☕️ SWITCHEROO ☙ Saturday, August 3, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A trio of surprisingly un-surprising items: military snatches back 9/11 plea deal (Kamala givers); shocking study shows free money makes people want to work LESS; dems frog-march Plan B online; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! And that means it’s time for the Weekend Edition. This morning we drill down into three shocking / non-shocking essential news developments: the military pivots suddenly and snatches back its 9/11 plotter plea deal, which I would never call Indian Giving, because that would be intolerant, so I called it Kamala Giving; largest randomly-controlled universal basic income trial produces expected results, at least, expected by anyone who is not suffering from dementia; and the Democrat party holds a sudden and unexpected and totally transparent delegate vote, and guess which Plan B candidate just became the party’s newest nominee?

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Yesterday, USA Today ran a remarkable story yesterday headlined, “U.S. defense secretary rejects plea deal for 9/11 mastermind, puts death penalty back on table.”  Raising all kinds of questions, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin suddenly and unexpectedly whipsawed Thursday’s plea deal and relieved the military commission officer in charge of the 9/11 cases of all her authority.

In case you missed it, or if you live in Portland, yesterday we covered the military’s first decision to enter a plea deal with  “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now 60, and his two accomplices, that would have given them life in prison in exchange for the government’s agreement not to seek the death penalty — for a crime that literally killed over 3,000 Americans and figuratively knocked the world off its axis.

Yesterday, amidst a wave bad press including an ocean of horrified public feedback and a pack of public officials buzzing like a swarm of meth-fueled hornets over the announced plea deal, Secretary Austin took direct control of the case in a brief memo consisting of only two short paragraphs, which was promptly leaked to the press.

(At least, we assume from the signature it was Austin, he has been known to go AWOL from time to time, and whenever it happens they just all pretend like he’s still working. But I digress.)

USA Today’s story reported mixed reactions from 9/11 family members. Some of them welcomed the sudden reversal; others were baffled by the incomprehensible incoherence infecting the military’s top brass, and wondered when the heck will this thing ever be over? In our lifetimes?

For me, I take no position on the return of the death penalty option. As a Christian, I accept as Biblical, but am uncomfortable with government-sanctioned killing. And for Heaven’s sake, it’s been over twenty years since 9/11 anyway. We may never live to see a verdict.

But I was disappointed in the plea deal, because it meant there would be no trial. The families and the American people deserve to see the evidence. The plea deal would have buried all the evidence under a Cuban missile silo right outside Gitmo (GTMO).

So … will there now be a trial? USA Today didn’t say, nor did the government. But if so, that would seem to be good news. So the reversal seems like progress. But of course, it was only ‘progress’ in the sense that it returned America to the status quo ante.

Having acknowledged being happy the plea is being withdrawn, let us turn to how it happened. What in the Dickens is going on? (And what does Charles Dickens have to do with this?) How was the plea deal with the “9/11 mastermind” approved without Austin being involved in the first place?  How did it happen without Biden being involved? Or did Joe just sign the damned thing without even reading it? Who’s in charge down there anyway?

Be honest: is Austin taking some more unscheduled leave in the hospital’s quiet room? Is he on another bender? Who is running the military?

Questions continue even after the reversal. Why hasn’t Biden said anything about this? Can he? Did the Harris campaign override the plotters’ plea deal because it was becoming bad optics for the Administration? Why didn’t the military explain what changed, or where things went wrong?

Why isn’t the media asking any questions about how this all happened?

To call this utterly incoherent switcheroo an ‘evolution in military justice’ is like calling the Army’s now-retired Gaza pier a ‘limited success.’ Especially because the about-face was unexplained, it leaves America —and the entire world— feeling even more like there is some kind of vegetative intellectual cavity wobbling at the top of the US government, which ain’t going to be good for business.

🔥🔥 Last week, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a vastly important study titled “The Employment Effects Of A Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence From Two U.S. States.”  It was so important, in fact, that it was immediately classified and secured in Hillary’s server closet. What happened was researchers tracked a 3-year program where poor people were given $1,000 per month and observed how the gifts changed their behavior. I’ll give you one guess how it turned out.

You’d think it would have gotten some press. It was the type of trial they like to call the ‘gold standard,’ a randomly controlled trial (RCT). As a control group, the study randomly assigned 2,000 other participants who only got $50 per month, just enough to purchase one additional child-sized mocha frappuccino at Starbucks.

The results were, shall we say, unencouraging. People who got the free money saw their annual individual income drop by about $1,500 compared to the control group. (Table 3.) But they had more time to write rap music lyrics, and you just can’t calculate the benefit to society accruing from one more song about hitting the hoe’, except they didn’t write any hit new rap songs or any other genre, for that matter.

For every dollar received by giftees, total household income (excluding the gifts) fell by at least 21 cents, and total individual income fell by at least 12 cents. Average annual non-employment (idleness) was higher in the gifted group by +1.1 months compared to the control group. And it was literally killing them. Giftee group members reported increased rates of disabilities, which obviously limited their ability to work, so please don’t ask.

According to a recent (July 31st) LA Times article, there are over a 150 “free money” trials currently ongoing across this great nation. As you might expect, the media has only covered the studies where the researchers’ reports showed some kind of positive benefit, usually fortunate trial participants self-reporting feeling happier. Who wouldn’t be happy?

