☕️ STORMY WEATHER ☙ Saturday, May 18, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

2024 is shattering weather records, both on Earth and in Space - why?; another barge-bridge meetup; unexpected pardon for justice seekers; China makes sanctions moves; Congress reigns in FAA; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your Weekend Edition rounds up all the news you need to know this morning: record-breaking storms continue on Earth and in Space, where carbon dioxide doesn’t exist; speculation about climate change and Earth’s dwindling magnetic field; another day, another barge-bridge collision; good news in Texas self-defense case as unlucky Uber driver gets pardon; Chinese fight Biden sanctions by dumping dollars, buying gold, and taking their pets back; and Congress chips a little more away from the covid jabs.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🌪️🌪️ Weather records keep crashing like meteorites. One week later, as data keeps streaming in and real scientists keep crunching numbers, last week’s solar storms look more and more historic. The BBC ran a colorful story yesterday headlined, “More Northern Lights expected soon as Sun drives stormy space weather.” We are amidst a solar maximum that happens whenever the Sun’s magnetic poles swap spots.

The BBC says the giant sunspot that caused last week’s solar storms, called AR3664, is expected to survive and will swing back into view in a couple weeks. Usually, spots like AR3664 decay over time and get smaller, but scientists quoted for various articles are hedging their bets for some reason.

One standout example of the historicity of last week’s storm made the rounds yesterday: visible aurora in the picturesque Pacific island nation of New Caledonia, located just over the equator in the Southern Hemisphere, where last weekend this dramatic picture was snapped by an alert resident:

No living Caledonian has ever before seen aurora. The last time aurora decorated the wide skies over its stunning lagoons and coral reefs was during the Great Carrington Event. Hisashi Hayakawa, space weather researcher at Japan's Nagoya University, explained "The last time sky watchers saw auroras in the area may have been during the Carrington Event of Sept. 1859, when auroras were sighted from a ship in the Coral Sea."

In a report on SpaceWeather.com, locals were delighted at the once-in-a-lifetime view. “I have rarely been so happy when taking a photo!" gushed photographer Frédéric Desmoulins. "I could see the red color of the auroras with my naked eye. According to the New Caledonian Astronomy Society, these photos are the first for this territory."

Sadly, Frédéric’s photographic pleasure was short-lived. Shortly after the May 10th storm, the natives got restless, and violent protests erupted on the island over a familiar-sounding proposed constitutional amendment that would bestow voting rights on immigrants who’ve lived there for over ten years. There have been hundreds of injuries and five deaths.

Which just proves you can give people paradise, but they’ll find something to fight about. See also, e.g., Garden of Eden.

🌪️🌪️ Worldwide aurora weren’t the only weather breaking records this week. As they say, everything is bigger in Texas. NBC ran a widely-reported storm record story yesterday headlined, “7 dead in Houston area after storms and 100-mph winds.” It wasn’t hurricanes. It wasn’t twisters. It was hundred-mile-an-hour winds … from thunderstorms.

Broken glass littered downtown Houston’s streets yesterday after the big storm. Here’s a short video clip showing windows being blown out of skyscrapers in Houston:

CLIP: Texas thunderstorms blowing out hi-rise windows (0:08).

CLIP: Another one (different building) (0:12)

Governor Abbott declared a state of emergency as storms, including tornadoes and baseball-sized hail, battered the state’s south and east since Mother’s Day. The extent of the damage remains unclear, but the 100-mph thunderstorms’ historic nature is already undeniable. As far as I can tell, corporate media has ignored the storm’s historic aspect, but I could find no evidence of 100-mph thunderstorms before 2024.

🔥🔥 Is ‘climate change’ causing weather records to fall? Probably not, since CO2 doesn’t exist in space. I’ll put one theory out there, a theory that is extremely hard to find anywhere in corporate media, probably since it contradicts the lucrative manmade climate theory. Behold this Live Science headline from ten years ago:

Four years later in 2018, Forbes picked up the same story:

It’s going faster. Earth is rapidly losing its magnetic shielding at an accelerating rate of five percent per decade:

Needless to say, the Earth’s magnetic shield protects the planet from harmful solar radiation:

It seems self-evidence that as the field weakens, more solar radiation will get through, causing changes on Earth. Things like worldwide aurora, for example. But don’t believe your lying eyes.

