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Editor’s Note: Many thanks to reader M. for sending in this share! 🌹
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! In today’s roundup: Biden shifts Ukraine strategy and messages pivot to peace; Russian high school history textbooks tell some home truths about 2020 US election; preprint study on persistent covid predicts pandemic of heart attacks; Michigan Supremes dump Trump 14th Amendment suit and keep him on the ballot; and a heartwarming tale of a Christmas that ALMOST went completely wrong.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🚀 Yesterday, Politico ran a shifty Proxy War story headlined, “The Biden Administration Is Quietly Shifting Its Strategy in Ukraine.” Holy Shakespeare, Batman, the strategy is changing! No, it’s Evolving! I mean Pivoting! Of course, I mean Biden’s strategy is Shifting. Quietly. Whichever synonym they want to use, it appears our favorite C&C proxy war propagandists may soon need to polish up their resumes.
Unironically and without sense of history, Politico reported as though it were just a slight change inmessaging that Biden is breaking his many grand promises to Ukraine and to woke liberal democrats. Politico also helpfully suggested that another way to spin the imminent betrayal is: Biden did keep his promise because — I am not making this up — Ukraine has already beaten the Russians:
Over the past year — with U.S. military support flagging fast on Capitol Hill and Zelenskyy’s once-vaunted counteroffensive failing since it was launched in June — Biden has shifted from promising the U.S. would back Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” to saying the U.S. will provide support “as long as we can” and contending that Ukraine has won “an enormous victory already. Putin has failed.”
It’s over! Ukraine won! Ah, the sweet, sweet smell of victory. And you didn’t even notice how fast Ukraine won, did you? Pay attention, silly.
Oops, wait a sec. Biden said “an” enormous victory. “A victory.” Not “the victory.” Tricky! It appears things aren’t quite that, well, victorious in general over in Eastern Europe this month. For example, the Washington Post ran a story just last week reporting, “Ukrainian cities are still under constant bombardment by Russian missiles and explosive drones, and Moscow’s troops are pushing to advance at several points along the front line in the east and south.”
Anyway. Yesterday’s news was that shifty Biden “shifted” his slogan from “as long as it takes” to “as long as we can.” It was just the teensiest semantic shift, but it was still kind of a shocking shift in meaning. And it wasn’t just me who noticed Biden’s sloganeering shiftiness:
Some analysts believe that is code for: Get ready to declare a partial victory and find a way to at least a truce or ceasefire with Moscow, one that would leave Ukraine partially divided.
For fun, take a quick moment and imagine, if President Trump had said it, how differently Politico would have reported a quote that “Putin has already failed.” On second thought, don’t aggravate yourself. Anyway, deploying a hopelessly mangled anonymous quote to avoid sounding negative, Politico stated the obvious: As usual, Biden is lying about what’s really going on, as though “politics” were a complete justification for the moral failure of lying your butt off.
Oh, and by the way. The most important thing is for it not to look like Putin won:
“Those discussions [about peace talks] are starting, but [the administration] can’t back down publicly because of the political risk” to Biden, said a congressional official who is familiar with the administration’s thinking and who was granted anonymity to speak freely. The Biden administration can’t appear to be handing the advantage to Putin after insisting since the war began in February 2022 that it stands fully behind Zelenskyy’s pledge of victory over Moscow.
On a quick aside, what on Earth does “granted anonymity” mean? How does keeping the speaker’s name out of the story help protect the integrity of peace negotiations? Here’s an idea: a quick way to improve the psyop media problemwould be to reject the use of shady “anonymous” sources. But I digress.
Biden’s problems are mounting up. The Administration faces a brand-new, unpopular-with-the-base, kinetic war in the Middle East. Kiev’s a political ghost town these days, but Tel Aviv has basically become a revolving door for Biden Administration spooks and regulars. Plus another war stirs in the Taiwan straits, and hot disputes require attention in Africa and South America. Lloyd Austin can’t be everywhere at once.
Sadly, Biden can’t just pull an Irish Goodbye in Ukraine like he did in Afghanistan. Too many promises.
