Better in their words…

“Oh, but it would have been so much worse if Trump were President.”  No bus drivers? Nothing to see here…  mrossol

Source: AWOL ☙ Sunday, January 7, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 Is it just me, or is everyone’s first thought reading this headline that it had to either be a jab injury or he somehow hurt himself trying some kinky maneuver totally inappropriate for a man his age? “Pentagon didn’t inform Biden, White House for days about Austin’s hospitalization.”  The sub-headline threw in, “The news came as a shock to top staff, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan.”

During a time of intense, widespread, and unstable world conflict, it is pretty important to know whenever the United States’ Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, 70, is hospitalized. Don’t you think? I’m pretty sure the law requires informing a whole lot of folks. If the top military commander is out of action, it immediately raises rivers of questions. Who is temporarily handling Austin’s duties? How is the Pentagon ensuring continuity of the many disasters the U.S. is currently involved in, from Ukraine to Iran to Taiwan to North Korea?

What is wrong with him and how bad was it?

Apparently this is one of those need-to-know types of things. Even Joe Biden didn’t need to know, so you don’t have a chance. According to reports, after four days in the ICU, Austin woke up yesterday morning and is now 100% back on the job. Um, sort of. The Secretary is also still in the hospital. Literally, that is all they will say. Oh — and Austin is talking again, and he says he regrets any “confusion” that his own decision and nobody else’s may have inadvertently caused, totally on accident, no harm done.

Nobody even noticed he was gone.

I’m pretty sure you must think I am exaggerating or making this up somehow. But here’s how the astounding, literally unbelievable Politico article began:

The Pentagon did not tell President Joe Biden and other top officials about Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization for three days, three U.S. officials said.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan and other senior White House aides didn’t know of Austin’s Jan. 1 hospitalization until the Defense Department sent over word Jan. 4, two other U.S. officials said. Sullivan informed Biden shortly after DOD’s Thursday notification.

This story is beyond bizarre. Why were the “U.S. officials” who leaked the story anonymous? Why did the Pentagon conceal Austin’s hospitalization from the other executive agencies and from the White House? Didn’t anyoneat the White House notice that Lloyd wasn’t popping up on Zoom meetings and wasn’t answering his WeChat messages and wasn’t taking up a fairly-robust amount of space over at the Pentagon offices?

The United States’ Middle East military bases are being bombed every day. And this week, while Secretary Austin was away on his secret vacation, we bombed Baghdad for the first time. Just how often do Biden and the Secretary of Defense touch base? No daily briefings? Do they talk at all? And when the Pentagon did fess up, why did it indirectly inform Jake Sullivan and not Biden directly? Like, why can’t Secretary Austin get Joe Biden on the phone? Why talk through subordinates? Who is running the country?

A better question might be, does Joe Biden even know that Lloyd Austin is the Secretary of Defense?

NBC’s version of the story added that Austin was suddenly and unexpectedly rushed into Walter Reed’s intensive care unit for four days due to “complications following a recent elective medical procedure.” Pentagon officials won’t even describe Austin’s current condition, much less what needed an elective procedure. They won’t say what exactly stopped him from carrying out his duties this week. Was he unconscious? Citing Austin’s “personal privacy,” the Pentagon refused to release any details about the elective procedure — not even when it originally happened — and the military wouldn’t say whether or not Austin was taken to the hospital in an ambulance or got there under his own steam.

Expect Congressional hearings over this. From Fox, last night:

Personally, what I’d like to know most is whether Austin suffered from a heart attack, a stroke, or a blood clot? And, was the ‘elective procedure’ really something that happened months and months ago and is just being used as a smokescreen for a current vaccine injury?

The Pentagon has played similar tunes before. On October 29th, Marine Corps Commandant General Eric Smith had a heart attack while jogging and was hospitalized for two and a half weeks for what they only admitted was a “medical incident.” It took over a month for the Corps to admit General Smith had a heart attack.

He has still not returned to duty.

The most recent General Smith update was a December 26th article in Defense News misleadingly headlined, “New in 2024: Eric Smith plans a return to the job of top Marine leader.” That sounds very encouraging, but the article’s second-to-last sentence admitted, “As of this article’s publication date, it’s unclear when, exactly, Smith will return to his office.” Two sentences before that it used the phrase, “if or when Smith returns.”

I predict General Smith will assume command of the Marine Corps on the same day that Damar Hamlin makes his next touchdown.

Oh wait! I just thought of something! Do you think Secretary Austin’s elective procedure might have been gender reassignment surgery? I hear those can have lots of complications.