This NBER trial, arguably the largest and most well-controlled of the studies, was covered by the media in the same way a german shepherd covers a favorite chew toy by burying it in the yard.

Psuedoscientifically named ‘Universal Basic Income’ (UBI is the required 3-letter acronym) might be the most subversive idea they’ve yet come up with, except of course the notion is as old as time itself. Free gifts of money from the government, so-called “guaranteed income,” would be the ultimate political panacea.

The dependents would be sure to only vote for politicians who promise to keep or increase the gifts. Over time, string after string would be tied to the gifts, ensuring recipients behaved in state-approved ways. Uncooperative people —like misinformers— would be formally or even mysteriously ‘disqualified’ from posting memes about vaccine injuries, for instance.

Worse, this has been tried before many, many times, and it has never worked in all of human history. But six thousand years of failure has never discouraged young socialists. Hope springs eternal, out of a hole in the ground near Hoboken, just south of the New Jersey Turnpike. Maybe this time, it will work!

Never give up, hopeful socialists insist. Try, try again! Nevermind Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity (trying, trying again but expecting a different result). Nevermind Benjamin Franklin (“when people find they can vote themselves money it will be the end of the Republic”). And nevermind the foundational wisdom literature underpinning Western Civilization (“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” 2 Thess. 3:10).

Those quaint, old-fashioned ideas are patriarchical, non-inclusive, and most importantly, inequitable.

Opponents of UBI include pessimistic killjoys like Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. On the other side of the politically lucrative debate stand visionary lowlights like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she’s not bartending or managing her new Congressional stock portfolio.

They act like free money is a novel concept they just came up with in a flash of brilliance while at a conference at the Ritz Carlton, reaching for the loofah with eyes covered in soap suds. Eureka! Let’s just give them cash!

In the first century AD, Roman poet Juvenal coined the term “panem et circense,” which is Latin for “I left my wallet in my other sports coat.” Unfortunately, even though it was in Latin and sounded very intellectual, and it took people a while to catch on, Juvenal used his fancy-sounding excuse a little too often, and eventually the other Romans stopped inviting him out for dinner at the Parthenon.

Juvenal’s flip phrase has also been widely translated by far-right sourpusses as “bread and circuses,” a concept reflecting how Roman emperors declared themselves to be gods, since they could so easily control the people by giving them free stuff the emperors took from citizens and foreigners they didn’t like. But as economist Herbert Stein famously said, free money that can’t continue forever, won’t.

It didn’t work for the Romans. And the Romans never had to pay off a $35 trillion dollar debt. In the U.S. today, there is $2.35 trillion in physical currency (money) in circulation. Every single dollar and coin, if somehow scraped together into a giant pile, wouldn’t make a dent in the debt. Just saying.

🔥🔥 Speaking of unexplained about-faces, the AP ran another switcheroo story yesterday headlined, “Harris has secured enough Democratic delegate votes to become their party's nominee, chair says.” That was fast!

It happened so fast, I bet you didn’t even know they were ‘voting.’ I bet the delegates didn’t even know they were voting. The DNC set up a special, totally secure, completely trustworthy website for Democrat delegates to quickly and easily cast their votes, and guess what happened next?

Vice President Cackle won! She beat the field even more clearly and resoundingly than President and Dictator for Life Nicolas Maduro did down in Venezuela earlier this week.

It wasn’t even close. Kamala handily beat every other nominee presented to Democrat delegates, which included … wait a minute … just a sec … oh. Sorry. There were no other options. The nominee drop-down on the website form was greyed out. She handily beat nobody.

But even if there weren’t any other available candidates, at least the voting process was completely transparent and open, by which I mean it looked much like the bottom of a coal mine after a cave-in, or maybe something closer to the pitch-black visibility in an inside cabin in the wreck of the Titanic. Here’s how the AP described the Democrats’ totally transparent presidential nominating process:

Haha, “Telethon.” In other words, it was a show. President Maduro is a pathetic amateur.

Still, I have a nagging question. If they can’t even trust their own delegates to vote right, how on Earth are they planning to trust the American people?

Weirdly, all of Biden’s campaign staff and all of his election apparatus seamlessly shifted to Kamala, as if she had no independent ideas at all, and as if the staff didn’t care who the nominee actually was. Rah-rah Joe Bi… go Harris!

It was just a small substitution of the side vegetable, nothing whatever to worry about. The price is the same.

Oh well. According to the AP, unidentified “Democrat officials” explained yesterday’s surprise, sudden and unexpected roll call website nominating process was absolutely necessary, thanks to an August 7th ballot deadline in Ohio. The AP admitted that deadline had already been extended by Ohio’s legislature to September 1st, but the anonymous officials just didn’t want to take any chances. So.

I defy you to come up with a more bizarre collection of events than 2024 has delivered thus far, and we only just yesterday learned who would be the (second) Democrat presidential candidate. I think I’ll go on Amazon Prime next, to order a stamp with the words “I’m not making this up,” since it’s really a lot of typing when you add them all together.

Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll catch you guys back here on Monday morning to kick off the next astonishing week of essential news and commentary.

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