Last year, corporate media collectively began “debunking” the commonsense notion that a weaker magnetic field will lead to more violent and extreme Earth weather. It’s just a coincidence.

But as usual, the certainty in the headline was betrayed by the details. Scientists aren’t quite as sure as National Geographic’s headline writers are. It’s the tired old no evidence mantra:

But laughably, and don’t roll your eyes too hard, the very same NatGeo article dismissively linked a 2021 study published in the Journal Science, which did find paleoclimatic evidence of climate change linked to magnetic field changes. Here’s the study’s entire abstract:

But — no evidence! It’s deliciously ironic that following the science requires ignoring studies published in a journal named “Science.”

🌪️🌪️ But that wasn’t all for Texas, which experienced another noteworthy disaster this week. The AP ran the story Thursday, headlined, “Barge hits bridge connecting Galveston and Pelican Island, causing partial collapse and oil spill.” It’s the third one this year.

While the damage was limited, officials say the Pelican Island bridge will probably be closed for the foreseeable future. The article described the accident happened after a tug “lost control of” the barge, and boom. That’s it.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

It’s like how there is nothing to see over at the Francis Scott Key Bridge accident scene. I was surprised to discover this week that the FBI — not normally involved in marine accidents — has locked the Dali’s crew on board the ship — even during the explosives operations this week while workers tried to pry the boat off the bridge wreckage.

And that was still not all. According to this week’s UK Independent, the FBI has also mysteriously confiscated the crew’s cell phones.  So the sailors can’t leave or call anybody. According to the story, the local seafarer’s aid society is still trying to get them new phones (although another story suggested they have received replacements).

The collision occurred in March:

The FBI said the entire crew has visa problems, so they must stay on board. Please, no border jokes. The sailors’ cell phones are, apparently, part of the FBI’s investigation into criminal negligence (rather than the NTSB, for some unexplained reason).

It’s totally normal.

Don’t feel wrong to wonder about these odd events. Even the Independent’s news barge crashed right into the FBI’s lack of clarity:

Why don’t they just go ahead and admit it was an infrastructure cyber-attack provoked by Biden’s foreign policy? It seems like that would be much easier than dreaming up all these ridiculous cover stories.

🔥🔥 Let’s not make too much of this, but careful readers will recall last month’s eclipse, which bore striking similarities to the eclipse immediately preceding the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes, which were the strongest in U.S. history. This week, a Thursday headline from KHMP News-Talk reported a fairly robust 3.8 shaker in Missouri:

Lest I be accused of sensationalism, I’m not the only one connecting this week’s geological activity to the big quakes of 1811 that caused the Mississippi River to run backwards. Headline from Fox Weather, yesterday:

More optimistically, similar shakers hit the area last year, and an unidentified geologist quoted in the story suggested the current quake could just be a small aftershock from the 1811 event, and therefore nothing to be concerned about. If it weren’t 2024, that would be the end of the story for me.

We’ll just keep an eye on things.

🔥 The New York Times unwillingly ran a good-news story yesterday headlined, “Texas Governor Pardons Man in Fatal Shooting of Protester in 2020.” Last year, Uber driver and Army veteran Daniel Perry was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for shooting a white BLM protestor during the 2020 summer riots, after the masked protestor blocked Perry’s car and aimed an AK-47 at him.

Despite that the deceased protestor was white, prosecutors still presented evidence to the jury of racist comments Perry had made online, as well as comments about his dislike for the 2020 protests, and put on psychological experts who called the hapless driver “basically a loaded gun.” The jury rejected Perry’s self-defense argument, found him guilty on all counts, and the judge imposed the maximum sentence. Then the Army dishonorably discharged Perry from active duty.

This week, Texas’s Board of Pardons and Paroles reviewed Perry’s case and recommended he be pardoned. Governor Abbott promptly issued the pardon, and also took the chance to swipe at the Soros-funded DA who’d prosecuted poor Perry. Governor Abbott wrote that DA José Garza did not pursue justice, but rather “demonstrated unethical and biased misuse of his office in prosecuting Daniel Scott Perry.”

