☕️ TESTY-CLES ☙ Thursday, October 17, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Kamala interview misfires; FDA pauses covid+flu shot; China and Taiwan loom over election; continuous war; what is Israel and Iran birthing?; Times bombs DEI; Elon's new GOTV plan; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Tick, tock, the clock continues counting down. Today’s sharp and wide-ranging roundup includes: testy Kamala misfires in interview on Fox and media runs cover; bad news for another covid shot maker; China surrounds Taiwan again, and we wonder about the Great Dragon’s moves before our election; Trump’s foreign policy versus continuous war; Israel-Iran conflict getting on everybody’s nerves; Times drops a bomb on Michigan University and it explodes on DEI; and Elon employs novel get-out-the-vote strategy.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

📉📉 CNN ran a revealing story yesterday headlined, “Kamala Harris spars with Fox News anchor in testy interview.” Almost every mockingbird media headline about yesterday’s interview with Fox News’ Brett Baier included the word, “testy.” So now we know! Testy means when the reporter insists that the interviewee answer the question, a rare strain of media treatment Kamala has never before encountered, but which used to be the default back before the government acquired corporate media.

CLIP: Brett Baier tells Kamala he has no idea what she’s talking about (0:50).

During her ‘testy’ interview with Brett, Kamala tried to execute the same oleaginous maneuver as during her debate with Trump, which was to recite a little memorized speech whenever Brett asked her a question, even if the little speech had nothing whatever to do with the question Brett asked except for the topic area.

For instance:

BRET: “How many illegal immigrants would you estimate your administration has released into the country over the last three and a half years?”

KAMALA: “Bret, let's just get to the point. Okay? The point is that we have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired.”

(Am I the only one who finds totally infuriating Kamala’s verbal tic of punctuating her speeches with “Okay?”)

She also claimed, possibly for the very first time, that her presidency would not in fact just continue Joe Biden’s regime. But, when Brett asked her to name something she’d do differently than Joe, she couldn’t even come up with a single example. She just rambled away sixty seconds of precious airtime.

Based on corporate media’s desperate efforts to rescue her from herself, and based on social media’s crowd reaction, it was the worst interview performance Kamala has ever given. My guess is she won’t be sitting for any more unscripted interviews. Back to the basement.

💉💉 The Wall Street Journal ran a startling story yesterday headlined, “Novavax Says FDA Puts Clinical Hold on Covid-19, Flu Vaccines.” Uh oh!

According to Novavax’s mandatory SEC disclosure filed Monday, the FDA paused trials both of Novavax's covid and its standalone flu vaccines, after a trial participant reported nerve damage (motor neuropathy). The stock plunged -24% on the news.

If only the original covid vaccines, approved under EUA, were subject to full clinical trials like Novavax’s new subunit protein vaccine is. I wonder if we’d have discovered more adverse effects, like what’s happening right now. The FDA is trying to recapture its long-lost public trust, but it will take more than this. A lot more.

🚀🚀 We need to check in on developments with China. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “With Jets and Ships, China is Honing Its Ability to Choke Taiwan.” I’m not sure “honing” is the right verb for that mixed metaphor, but we got the idea. China put Taiwan in check yesterday with military chess pieces.

In our intense focus on the upcoming elections, it’s easy to forget how rapidly the rush of events is overtaking the world in other places.

Yesterday, the United States, Japan, South Korea, France and Britain held massive joint military drills near Taiwan. Then, China responded with its own record-setting drills, completely encircling the island nation with China’s Coast Guard, and buzzing it with fighter jets launched from China’s first production aircraft carrier.

One sympathizes with the average Taiwanese citizen who, observing all this military attention, probably feels like it’s been one damn thing after another lately.

Beyond describing the military schlong measuring, the article unintentionally confessed an ugly truth. Neocon China hawks often argue China would be easy to beat since it hasn’t “practiced war” since Vietnam. (You could also say China has remained peaceful for the last 50 years, but nobody wants to hear that.) In making that overly simplistic point, the formerly peace-loving Times grotesquely bragged how the United States has honed its warmaking skills over decades of continuous war:

While continuous war might be great for military-industrial complex shareholders, for everybody else, continuous war is noisy, expensive, and every now and then somebody actually gets killed. Continuous war is kind of exactly what we were hoping to avoid.