Another big Biden problem is that Ukraine is getting its clock cleaned right now. Which means it has little or nothing to trade with in any peace talks. In other words, the Administration needs some new leverage with which to negotiate with Moscow. That need for leverage explains all Biden’s recent bellicose grandstanding and the drumbeat of threats to broaden NATO involvement.
It’s all been for show, to give negotiators something to trade with.
But Biden’s biggest problem is time’s running out. There’s just not that much time left on the clock and Putin knows it. The war continues. Ukraine could suffer a serious setback any second, making already-difficult negotiations even harder. Russia already surprised sleepy American generals by seemingly-overnight constructing a massive, impenetrable defensive perimeter all the way down Ukraine. Our best and brightest, preoccupied with high-tech AI drone swarms and state-of-the-art networked missile systems, never even thought of a 600-mile concrete ditch.
Who knows what could fall out of Putin’s well-manicured cuffs next?
The much-ballyhooed, glorious Spring Counteroffensive, which was their first scheme to create some leverage for dickering with the Russians, failed worse than an off-teleprompter Biden speech. It created zero leverage. So it’s Plan B time, boys. Behold, the State Department’s two best ideas to threaten Russia with so they’ll offer reasonable terms: a long, expensive “stalemate” on one hand and the threat of Ukraine’s possible NATO/EU membership on the other:
Biden faces political peril if the war goes badly for the Ukrainians.
A shift to defense could buy Ukraine the time it needs to eventually force Putin into an acceptable compromise (by) allowing the Ukrainians to conserve resources while making future Russian progress look unlikely. The European Union is also raising the threat of expediting Ukraine’s membership in NATO to “put the Ukrainians in the best situation possible to negotiate” with Moscow.
Note the explicit recognition that Biden’s political fortunes are tied together with a good result for Ukraine.
However it ends, it should be over soon. It looks like Team Biden is extremely eager to get started with the much-more politically-fruitful job of putting back together whatever is left of Ukraine, before the elections start in earnest, so that Biden can show voters it wasn’t all for nothing.
In fact, I’m predicting a media stew of astounding “rebuilding Ukraine” articles praising Biden, featuring interviews with grateful Ukrainians, and mounting headlines like: Pfizer’s New State-of-the-Art Ukraine Pharma Labs Help World Prepare for Next Pandemic, Gates and Blackrock Build Beetle Flour Manufacturing Plants in Donbass, Clinton Foundation Constructs Kiev Schools with Cool Underground Tunnels, and Marina Abromovic Chaperones Bahkmut Children on Educational Field Trip to Hades.
Get ready for the new Narrative: Joe Biden’s Proxy War was the best thing that ever happened to Ukraine.
🔥 Troll level: Grand Master. Well played, Russia. Well played. Newsweek ran the informative story yesterday featuring this startling headline:
Bwahahahaha! According to Newsweek, Russia’s state-approved 11th Grade World History textbook informs students that the democrats stole the 2020 elections in the U.S. “as a result of obvious electoral fraud by the Democratic Party,” adding for context that Joe Biden had extensive corrupt connections to Ukraine. And they included a masked picture of Joe, an obvious metaphor which is triggering leftists even more:
Of course this kind of thing makes democrats believe the whole “Russia collusion” story even more, but you have to admit the pot-stirring is a tasty little scrap of satisfaction.
🔬 Yesterday I came across a new iScience preprint study signaling a potential new Pandemic Narrative, titled “Predicted risk of heart failure pandemic due to persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection using a three-dimensional cardiac model.” It features goofy Covidian science, as I’ll explain momentarily, but note its dire prediction: an upcoming pandemic of heart failure. Yeah.
The researchers begin with the Covidian theory of persistent covid infection — a stealthiest kind of crypto-covid infection ever, which is not only asymptomatic but also tests negative, even using PCR — which has been criticized for being toosensitive. In fact, persistent covid is completely invisible to testing. So far.
So, it’s kind of a religious belief.
