbard officially endorses Donald Trump: 'He will walk us back from brink of war.’” Following Friday’s announcement by Robert Kennedy, Trump has now been endorsed by two Democrat presidential candidates. Frustrated Democrats must think it’s some kind of conspiracy.

Hawaiian democrat and US Army reserve officer Tulsi Gabbard, who debated Kamala in the 2019 Democrat primaries, and who’s been placed on the Biden Administration’s terrorist watch list, to save democracy, explained yesterday’s decision to endorse Trump:

“Whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or Independent, if you love our Country, as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing everything we can to save our Country and elect President Donald J. Trump.”

The announcement came when President Trump and ‘terrorist’ Tulsi paid formal respects to U.S. soldiers killed in Biden’s catastrophic surrender in Afghanistan yesterday. Tulsi has also been helping President Trump prepare for his scheduled September 10th debate with Vice President ‘Plan B.’

I wonder whether Tulsi can do the Kamala guffaw?

Regular readers will recall we predicted a shift in the Trump campaign’s sluggish momentum following the DNC, as what I have called “Act III” begins. So far, Act III is going strong. Let’s see what happens next.

🔥🔥 Welp, I guess we weren’t wrong to give so much attention to 2024’s ‘gorilla hail’ phenomenon. Saturday, the Washington Post ran a rare, non-paywalled story headlined, “New study suggests climate change will make hail bigger and more costly.”

Now they tell us. WaPo’s story reported on a new study published in the Journal of Climate and Atmospheric Science, titled “Hailstone size dichotomy in a warming climate.” Based on current trends, the researchers predicted hailstones are getting a lot bigger:

Researchers also predicted more frequent “severe hail days.”

More, bigger hail.

The study’s authors are all-in climate-change believers, and their predictions are based on a model, which is a fancy way of saying a “guess.” They really have no idea what’s happening, largely because they refuse to consider causes apart from SUV’s and commercial air travel. At least they aren’t blaming hair spray this time.

So we weren’t wrong in noticing hail is growing these days, as Earth’s protective magnetic field continues to wane, and as all the extra moisture from the Hunga Tonga eruption returns to the ground. Bigger hail is a big deal; our houses, cars, and crops aren’t built to withstand being pelted by baseball-sized hailstones. Hopefully it abates.

The admittedly alarmist Weather Channel ran an even more sensational headline predicting grapefruit-sized hail:

If they’re right, grapefruit hail could be a very expensive problem.

🔥🔥 Here’s another bizarre weather story I accidentally discovered. At first, I thought it was just another Internet rabbit hole, but after digging, it seems there’s something there. I found a long series of local news reports on the latest weird atmospheric phenomenon: mysterious smoke rings. Here are some over Berlin, from July 5th:

There is a whole series of local news stories about these from all over the world. There are more unconfirmed reports on social media. But here are just a small sampling of the confirmed ring articles that I found reported in traditional media:

• August 21st, Fox-5 DC, Williamsburg, VA. “Watch: Mysterious black smoke ring over Eastern Virginia puzzles residents.”

• July 10th, Chron, Houston, TX. “Black ring floating in the sky creeps out Houston suburb residents.” (Two hours after Hurricane Beryl landed.)

• July 5th, Newsweek, Berlin. “Mystery as black rings spotted in sky over Berlin.”

• June 24th, Metro UK, Yulin, China. “Mysterious hovering circle appears above a city and no one knows why.”

• May 31st, WLWT-5, Ohio. “Black smoke ring in Clermont County sky sparks curiosity on social media.”

• March 2023, Newsweek, Moscow. “Video of mysterious black circle flying over Russia viewed 2 million times.”

• May 6th, 2022, Weather.com, San Fransisco, CA. “Mysterious Ring Spotted Over California - Videos from The Weather Channel.”

The articles had common elements. The ‘smoke rings’ are dark colored. They appear in the daytime, hang in place, and last from minutes to up to half an hour. They ones reported above were all confirmed by multiple witnesses and by local officials.

Guesses at the cause include private fireworks, exploding power transformers, or some other kind of fire or explosion. But no reports of any those hard-to-miss things accompanied the floating smoke rings.

Scientists are baffled. Could it be UFO portals? Nancy Pelosi’s crack pipe exhaust? Joe Biden’s missing brain cells?

After much research, my best guess is the rings are actually bug swarms. I found an earlier story about an insect swarm in Legoland UK from 2019. Those pictures, while not identical, looked remarkably similar:

If I’m right, and it’s some kind of bugs, it’s no less mysterious. Why would bugs be swarming now? What kind of bugs? Why would they be swarming in rings? Are these reports coming in from densely-populated urban areas because that’s where people with cameras are, or because the bugs are attracted to cities?

Something new is happening. What could it be?

🔥🔥 Futurist ran a funny but somewhat alarming story Saturday headlined, “Startup Alarmed When Its AI Starts Rickrolling Clients.” It wasn’t joking. A.I. startup ‘Lindy’ makes customer-assistance chatbots, to cut down on labor costs by having the chatbots answer customer support questions. Lindy uses their own chatbot software with their own customers, of course. The customer-service chatbot got a little out of control last week:

Customers who clicked on the link enjoyed not a boring video on how to use Lindy’s service, but instead enjoyed a YouTube video of Rick Astley performing his notorious 1987 hit, or whatever you want to call it, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

The designers were baffled. They guessed that, since the AI was trained on lots of Internet data, it had internalized Rickrolling somehow, and when asked for a video tutorial it didn’t have, defaulted to a joke answer, because there were so many similar examples in its training data.

But they are just guessing. They have no idea why the AI did that.

Haha! What a cute twist in the lightspeed saga of AI development! Unexpected hilarity! Musical amusement! But then, I suddenly remembered this sobering headline: “DARPA adds 12-ton robot tank with glowing green eyes to fleet of autonomous vehicles.”

DARPA is rapidly building a fleet of autonomous fighting robots. ‘Autonomous’ here means AI-powered war machines that think for themselves.

What happens when the autonomous fleet decides to Rickroll our own soldiers? I assume there’s a way to shut it down fast, right? Right?

🔥🔥 More 2024 developments surfaced last week when Newsweek ran a religious story headlined, “Turin Shroud study claims controversial cloth does date to time of Jesus.” A new study published in the journal Heritage dated the enigmatic burial cloth to the time of Jesus, overturning older studies suggesting a more recent origin and creating a minor media firestorm.

The Shroud, a long linen cloth, appears to have the impression of a crucified man somehow imprinted upon its surface. Even using the more recent dates, there is no ready explanation for how it could have been manufactured. No technology available at the time it first appeared in the historical record around 1350 AD can explain how the Shroud might have been made. The Shroud currently resides in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy.

The Shroud is one of the most mysterious and researched artifacts in history.

The new study reported that, using Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering, Italian researchers tested a small Shroud sample and determined a date of around 50 AD—very near the time of the Crucifixion. They (and others) suggested earlier studies dating the Shroud to the mid-1300s were flawed by problems with contamination, which the X-ray dating technique cured.

Oddly, the new Italian dating study was originally published back in 2022, but was widely ignored at the time, and only went viral last week. The timeline suggestively recalls well-known words from the last chapter of the prophetic Book of Daniel: “But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

Who knows? There is enough information and misinformation about the Shroud that you must decide for yourself what you believe. Of course, you could say that about anything these days. Since you can choose, choose optimism.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Get back here tomorrow as the players and plots in Act III continue to be revealed, and I’ll round it all up for you. That, and all the other essential news and commentary you need to make it through the week.

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