That’s why we need President Trump!

Trump’s foreign policy is based on competing with other countries economically rather than kinetically. Trump is confident he can outwit, outmarket, and outsell other countries, without anybody having to die or even get mangled in a drone strike.

This kind of competition is out of the left’s reach. Democrats and generals are cowards; they are scared they can’t compete on a fair economic table, so they wield the bully clubs of American military and economic sanctions trying to tilt the scales in our favor.

The very same people whining about Trump’s straightforward proposals for temporary tariffs never saw a sanctions package they didn’t love. This is a terrific example of the structural problem when deep-state bureaucrats pull the levers of power behind the scenes. On the one hand, the deep-staters are over-emboldened by their lack of accountability, which makes them too aggressive when they should be diplomatic. But they are also fundamentally cowards, constantly fearing exposure, so they are also too passive when they should be forceful.

Deep-state bureaucrats experience constant anxiety over professional ‘death,’ which is being thrust into the political spotlight like Fauci and thus rendered useless to the rest of the blob. This results in obsessive secrecy, where it seems like the government classifies almost everything it does.

In other words, we aren’t being told a tenth of what is really going on in the Pacific theater. (Where did the mystery drones flying over US airbases come from?) If China does plan to invade Taiwan anytime soon, the best time might be proximate to the U.S. elections, either just before or just after, especially if a close election is contested resulting in a difficult period when it isn’t clear who’ll be in charge.

Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, and the election will not even be close.

🚀🚀 Reuters ran a suggestive story yesterday headlined, “Iran warns Israel against retaliation for missile attack.” The gist is that a building layer of anxiety about what will happen next with Iran blankets the substrata of constant conflict between Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah. We’re all enduring the awful strategic positioning phase, waiting nervelessly for Israel to hit back at Iran.

It seems fair to say Joe Biden’s ‘heroic,’ over-hyped, CIA-led peace talks finally failed. If there were actually any ‘peace talks’ to begin with, that is. Take it up with mendacious media, which has dropped that now-inconvenient part of the narrative like a hot falafel.

The Israel-Iran conflict is something completely new to modern warfare. I can neither recall nor locate another historical example of this kind of slow-motion, tit-for-tat escalation. Israel hits Iran (or a proxy). Then, weeks go by. Then Iran hits back. Then Israel pauses. And so on.

The conflict suggests a cyclical, even rhythmic pattern. Maybe it’s more like labor pains—short bursts of intense stress followed by lulls, but suffused with the constant tension of knowing the next "contraction" is on its way. Each round of missile strikes ratchets up the pressure, and even during the quiet moments in between, there's a collective breath-hold anticipating the next escalation.

And it’s all unfolding in the context of an ever bigger picture: the contractions mean some kind of a ‘big moment’ is coming soon, but they don’t say exactly when.

This unprecedented style of conflict, bookended by dramatic pauses, provides the illusion of a peaceful lake stretching between spikes of violence poking up from the water. But peace is a mirage. The ever-present undercurrent of impending escalation makes it impossible to forget that something bigger is coming around the next bend.

Everyone is anxiously waiting for the "next one" to hit. The ‘quiet’ periods of building anticipation, as between labor pains, are themselves draining and unsettling. It’s hard to say which is worse. At least when the rockets come, folks can stop imagining the worst.

As Yeats famously asked: What rough beast, its time come ‘round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Heading into these final weeks before the election, it seems inevitable some unpleasant beast will be born if Kamala is elected since a Kamala Administration will be a mere continuation of Biden’s foreign policy midwife.

Our only hope of avoiding what is looking more and more like a worst-case scenario is electing Donald Trump.

So vote like this might be your last chance! And nag other folks into voting, too. The most surprising thing I’ve learned from watching hardworking voter-registration heroes like Scott Pressler is how many people either aren’t properly registered to vote in the first place, or who say they aren’t planning to vote for some reason or other.

Local, local, local.

🔥🔥 Due to blowing past this morning’s looming deadline, I cannot give this significant story the time it rightly deserves. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a long-form, magazine-style report, explicitly labeled as “investigative,” headlined “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” You might want to read this one. (I don’t often suggest reading NYT articles, either.)