🔥 SPY VERSUS SPY. The AP ran a quiet story in early December headlined, “Former US ambassador arrested in Florida, accused of serving as an agent of Cuba, AP source says.”

You’d think it would be bigger news. “This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland explained. “To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.”

Imagine that. Who else could you think of fitting the description of “falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power,” and does their name rhyme with Biden? Anyway, there was a reason Garland used that mouthful and didn’t just say “spying.”

Manuel Rocha, 73, spent 20 years working as a State Department diplomat for Bolivia, Argentina, and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. He’s been working on sensitive jobs ever since. As recently as August, Rocha worked “as a consultant” for Florida mega law firm Foley & Lardner.  The whole time — 41 years — he was, apparently, working for the Cuban secret police.

He was arrested by the FBI at his Miami home in early December.

Curiously, rather than being charged with espionage, Rocha was charged with serving as an unregistered foreign agent due to his work for Cuba’s intelligence agency since at least 1981. Unsealed DOJ court records alleged that Manuel Rocha engaged for decades in “clandestine activity” for Cuba, including meetings with Cuban intelligence operatives.

In other words, spying. But that’s not how he was charged. The charges, “unregistered foreign agent” violations — so-called FARA crimes — are coincidentally the same crimes that conservatives claim Hunter Biden committed.

One wonders whether the FBI went after the elderly spy Rocha — long after his spying damage was done, the Cold War was closed, and Fidel Castro gone cold in the grave — so as to create a defensible precedent about the high level of activity it takes for a FARA violation. If — in the FBI’s view — a FARA prosecution requires decades of literal spying like Manuel Rocha, then nobody should complain about the feds failing to pursue Hunter’s financial work for Ukraine.

In other words, it’s not like Hunter was literally spying or anything.

We already have perfectly good espionage laws, which have effectively convicted spies for treason. Just ask Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I wonder whether the FBI is trying to confuse the FARA standards to justify Hunter’s non-prosecution.  Or maybe it’s just that the DOJ’s lawyers decided it would be easier to convict Rocha under FARA than proving he was spying. But if so, why not charge him with both crimes.

What do you think Merrick Garland is up to?

💉 The pro-vaccine Reddit forum r/Covid19Positive, which users whine about their never-ending covid infections and adventures in medical fetishism, continues to inform the rest of us about the day-to-day struggles some of those folks are having with their newly-suppressed immune systems.

In the first example, this poster with “no known issues with” his health got five shots. He has also stopped counting his many covid infections. But he estimates he’s tested positive at least seventeen times with no sign of slowing down:

Exhibit number two is another “extremely fit” poster, who two days ago reported his sixth covid infection. He was so tired he passed out while making something to eat. He feels like his infections are getting worse and worse each time:

In light of the incredible database of evidence that r/Covid19Positive has become, I’ll just leave this article right here, for your education and entertainment:

💉 I could allow that, with as many trips as school buses make you could expect a few accidents during an average year. But I really wonder how many there could possibly be that are caused by sudden and unexpected medical emergencies. When it comes to school buses, “safety” is their middle name. So it seems evident that during any particular 12-month period there shouldn’t be more than one or two crashes caused by school bus drivers suddenly losing control of their physical or mental faculties.

But the last twelve months was a horrible, no-good, very bad year for school bus drivers. Here is a roundup of just some of the cases I could find without much effort. In no way should this list be considered complete or comprehensive. But, before we discuss what else is going on with the school bus community, and before we get down to potential causes, here is a taste of headlines suggesting how the last year went:

• January 5th, “North Carolina school bus crashes into home, bus driver suffered medical episode, officials say.”
• January 5th, “Rollover crash in Raleigh County injures school bus driver, dispatchers say.”
• January 3rd, “Driver, students injured in crash involving school bus in Williamsburg County.”
• December 31 –  “Students stop runaway school bus after driver loses consciousness”
• November 14th. “Harvest Elementary Medical Emergency Leaves Damage.”
• November 7th. “Investigation underway after bus driver’s medical episode put 2 students 40 minutes away from school.”

