☕️ WEIRDNESS ☙ Monday, August 26, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

French arrest free speech platformer; dems' mixed results at blocking 3rd-partiers; Georgia election news on our mind; weird oceans baffle experts; Biden makes nukes gayer; hilarious RFK clip; more.

And just like that, we’re closing in on the end of August and of summer, with hints of chill occasionally riding the morning’s warmer breezes. Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday!  Your roundup today includes: Telegram founder Pavel Durov detained by diligent French speech police for being insufficiently cooperative; Democrats experience wins and losses in pro-democracy campaign to block third-party candidates; great election integrity news from Georgia confounds democrats; weird weather news and inexplicable ocean records baffle climate experts, again; Biden moves to make nuclear weapons gayer; and RFK hilariously rebuts weird allegations of dog-eating.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Politico ran a story yesterday headlined, “France extends detention of Telegram chief Pavel Durov.” Over the weekend, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was nabbed by French police when his private jet landed there to grab a quick espresso. Yet to be charged, media articles all suggest Pavel’s detention is related to Telegram’s failure to cooperate in stopping ‘criminal activity’ on the social media platform.

SHOW: Tucker Carlson interviews criminal mastermind Pavel Durov (58:28).

CLIP: Pavel Durov tells Tucker about deep state efforts to bribe Telegram engineers (2:52).

Telegram advertises itself as a protected free speech platform with over 900 million users. It was created and is owned by Pavel Durov. Pavel was born in Russia, but fled to Dubai in 2014 after Russian efforts to control his first social media platform, described as a Russian ‘Facebook.’ I’d name it but I can’t do the dialect. Rhazhivashi-something.

Anyway, most people view Pavel’s detention (not arrest) as a kind of hostage scenario. If Telegram plays ball, Pavel’s problems will magically disappear! All the platform need do is build a few government backdoors into the Telegram system, for safety, not for monitoring and censoring citizens, no, never.

It’s unusual for a corporation’s CEO to be arrested for crimes committed by others. Media calls it “unprecedented.” We can compare Pavel’s predicament with Mark Zuckerberg’s. Zuckerberg learned how to play ball in 2020, generously donated to Democrats, and, despite originally warning employees not to take the jabs, hired a battalion of security-state drones and built the government its own misinformation portal page during the pandemic.

Zuckerberg has never been detained, not even for the child pornography rings running rampant on Facebook. Nor detained for anything else, since he’s a good little deep-state doggie.

Other corporate bigwigs evade prosecution even for crimes they commit themselves. Take the pharmaceutical industry, for example, whose executives escape detention even after pleading guilty to literally killing people through fraud, like opioid maker Purdue Pharma, which just paid a fine (using money collected from customers) to the government.

Maybe Telegram should hire pharma lawyers. In any event, the French can only legally hold Pavel for 96 hours without charging him. So we’ll see the government’s next move soon.

In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which was pretty much a ponderous, inky mess for a while. Still, governments spent centuries trying to rein it back in. For example, in 1662, Great Britain passed “An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses.”

The 1662 Act, which required citizens to purchase licenses to legally own and operate printing presses, was repeatedly extended and wasn’t repealed until 1863, even though it was initially supposed to be in effect for only two years.

The British government justified the 1662 Act by citing the circulation of disinformation that caused public panic and unrest (although they hadn’t yet invented that Orwellian term ‘disinformation’). You could quibble with comparing Telegram to the printing press, but you get the idea.

Was Pavel’s detention a genuine effort to protect the public, or a repeat of historical patterns where governments wield the power of arrest to shut down the free flow of information?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

🔥🔥 Wins and losses. On Saturday, the Washington Examiner ran a story headlined, “Court rules Cornel West can’t be on ballot in Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Democrats successfully stopped another third-party candidate from running in the tossup state (it’s currently split Trump—Harris, 47.7%—47.5%).

CLIP: Cornel West calls for investigation of big pharma’s capture of government (0:42).

The democrat majority Pennsylvania court of appeals found that, even though major party candidates need not submit affidavits with their application to appear on the ballot, third-party candidates must, so West’s application was deficient.

West’s lawyers haven’t yet said whether West will appeal to the state’s Supreme Court.