Apart from Matt Walsh’s movie (“Am I Racist?”), nothing this year has more evidenced the promising advances in the conservative counter-revolution than this article springing from one of the wellsprings of DEI, which, as it turns out, is not, after all, Ponce De Leon’s fountain of eternal academic youth.

DEI is prematurely aging. It isn’t aging well.

The article described how no university in America embraced DEI as tightly and passionately as did the University of Michigan. In 2016, after Trump’s election, every single MichU department, hundreds and hundreds of them, were ordered to develop and staff comprehensive DEI radicalization plans.

Even the university’s plant nursery (the “Arboretum”) delivered a 37-page buzzword-packed diversity plan, born out of wedlock, which vowed to adopt “a polycentric paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”

They are deadly serious, but that right there is a joke. I defy you to explain what that means in simple English. (Two-Eyed Seeing? Apart from BB gun accident victims and the mythical Cyclops, is there any other kind of seeing?) I also defy you to justify how a plant nursery could be so racist it had to be “fixed” in the first place.

The Times’ investigative journalist interviewed numberless faculty members, mostly unlucky teachers who the institutional DEI machine had masticated at one point or another. A common theme developed. The original architects and power brokers of MichU’s DEI industry refused to talk to the Times’ reporter. They sensed it was too dangerous.

A second theme bubbled up: white women were the worst. A “cartoon professor” was investigated by the University’s DEI police after students reported her for showing them a ‘racist’ cartoon (a 1960s political cartoon about Maoist repression). She told the Times she’d been reported by a group of female white students. “They want to do something — be a part of the cause,” the professor explained.

Another professor remarked that creating the DEI tipline and policing process was like handing tasers to a gang of six-year-old children. At times, the article swerved — almost certainly intentionally — toward Matt Walsh-levels of self-parody. For example:

As the article wrapped up, Michigan’s DEI administrators were fully exposed as clueless nitwits. The reporter quoted them defending the school’s horrible racial performance statistics, like dropping black enrollment and student surveys showing higher rates of racial angst and animus on campus. According to the DEI Administrators, these failing numbers show Michigan’s DEI programs are actually working because, paradoxically, when you “fix” racism it “stirs up anger and resentment.”

We always thought that racism was anger and resentment.

In sum, the Times’ story — again, well worth reading — conveyed a pervasive sense of dilapidation, as though the entire edifice of DEI is rotting from the inside, paint peeling off the walls, doors hanging from the hinges. Let us never forget that DEI was still under construction until the pandemic exposed the reprehensible ideology to appalled parents.

🔥🔥 PennLive ran a terrific story yesterday headlined, “Musk hits campaign trail in Pa. with deal for voters that sparked election law concerns.” When we said Elon went all-in, it turned out there was a lot more “in” for the billionaire to go.

Elon is taking a pre-victory tour through Pennsylvania to entice voting. He tweeted out an invitation to events: “Tomorrow night through Monday, I will be giving a series of talks throughout Pennsylvania,” Musk wrote. “If you’d like to attend one of my talks, there’s no attendance fee. You just need to have signed our petition supporting free speech & right to bear arms & have voted in this election in Pennsylvania.”

Imagine how valuable Elon Musk’s time is, even a single hour, nevermind days on the campaign trail.

The ‘election law concern’ in the headline referred to a quote by a lawyer citing a federal statute that prohibits inducing someone to vote by offering something of value. Here, the ‘something of value’ is attending Elon’s TED Talk. Elon’s deal is right on the legal line, but he might be okay since his offer is after the fact (they already voted).

Maybe it’s more like getting that little “I voted!” sticker or a free donut or any of a number of get-out-the-vote incentives. We’ll see.

Regardless, Elon’s tour is a terrific way to remind everyone in Pennsylvania to go vote early, which is the current GOP strategy. Elon’s putting his time and celebrity where his mouth is. Again. He’s in that state because the pundits are projecting that whoever wins Pennsylvania will win the election.

In related news, Trump continued surging yesterday on Polymarket:

Keep encouraged but also keep frosty.

Have a tremendous Thursday! Tour back here tomorrow morning for more essential C&C news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com