• November 5th. “RIPTA bus crashes in Jamestown after driver suffers medical emergency.”
• November 2nd. “Gillette School Bus Driver Loses Consciousness, Plows Into Fence With 17 Kids Onboard.”
• October 31st. “Hawthorne woman seriously injured in Marion County school bus crash.”
• September 30th. “School bus driver suffered ‘medical issue’ before M53 crash that killed teen.”
• September 25th, “Students, driver safe after Sparkman Middle bus driver suffers ‘medical emergency’.”
• September 6th. “As Many As 49 Children Injured In PA School Bus Crash.” (Note: Tow driver had medical emergency and hit bus.)
• May 13th. “New Jersey school bus missing for over an hour after driver suffers medical emergency.”
• April 28th, “‘Little Hero’: Boy Stops Michigan School Bus After Driver Suffers Medical Emergency.”
• April 25th. “School bus crashes into trees in South Bay.”
• March 30th. “Driver’s medical emergency causes Enoch school bus to crash, officials say; kindergartners unharmed.”
• March 24th. “8 students, driver released from hospital after ‘medical emergency’ on Rowan County bus.”
• February 15th. “Coaches steer bus toward safety after driver suffers medical emergency in Kingsburg.”

During my research on sudden and unexpected school bus crashes, I noticed another trend: The population of available drivers is also crashing. Where have all the bus drivers gone? Could crashing driver populations be related to sudden and unexpected school bus crashing?

According to a December 14th article on the National Education Association website, there’s a national bus driver shortage:

According to the NEA article, in 2019 there were just under 200,000 bus drivers in the U.S.  (which helps shed some light on the scale of sudden and unexpected accidents). The NEA reported the 2019 figures have fallen by over -15% over the last three years. Before speculating about other causes like atrocious student behavior, Taylor Swift music, or some other cause that would naturally vary from place to place, note carefully that the NEA said the bus driver shortage is severe all across the country.

They weren’t wrong, either. I found tons of local headlines, like this next one from the Loveland Reporter-Herald, dated yesterday, reporting that, even though the district hiked driver wages five times in the last three years, the shortfall in drivers is just getting worse:

Or how about this one from three days ago, published in Kentucky’s News-44, explaining the school district is now “offering some of the highest bus driver wages in the area for new drivers”:

How bad could things get? This startling, three-day-old headline suggests where we could be headed next:

School bus drivers are a pretty discrete, well-defined group. To drive, they must pass physicals and take fairly extensive safety training, as you could easily imagine. It’s not easy to quickly replace them, at least not in any large numbers. So again, what is happening to all the bus drivers? The articles hand-wave about covid, aging driver populations, and low wages, but never cite any evidence. Seasonal bugs, old drivers, and low wages have been part of the job since the very first school bus rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Does the bus driver shortage sound familiar? It should. We’ve already seen a worldwide shortage of nurses — which by the way, is a problem that isn’t getting any better. For example, here’s a two-week-old headline from an industry mag:

Nurses and bus drivers are two heavily-vaccinated professions. But it’s not just nurses. Can you think of another recent professional shortage in a heavily-vaccinated population? How about pilots?

If I am right that each of these small professional groups experiencing sudden and unexpected shortages have something in common, namely mRNA vaccines, then the question becomes: is this problem shrinking, stable, or is it expanding to include bigger groups?

Who’s next?

✈️  Fox News ran a horrifying article yesterday with the startling headline, “FAA to temporarily ground certain Boeing planes after Alaska Airlines door blew off in midair.”

The plane was a few minutes into its flight out of Portland (of course), quietly ascending at 16,000 feet when, well, it suddenly happened. Here’s the politically-correct, euphemistic version: “a mid-cabin door plug departed the airplane, resulting in rapid decompression.”

By “mid-cabin door plug,” they mean the exit-row door. It was one of those emergency exits next to the seats where they’re always politely asking if you are willing to sit there. Now you know why.

By “departed the airplane,” they mean the door suddenly and unexpectedly ripped off the side of the plane in a massive rush of wind leaving a gaping door hole at sixteen thousand feet. The passengers were freaking out. The good news was that everyone was still seated and belted since the plane hadn’t yet reached cruising altitude, and nobody was sitting in the exit row.

Finally, by “resulting in rapid decompression,” they meant that all the air rushed out the now-open doorway and people had to breathe through their oxygen masks for a while.

The plane was basically brand-new; Alaska Airlines took delivery from Boeing in October. Now it can’t fly at all — it has no door. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy asked the public for help finding the missing door; it has to be around there somewhere.

Hey, at least this time they only lost part of an airplane, not like last time when they lost an entire F35 fighter jet.  But good luck getting Portland’s amateur pot farmers to sober up long enough to find the stupid thing.

My question is, was the door all the way shut? I’ll just leave it there; take it away in the comments.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you for your continued loyal support. I’ll catch you guys back here on Monday for a terrific new roundup.

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