Notably, the researchers predicted a pandemic of heart failure which, they say, will be evidenced by finding spike protein in cardiac tissue. Even though they admitted there’s no conclusive evidence for persistent covid infection so far, they feel the alarm bells should already be going off about heart attacks:
The explosive increase in the number of virus-infected patients due to the COVID-19 pandemic may have led to an enormous increase in the number of patients at potential risk for future heart failure. In clinical practices, such high-risk patients should be identified by detecting the virus itself or the viral genome in endocardial biopsy tissue or by monitoring blood troponin levels. This report may serve as a warning for the possibility of a heart failure pandemic in the post COVID-19 era.
The study does not, and wasn’t intended to, show persistent covid infection. The researchers infected some cardiac cells with covid in a Petri dish and looked to see what happens. Since there’s no immune system in a Petri dish, it couldn’t show viral persistence in the body. But it did show what happens to cardiac cells when spike protein gets into them through viral infection or mRNA transfection. Which is: nothing good.
I thought the author’s illustration (above) sort of gave away what they’re really thinking about. The upper panel at the far left shows increasing spike protein not virus. Only one thing causes spike without virus: the jabs.
“Persistent covid” — which sounds a lot more scientific than “long covid” — would sure be a good cover for jab injuries, if they can find some evidence for it somewhere.
🔥 NBC ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Michigan Supreme Court rejects case to remove Trump from 2024 ballot.” The sub-headline explained, “The effort had sought to remove Trump from the state’s primary ballot for allegedly violating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.” In other words, Michigan’s democrat-majority Supreme Court is a lot smarter than Colorado’s.
As you may recall, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — a barely-used provision which you probably never even heard of before this year — bans anyone from office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” after having sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Passed as part of the civil rights Amendments following the Civil War, Section 3 was originally intended to keep rebellious and unrepentant Southern Democrats out of office.
In support of their decision, the majority of Michigan Supremes relied on the ‘political question doctrine,’ which holds that courts should stay out of issues of pure politics. The short, 1-paragraph decision explained, “we are not persuaded that the questions presented should be reviewed by this Court.” Michigan joined courts in Arizona and Minnesota, which have also ruled against similar efforts to get Trump kicked off the ballot. So far, only Colorado’s highest court has been willing to endure the well-deserved mockery and ridicule.
Needless to say, the prospects that Colorado’s decision will stand just got a lot worse.
🎄 NBC (and many others) ran an explosive Christmas story yesterday headlined, “North Carolina toddler opens entire family’s Christmas presents at 3 a.m.” A very industrious 3-year-old “helped” his family with the most frustrating part of Christmas gift exchange: the unwrapping part.
The first sign of trouble came in the middle of the night when the North Carolina family’s 3-year-old son — their middle child — woke his parents up at 3am loudly asking for scissors. Not a good sign by any measure. After a quick investigation of the living room, Katie Reintgen discovered the young man had busily unwrapped “literally everything, from the tiniest eraser to the biggest box.”
The gifts had taken hours to carefully wrap the night before, Katie and her husband Scott explained.
Fortunately, the Reingarten Christmas was not ruined. Katie and Scott put the little midnight Christmas bandit back to bed, staying up to re-wrap the presents, painstakingly piecing the mangled wrapping paper back together with a lotof extra tape. (Well, it was mostly Katie. But Scott helped.) Now the story is international news, and presumably is going to be a great story his parents will tell at the young man’s wedding.
After interrogation, the learned the crime was not intended only to get hold of his requested Spiderman web-shooting gloves. It was actually an act of pure self-sacrifice and love. He did it for others. The 3-year-old told his parents he unwrapped the presents because he didn’t want his family to be confused. “He wanted us to be able to see our presents so we knew what they were,” Scott Reintgen reported. “I think he legitimately just felt that he was doing a service to everyone. He will not do it again next year. We hope.”
What’s your best Christmas story?
Have a terrific Thursday! Enjoy the last few days of 2023, and be right back here tomorrow morning for a fresh refill of Coffee & Covid.
Rose Rambles... 