☕️ SPASMS ☙ Tuesday, October 10, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden isn't letting a good crisis go to waste; local story shows national mood; Disney's woke woes grow like magic mushrooms; Biden interviewed over docs case; more bribery evidence; and lots more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! The post is a little shorter today since I’m traveling for work. In the roundup: some Israel supporters aren’t letting a good crisis go to waste; local story highlights national mood; Disney’s woke financial woes multiply as the Mouse House catches fire; we found out where Biden’s been hiden’ for the last two days while Israel burned: an interview for his classified documents problem; scholar Jonathan Turley discusses latest Biden Bribery evidence; and researchers work diligently to replace their naturalistic god with a new-and-improved god of their own creation: artificial intelligence.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🔥 C&C ARMY: Yesterday I drafted and sent my letter to Governor DeSantis calling for an organized response to our border problem. It was simple, straightforward, and got right to the point, hopefully increasing the odds our hyper-busy governor will read it. Today, whether or not you’re a Florida resident, if you agree, please email a copy of the letter to GovernorRon.Desantis@eog.myflorida.com.

So whoever reviews the Governor’s public email inbox gets the idea, use the subject line of “Letter re: Response to Attacks on Israel.” Add whatever additional thoughts you like. Hopefully, once they see how many of us are concerned about this issue, they’ll escalate the priority.

FILE: Download a PDF copy of the letter for your email attachment.

One thoughtful commenter yesterday reasonably argued that we should take care to avoid a knee-jerk reaction to the crisis, because the government psyoperators love to use the problem-reaction-solution dialectic to manipulate us. We’ll keep this in mind. But our border crisis feels more like a 9/11-style failure of imagination than a dialectical setup, and the psyoperators act like they’d prefer we ignore this particular problem.

So, let’s focus on it.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🚀 Three days in, Israel believes it has finally restored its internal security. It has not yet begun its punitive counterattack, apart from softening its enemies up with an air assault. Meanwhile the death counter kept climbing yesterday, surmounting 900 dead Israelis (including over 120 soldiers and police), and it will probably keep on climbing as bloodied Israel figures out what exactly happened to it this weekend. Hamas is reported to be holding over 100 civilians, including a handful of Americans, Germans, and Russians. That we know of so far.

Around the rest of the world, including here in the U.S., cunning politicians jockeyed for position yesterday in a frantic race to express the most support for Israel, not letting a good crisis go to waste. Biden — or whoever runs things while he’s being interviewed about his classified documents problem — has ordered U.S. warships in the area to deliver whatever they have on hand that might be helpful.

Here at home, Congress began debating a multi-billion dollar aid package for Israel, although it is not yet exactly clear what sort of aid Israel needs beyond more shells for its Iron Dome defense system.

An NBC News headline yesterday reflected the kind of diligent opportunism that — only 72 hours into the war — has already reared its Medusa-like heads — and you can expect to see a lot more of it:

Of course! Israel can have its aid, as long as Ukraine gets some green, too. You can’t blame them. They have their priorities. Both conflicts are very similar, after all. Both aid packages are — facially — intended to help both countries secure both of their borders.

It’s a good thing there aren’t any other countries with insecure borders around here, or we could be in a real pickle.

It wasn’t just democrats trying to advantage the tragedy in Israel. Establishment Republicans were up to their bloody necks in it too. From Fox News:

Sure, that makes sense. We can’t vote on Israel aid until we have a new Speaker, and we won’t vote for a new Speaker unless you give us our old Speaker back. It’s not blackmail, it’s politics. We all want the same thing at the end of the day!

Now, haha, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all these politicians falling all over themselves to express support for Israel are actually grasping with their grubby, chocolate-stained fingers at the treasury’s lockbox for their own political ends or anything. The facts can speak for themselves.

I don’t plan to cover the war’s play-by-play, you can get that news all over the Internet if you want it. But I’ll make sure you know about the major military and political developments and will highlight whatever inconvenient facts the media tries to bury.

🚀 A News4-Jax headline about my home town yesterday was a good barometer for where all our minds are at these days:

What happened was, last night students held a pro-Israel candlelight prayer vigil on the University of Florida campus. Just before 9 p.m., someone fainted, and some attendees starting asking for someone to call 911.  Local police said the request for 911 was “misunderstood by the crowd,” causing people to freak out, panic, frantically scatter, and generally provoking full-on pandemonium.

Five people were injured during the frenetic fracas.

UF police chief Linda Stump-Kurnick said, “It was an accident that was misinterpreted by the crowd that led to panic.” Police quelled the hysterical crowd and cleared the area. The News4 article ended by telling people who’d left all their stuff behind when they legged it how to get their belongings back.

What does it mean? I think that little story shows a lot of folks are jitterier than Nancy Pelosi nervously edging into church, all wound up and stressed out, waiting for the next giant clown shoe to drop. It’s not sustainable.

🔥 ZeroHedge ran a delightful article yesterday, headlined “Desperate Disneyland Slashes Children's Ticket Prices By More Than 50%.”

I grew up in Florida. For my whole life, it was well known that Disney didn’t discount admission prices, apart from a small break offered to Florida residents during the hot, low-attendance summer months. Not discounting was part of the brand.

I guess those days are over now.

