☕️ THE EXECRABLE GAMES ☙ Tuesday, July 30, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden's big Supr. Court broadside; Paris hits bad luck after sacrilege; garbage in, AI out; replacement Secret Service Director takes second shot at Congress; 3rd Circuit jab win; UK sanity; more.

Jul 30, 2024

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your essential news roundup today includes: Governor Cooper flees Kamala ticket and heads for the North Carolina hills; Biden suggests Supreme Court overhaul; Paris, France, scene of the Drag Queen Last Supper, encounters lots of bad luck, including unconfirmable citywide loss of power and much more; AI study confirms age-old axiom about garbage; replacement Acting Secret Service Director to debut before Congress; reversing lower court, Third Circuit supports jab lawsuit; and UK High Court upholds puberty blocker ban.

In an unexpected twist, after a full-day hearing yesterday, the judge called for a special unscheduled hearing this morning, to announce a ruling. Mercifully it is at 11am. But last night, I had to Uber to the mall to buy a new emergency dress shirt and tie. That’s a litigator’s life.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper pulled out of consideration as Kamala Harris’s running mate.” He pulled out. I have been informed that technique does not work, but I’m already digressing.

However he did it, he’s out, which probably means they asked him to run, and the prospect of campaigning with Kamala “Plan B” Harris suddenly got real and very weird. Governor Cooper blamed pulling out on North Carolina:

Or it might be because Kamala weirdly pulled out all her eyebrow hairs and now just draws them on. Maybe it was because she weirdly pulled out the couch when they met to discuss Cooper joining the ticket. Whichever, Cooper pulled out his phone and ordered an Uber.

Next!

🔥🔥 How often have you heard media gassing about ‘democratic norms and institutions’? But whenever they don’t like the democratic norms and institutions, they just change and undermine them, which I believe is technically called “Calvin Ball.” The New York Times ran the story yesterday headlined, “Warning of ‘Extreme’ Agenda, Biden Calls for Supreme Court Overhaul.” Biden’s overhaul seeks to pack the extreme, far-right Court into a U-haul.

In a fiery, teleprompter-fueled speech in Austin, President Cabbage outlines his “proposals”:

18-year term limits;
A ‘code of conduct;’
Disclosures of gifts;
Conflict of interest rules; and
“Paring back“ the recent immunity ruling.

Standing in Democrats’ way is Article III of the Constitution:

Note that Article III only lets Congress dabble in the “inferior courts.” Not the Supreme Court. In this lawyer’s humble opinion, Biden’s proposals would require a Constitutional Amendment. Any laws passed by Congress (Article II) would be reviewed by the Supreme Court (Article III), which would probably strike them down as an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers.

In the Times’ article, Notre Dame law professor Richard W. Garnett more or less agreed with me, and diplomatically noted, “We don’t really have completely clear rules about the extent to which Congress is able to regulate the internal practices of the court.” No such rules exist. Garnett added, “The things about retirement ages and term limits are complicated by the Constitution’s text. I think things like disclosure rules might be in a different category.”

When Garnett said Joe’s proposals were “complicated by the Constitution’s text,” he meant prohibited by the Constitution. Lawyers, am I right?

Democrats need a Constitutional Amendment, which isn’t likely to happen. As much fun as a Constitutional Convention of the States would be, Democrats wouldn’t risk it. It would be great if they did, but might have a few other suggestions for a Convention, like abolishing the income tax, and they don’t have enough states anyway.

So what gives? Why bother? The suggestions themselves are a way to attack the Court. They are intended to gin up controversy, which I always thought was a weird expression, since the last thing you need in a controversy is more mixed drinks. But they are trying to smear the Court, for refusing to go along with Joe’s “commonsense reforms.”

Wash, rinse, and repeat. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt infamously announced his so-called “court-packing” plan, which would have required all nine Justices to squeeze into a single office the size of a Toyota Prius. Merely announcing the packing plan did the trick, especially since several of the Justices were quite prosperously sized. The cowed Justices threw in the judicial towels and started rubber-stamping Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal, paving the way for the mess in which we currently find ourselves.

Democrats have been trying to pack up the Court ever since Biden took office. In 2021, euphoric media reported Biden’s Supreme Court Review Commission, which was widely predicted to recommend a brand-new court-packing scheme. Fortunately, the buck stopped at a dementia-addled root vegetable, so it went nowhere.

Biden’s latest broadside is ‘Plan B.’ They wish to intimidate the Court before the election cases start rolling in: Stay out of it.

🔥🔥 The UK Daily Mail ran a very odd story yesterday headlined, “Paris is hit by a 'power blackout', claim social media users.” What? Which was it? A blackout, or social media “claims?” A smattering of media covered the story, and bizarrely, while not denying it happened, they all reported widespread power outages in the French capital as “unconfirmed.”

Unconfirmed? Just when you think the media can’t get any more moronic, they come up with something like this. How many reporters do you suppose are in Paris right now to cover the games? How is it possible for a major world city, the location of the 33rd Summer Olympics, to have an “unconfirmed” power outage?