Governor Abbott further explained in the pardon, “District Attorney Garza directed the lead detective investigating Daniel Scott Perry to withhold exculpatory evidence from the grand jury considering whether to report an indictment.” Among other things, a detective called by prosecutors signed an affidavit saying DA Garza had ordered him to remove over 100 items of exculpatory evidence from his testimony.

In maybe the best good news, DA Garza — like Trump-prosecuting DA Fani Willis — now finds himself under investigation. The woke Texas DA is currently facing a proceeding that could remove him from office under a new law signed by the Governor that limits local prosecutors’ discretion.

Perry’s pardon has ignited a small firestorm of disorganized controversy. Corproate media knows it’s upset, but it isn’t sure what exactly to be upset about. They want so badly for the case to be about systemic racism. But they keep crunching the numbers and it’s never coming out right.

As far as I can tell, based on how many column inches they devote to Perry’s irrelevant beliefs, corporate media’s main problem with Daniel Perry is that he’s got the wrong politics, so he’s a bad person.

The Times’s article ended weakly by unsuccessfully attempting to tie Perry’s self-defense case to Austin’s pro-Palestine protests. The effort failed, but unintentionally connected the 2020 pre-election protests to 2024’s pre-election protests, making the whole mess look politically-motivated.

The Times’ article was a disjointed disaster for journalism, but it was good news for justice.

🐼 Speaking of history making events, and utterly predictably, the Chinese are not taking Biden’s new sanctions sitting on their rice mats. Bloomberg ran the largely ignored, record-setting story under the headline, “China Sells Record Sum of US Debt Amid Signs of Diversification.”

During 2024’s first quarter, China dumped a record number of US treasuries and bonds valued higher than the Great Wall, totaling a staggering $53.3 billion. In historical terms, this is the largest treasury sell-off ever recorded. Coincidentally, the US dollar declined to its current one-month low during the same period. Bad luck.

As China sells its US treasuries, it uses the money to buy up gold like it’s going out of style. China and the BRICS alliance were the largest buyers of gold in 2022, 2023, and even 2024. Last year alone, China added several tons of gold worth $550 billion to its reserves.

It might be connected to the war in Ukraine. “This suggests that gold purchases by some central banks may have been driven by concerns about sanctions risk,” an IMF official quoted for the story explained. In other words, BRICS is way ahead of Sleepy Joe.

Never mind, the country is in the best of hands. It’s a good thing Biden and Blinken are running the country. Forget about diplomacy, that’s for dog-faced pony soldiers. No peace until every inch of Ukraine is back in the CIA’s hands!

Meanwhile, Microsoft — all on its own, mind you — announced this week it is beginning to airlift its artificial intelligence team out of China. From the Wall Street Journal, Thursday:

Microsoft gave its Chinese employees a month to make up their minds. The tech giant “declined to comment on the reason behind the relocation offer.”

Under Biden Administration rules, neither OpenAI’s ChatGPT nor Microsoft’s AI ‘Copilot’ are available in China. Decide for yourself which country is better off under that arrangement.

But that wasn’t all. Goodbye, and thanks for all the bamboo shoots. Perhaps China’s deepest and most insulting cut was reported Thursday by CBS, in a story headlined, “Last pandas in the U.S. have a timetable to fly back to China.”

Last November, the National Zoo in Washington returned three pandas to China, “as loan agreements lapsed amid heightened diplomatic tensions between the two nations.”

No more pandas for you!  Thanks, Joe Biden, for the Panda War.

🔥🔥 Finally, some good news as the COVID accountability movement continues slowly and ponderously trundling down the one-way tracks. Yesterday, both the Senate and House passed an FAA reauthorization bill, H.R.3935, which bans vaccine and mask mandates for airline employees, passengers, and FAA staff.

I feel a little bit bad for the covid holdouts who are still masking and huddling together on their “covid zero” Reddit forums. They seem like those luckless Japanese soldiers discovered holding post on tiny South Pacific islands twenty years after the war ended. It would have been better had they outlawed masks completely, but it’s a start. The momentum is building. Stay on board, we’re getting there.

Have a wonderful weekend! And come back here Monday for an exciting, fully caffeinated week of Trump trial drama and so much more.

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