Now, after tangling with Governor DeSantis about what is properly characterized as Disney’s pro-grooming position, and probably eying an increasingly gloomy economic forecast, Disney has announced a half-off fire sale for kids’ tickets at its California location.

The Epoch Times, which also reported on the story, suggested that the discounts won’t be enough to get conservative parents back in the park. One recent Disneyland visitor told the Epoch Times, "I just don’t think we’ll be taking our kids back any time soon, especially after their new movie basically makes God into the bad guy.” (They were referring to Disney’s latest Pixar blockbuster, Wish.)

It seems like nothing’s been going Disney’s way since they picked that political fight with Florida in 2021 and lost their special tax benefits. Here’s a Bloomberg headline, run just yesterday:

The Disney news is even bleaker than when Woody and Buzz got knocked out the window of Andy's moving truck and watched it drive away. Sayeth Bloomberg:

— “Disney+ has lost the company more than $2 billion so far this year and is bleeding subscribers as it tries to raise prices.”

— “Disney (is) worth $160 billion—less than half what it had been (worth) when (Iger) left in 2021.”

— The “movie division is suffering from a string of box-office bombs that call into question its most prized franchises.”

— “Even Disney World in Florida is reporting lower attendance. Iger blamed the humidity.” Hunga Tonga!

— A “current Disney executive close to Iger” explained, “the house is on fire.”

Get woke, go broke!

🔥 Yesterday, buried under wall-to-wall Israel coverage, the Washington Post ran a curious story headlined, “Biden interviewed about classified documents found at his office, home.”

The investigation continues, even though the FBI never raided his offices or his homes where Biden had scattered valuable U.S. classified secrets like they were spilled coffee beans, and you never know who might want to buy them later. Special counsel Robert Hur finally “interviewed” the Resident “over the last two days,” which would explain why Biden has been AWOL as the Israel crisis unfolded. WAPO cited unnamed sources for the information.

There wasn’t much more to the story. Unlike a deposition, an “interview” isn’t sworn, so Biden won’t be directly liable for perjury if he lied, but there are general laws about lying to federal officials that could come into play. It was interesting the interview took two days — Sunday and Monday — which suggests Special Counsel Hur went file-by-file and/or Joe rambled a lot and told stories about dogfaced pony soldiers back in the good old days.

It was also intriguing that the interview wasn’t rescheduled given the developing Middle East crisis. On the other hand, what does Joe really do, day to day, anyway?

Right below the end of the article was a link titled “There are key differences between the Trump, Biden classified documents investigations.” I didn’t explore it.

🔥 Congressional scholar and legal impeachment expert Jonathan Turley wrote a great Substack, re-published in the Hill of all places, about the Biden Bribery case. It was headlined, The Biden Family Tree: How Investigations are Exposing the Bidens’ Influence-Peddling Dynasty

Turley pointed out that newly released evidence from the House Ways and Means Committee reveals at least nine Biden family members benefitted from over $20 million dollars coming from 23 separate countries on four continents. It was a worldwide brand with only one product: Senator then Vice-President Joe Biden.

The latest evidence gives the old saw about “having a rich uncle” a whole new dimension.

Read the whole thing.

🤖 Finally, in artificial intelligence news, science mag Earth.com ran a breathless story yesterday headlined, “Artificial intelligence can design walking robots in seconds..” Wow! Still, not to quibble or anything, but the robot designed by A.I. looks like a sponge and moves around by squirming and spasming. So.

A.I.’s bizarre pet robot.

What I found most interesting were the researchers’ excited, over-the-top exclamations about how much smarter A.I. already is than nature:

“We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses the traffic jams of evolution, without falling back on the bias of human designers,” said co-author Sam Kriegman, an assistant professor of Robotics and AI at Northwestern. 

“We told the AI that we wanted a robot that could walk across land. Then we simply pressed a button and presto! It generated a blueprint for a robot in the blink of an eye that looks nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth. I call this process ‘instant evolution.’”

“When people look at this robot, they might see a useless gadget. I see the birth of a brand-new organism,” Kriegman said.

Reflecting on this extraordinary achievement, Kriegman said: “Now anyone can watch evolution in action as AI generates better and better robot bodies in real time. This is because evolution has no foresight. It cannot see into the future to know if a specific mutation will be beneficial or catastrophic. We found a way to remove this blindfold, thereby compressing billions of years of evolution into an instant.”

Scientism — the faith-based, naturalistic religion often called “humanism” and which often masquerades as “science” — holds evolution as its primary diety. So in one sense, Professor Kriegman is claiming that his A.I. has surpassed god, his god that is, the great stochastic, pantheistic god of nature. It’s a significant claim.

But Professor Kriegman is wrong. He’s not even close.

The reason by Professor Kriegman is wrong is because his spasming sponge can’t find food to eat, it can’t procreate, it can’t carry anything, it can’t evade predators, and it can’t even find its way through a maze, all of which a tiny ant can do (and more). Kriegman is fallaciously equating “movement” with biological evolution. Not to throw a wet blanket over his A.I.’s accomplishment, but while A.I. may someday be able to design something as complex as an ant, we remain far from that point today.

They sure want an A.I. god, don’t they? You can smell it a mile away. I’ll keep the God I already have though, thanks.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Enjoy the cool weather, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning with a full-size roundup to warm you up and mark the week’s midpoint.

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