Don’t complain! Democrats are suing everywhere to stop voters from choosing third-party candidates because Democrats are trying to save democracy. This is totally different from what South American communists do because reasons.

But there was also good news for folks who believe in voting for candidates instead of selecting them. Also on Friday, a Michigan court ruled against Democrats, holding that Dr. West can appear on the ballot in that state. Michigan is another key tossup state. So.

🔥🔥 Last week, the New York Times ran a very encouraging story headlined, “How a Far-Right Takeover of Georgia’s Election Board Could Swing the Election.” By ‘far-right,’ of course, the Times means ‘garden-variety conservatives.’ Still, it was great news, as the sub-headline revealed: “The unelected body that shapes voting rules has a new conservative majority who question the state’s 2020 results. They now have new power to influence the results in 2024.”

Georgia is one of the critical tossup states. Last month, Republicans achieved a majority and immediately moved to implement a series of new election-integrity rules and investigations.

For example, earlier this month in a 3-2 vote, the Republican-controlled Election Board voted to define the certification of election results as “attest[ing], after reasonable inquiry, that the tabulation and canvassing of the election are complete and accurate and that the election results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election.”

By adding the words “after reasonable inquiry,” the Board gave local election boards the legal right to challenge results if questions arise, protecting them from post-election prosecution and lawfare. The new rule allows county election boards to request more information and to delay or even refuse to certify the results where appropriate.

This commonsense rule has so alarmed Democrats they are now trying to remove the conservative board members, alleging violations of Georgia’s Code of Ethics and the state’s Open Meetings Act. As the Times’ headline suggested, the Board’s new rules “Could Swing the Election.” We’ll see.

🔥🔥 In more weird weather news, last week the New Scientist ran an article headlined, “Part of the Atlantic is cooling at record speed and nobody knows why.” Climate scientists are baffled. Again. The story’s sub-headline added, “After over a year of record-high global sea temperatures, the equatorial Atlantic is cooling off more quickly than ever recorded, which could impact weather around the world.”

The short version was, after reaching record-hot readings earlier this year, temperatures in the equatorial Atlantic have plunged faster than ever recorded, breaking even more weather records.

Experts are mystified and so far don’t even have theories.

They have also been perplexed by the relatively quiet hurricane season, after predicting this climate-change-fueled summer would see the worst hurricane season ever. They still hope next month will make up the difference. Good thing we have experts! What would we do without them?

🚀🚀 Newsweek ran a story last week with the unlikely headline, “Biden nuclear security official called for 'queering nuclear weapons’.” Yep, it’s come to that.

In February, Biden’s Department of Energy hired Sneha Nair (if that’s her real name) as the new special assistant to the National Nuclear Security Administration. Her resume included an article she wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in June, 2023, titled “Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament.”

Among other arguments, Nair suggested that without the keen insights and perspectives from gay nuclear weapons administrators of color, the government might accidentally overlook nuclear threats posed by normal white people, which she described as domestic terrorists.

You can easily see how that kind of mistake could happen, if there aren’t enough gay people supervising the nukes.

“Equity and inclusion for queer people,” Nair insisted in her article, “is not just a box-ticking exercise in ethics and social justice; it is also essential for creating effective nuclear policy.” Don’t read it, the article was mostly ‘queer theory’ gobbledygook like that, which could just have easily been written by an AI chatbot.

Isn’t all this progress wonderful? We’re evolving far beyond the old-fashioned nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction to a new, more inclusive nuclear strategy based on equity and queer theory. And Joe Biden is making sure gay perspectives are fully shaping our country’s nuclear weapons policy. One month after Nair was hired, Biden signed a brand-new, highly classified U.S. nuclear policy, which you aren’t allowed to read.

🔥🔥 You are going to love this clip. Kennedy made a video response to weird and not-joyful corporate media allegations he once ate a dog. This is how it’s done:

CLIP: Kennedy responds to dog-eating claims (1:04).

The most hilarious line comes right at the end. Watch the whole (short) clip. Watch it twice.

Have a magnificent Monday! C&C will be back right on schedule tomorrow morning with more terrific roundups of essential news and commentary. Let’s win this thing.

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