Well, it is Paris we are talking about. So, maybe. But which is weirder? A city-wide power-outage right after the irreverent Olympic organizers were practically begging for a lightning bolt? Or that the unholy media can’t confirm whether it happened?

Apart from the mysterious, unconfirmable power outage, what was confirmed was a whole lot of Olympic-sized misfortune. First, torrential rain spoiled lots of outdoor Olympic events (including the godless opening ceremonies). One fan, Marc Hobes, 25, who lives in Paris and eats croissants like they’re going out of style, said, “This is not typical weather. For a tennis fan like me, this is very bad luck and also for Paris.”

It could be ‘bad luck,’ and not Divine Justice. According to the Mail, the torrential downpour caused all sorts of problems, like in the cycling events, with several competitors crashing on the capital’s slick streets.

Here’s another one, in a short video clip:

Biblical downpours and crashing cyclists were not even close to all the bad luck infecting the ceremonies. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “More Trains, but Few Answers, After Railway Sabotage in France.” Apparently, unidentified arsonists —probably Russians— attacked France’s high-speed rail network early Friday, paralyzing travel to Paris from across Europe for over 800,000 people, including many Olympic athletes who’d been heading to the controversial grand opening ceremony, but couldn’t get there in time, providentially rescued from the wicked, eyeball-searing show.

But wait! There’s more. In perhaps the most ironic headline of all, from the Wall Street Journal:

“Pollution” is a nice way of saying the Seine became a river of sh… dung. Dangerously high e-coli levels precluded anyone sane from getting anywhere near the water, although anecdotal reports suggested Kamala Harris was seen gaily splashing around. But I can’t confirm that either.

Outraged social media gangs drew a line straight from the sacrilegious opening ceremonies to all the bad luck, including baffling railway sabotage, ‘unconfirmed’ city-wide blackouts, execrable river conditions, and Noahic weather. I think there is a whole chapter in the Book of Revelation about that.

Anyway. I’m not saying anything. I report, you decide.

🔬🔬 Garbage in, garbage out! Last week, the Journal Nature published a new A.I. study titled, “A.I. models collapse when trained on recursively generated data.” The researchers found a hard limit on artificial intelligence, at least the current systems, which is that when you take humans out of the loop, it goes sideways. Behold, AI’s pitiful attempt to draw a dog, after being fed AI-created pictures of dogs:

The AI researchers found that current AIs trained on AI-generated data got worse, fast. If you put too much ‘synthetic’ information into the database, the model collapses and spits out nonsense.

Here’s the full illustration from the article, otherwise described as how to turn dogs into chocolate-chip cookies in three easy steps:

If this study is correct, for the time being we remain safe from being completely replaced by AI overlords. It still needs us. But don’t worry, they’re working on the problem right now.

🔥🔥 ABC-7 Los Angeles ran a story yesterday headlined, “Acting Secret Service director to testify before Senate about Trump assassination attempt security.” After disgraced diversity Director Kimberly Cheatle’s sudden and unexpected resignation last week, former Deputy Director Ronald Rowe, Jr. took over as Acting Director, and this morning Rowe will deliver his first performance in Congress.

Rowe started in the West Palm Beach police department and has been with the Secret Service for 24 years. Former Vice President Biden is interviewing candidates for a permanent replacement Secret Service Director, who must meet minimum diversity requirements and identify as a gay orangutan.

ABC reported that Rowe will appear in Congress at 10am this morning and deliver a few more sparse and unsatisfying details about Trump’s Assassination Attempt. You may have noticed I cited a local media source; corporate media was silent about A.D. Rowe’s scheduled testimony.

I don’t know how ABC knew what Rowe is going to say, probably strategic leaks, but the article reported he will provide some new text messages between Secret Service and Butler County Emergency Services intended to show coordination ahead of the event. But ABC also confirmed the Secret Service did not communicate with Beaver County SWAT (not Butler, as previously reported). The eager Beaver team was onsite to assist Butler County police.

ABC pre-explained that Butler County, not the Secret Service, was supposed to coordinate with the Beaver SWAT team. In other words, the already murky and stinky story is getting even murkier and stinkier, kind of like the Seine River.

I’m guessing that Acting Director Rowe will handle the hard questions from Congressmen better than former Director “I’m not going anywhere” Cheatle did. We’ll see.

💉💉 More good jab news. The slow-motion collapse of the jab mandate industry continues. NBC Philadelphia ran a local-interest story yesterday headlined, “Former ADA wins appeal after being fired for refusing COVID vaccination due to religious beliefs.” The Third Circuit overruled the lower federal district court, which now allows former Assistant District Attorney Rachel Spivack’s case to head to trial.

Rachel, who is Jewish, was fired by the federal government —which never fires anybody including failed Secret Service Directors. But they sure fired Rachel, for refusing to take the jab on religious grounds. The District Attorney’s office made Rachel wait seven months before denying her request for a religious exemption, and then they fired her.

Even better, Rachel’s attorneys now get the right to take discovery, and so forth. I sense a settlement coming.

☕️ Coffee & Covid 2024 🦠

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