Better in their words…

Mecklenberg Maniac slapped with federal charges; Democrats dither and deflect; Sec. Kennedy guts drug ads with new regs; and Congress hears UFO bombshells that rattle reality itself.

Source: REALITY ITSELF ☙ Wednesday, September 10, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced it was wrestling Decarlos Brown out of the Mecklenberg County Judicial System’s warm embrace in an official DOJ statement titled, “Justice Department Charges Light Rail Attacker with Federal Crime.”

The single federal charge of causing a death on mass transportation is itself death penalty eligible, which means Declarlos Brown, Jr., could soon ride a completely different kind of rail. US Attorney General Pam Bondi promised that prosecutors will seek the maximum criminal sentence, stressing that Brown “will never again see the light of day as a free man.”

In case you missed it, a gruesome security video emerged this week showing the final destination of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, 23. Iryna held a recent degree in art and restoration from the University of Kiev, and hoped to become a veterinary assistant. She’d been living in a bomb shelter before fleeing to North Carolina, where she gained employment at a local pizza parlor. While riding home from work last week on Charlotte’s public light rail system (a kind of overground subway), she was heinously attacked from behind in a most cowardly fashion by Declarlos Brown, a fourteen-time “justice-involved individual,” who suddenly and unexpectedly loomed up and slashed her throat using a pocketknife.

Brown, dripping Iryna’s blood, can be seen exiting the train and heard repeatedly crowing, “I got that white b-tch!” Democrats instantly denied any racial aspect to the crime. They’ve been musing that we may never know the cause, and suggesting more money for Democrat-run mental health services. Of course, they would say that, since Democrats were the actual proximate cause of Iryna’s death, as I explained yesterday.

A groundswell of outrage filled social media, shaming corporate media into belatedly covering the story —18 days after the fact— but reporters finally did it, like the surly children they are. “Woman’s Stabbing Death Becomes MAGA Talking Point,” one Wall Street Journal headline resentfully reported (though the headline was later revised, after widespread mockery).

Now, Decarlos is getting all the attention he richly deserves. Yesterday, the President issued a video statement. The White House held a press conference. The DOJ charged Brown, ensuring he won’t be released againafter signing a “promise to appear.” Republicans demanded the firing of Mecklenberg Magistrate Teresa Stokes, the most recent judge to inflict Brown back onto the Charlotte community, and who isn’t even a lawyer. For her part, Ms. Stokes seems to have gone into hiding.

Readers wondered how magistrates can be allowed to decide things like releasing violent criminals without bond if they haven’t even passed the bar. The short answer is that a “magistrate” position is defined by local law. Magistrates help judges by relieving some of the less demanding judicial workload. In theory, they must be supervised by local judges. In practice, their courtrooms are the wild west of the law; a bizarro-world combination of Night Court and Judge Judy.

In Mecklenburg, magistrates’ salaries are set between $56K and $100K, depending on years of service. Obviously, at a starting salary of $56K, Mecklenburg is not getting a lot of applications from practicing lawyers. Not good ones, anyway. According to its website, Mecklenberg has 38 listed magistrates, including Ms. Stokes, a mental-health services activist and NGO parasite who is utterly unqualified for the job (she got a law degree from Cooley Law School, but couldn’t pass the bar).

The story continues developing. A pent-up, completely necessary, and unavoidably ugly discussion of systemic reverse racism is volcanically erupting on social media. To paraphrase myself, we can kill Decarlos (and probably should), but that won’t kill the problem. We must hang the Democrats’ marxist, anti-civilizational playbook, which created Decarlos Brown in the first place.

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Yesterday, Politico ran a terrific story headlined, “Trump announces crackdown on pharmaceutical advertising.” It’s the first shot HHS is firing against Big Pharma.

The phrase “death by a thousand cuts” comes from the Chinese term lingchi, which is literally translated both as “slow slicing” and “lingering death.” Lingchi was a gruesome form of torture and execution practiced in China all the way from the 10th century until it was banned in 1905. During the ‘procedure,’ executioners would slowly and methodically cut off parts of the condemned person’s body over a long period until they finally expired.

💊 Back in the old days of digital entertainment —about three years ago— the Childers family signed up for several streaming services, for convenience and selection, yes, but mostly to avoid TV commercials. Lately, we’ve noticed a disturbing trend of commercials creeping back even in the streaming shows, which sort of defeats the whole point. And last week, while I was watching the latest episode of Alien Earth on Hulu, I pressed “mute” when the ads started— and the video paused.

In short: Hulu won’t even let us mute the ads anymore! Even on a paidsubscription! It’s basically criminal. Or it should be, if it isn’t. One wonders whether we should make lingchi legal again. But I digress.

The point is, at least half the ads were for drugs. Honestly, over a handful of episodes, I’ve learned more about various awkward body parts and rare conditions that I ever cared to know. Plus oddly named compounds to ask your doctor about for treating “overactive” bladder (um), erectile bending, and even sadness, as well as incomprehensible ailments like chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. According to the ads, if you take the drugs, you’ll hallucinate happy, glowing butterflies that flitter around and help you forget all about your corkscrewed weiner condition.

Most of the ads included upbeat descriptions of scary side effects like “serious infections,” “uncontrolled blinking,” “hotdog fingers,” “incontinence,” “risk of suicide,” and “sometimes fatal reactions,” while the screen shows blissfully unworried healthy people dancing, playing sports, or strolling on beaches at sunset. Very diverse people, too.

The ads are so over-the-top ridiculous that they are practically hallucinogenic. You have to take drugs to understand the ads.

🔥 These big-budget ads are designed specifically for us. Only two countries in the entire world —New Zealand and the U.S.— allow direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs. “Research,” Politico said, “shows that direct-to-consumer advertising increases the number of drugs prescribed by doctors.” You don’t say. What would we do without research?

Yesterday, President Trump signed an order directing HHS and the FDA to close what Politico called the “adequate provision loophole” in drug advertising. The current policy lets drugmakers omit many drug risks in ads, as long as the ads direct consumers to more information, such as by providing a website address.

Not anymore. “We plan to take regulatory action to change that loophole and to close it,” a senior administration official said.

Even better, and more fascinating, HHS had it all ready to go on the same day as the announcement. “Today, we will be sending out approximately 100 cease and desist enforcement letters and thousands of warning letters, warning companies that we plan to enforce these regulations that are currently on the books,” the official explained.

But here was the weirdest thing: Politico’s story never quoted a single negative source: not any trade groups like PhRMA, patient advocacy organizations, free speech activists, medical experts, or legal analysts who challenged the policy’s practicality or even its legality under the First Amendment.

That omission spoke volumes. The tide is turning, at least a little.

This apparently minor move to enforce existing ad regulations —coupled with thousands of official warning letters— isn’t as innocuous as it may seem at first. It lasers right into the heart of a vast web of interconnected financial interests— involving so many billions of advertising dollars that streaming services have dared to reintroduce ads into popular shows.

The requirement to include all known side effects in ads may make most pharma ads impractical or useless, thereby effectively banning them.

So we can begin to see the outlines of Secretary Kennedy’s strategy. He’s not recklessly engaging in a single, dramatic legislative showdown with Big Pharma. Instead, he’s unveiling a lingchi strategy— death by a thousand pharmaceutical cuts. This move suggests he’s cutting off the easy, low-hanging fruit first.

The Overton Window has shifted so far that nobody is even trying to defend pharma’s ads anymore. We’re all sick to death of them— and everybody knows it. (They need a drug to treat that.)

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Yesterday, in one of the day’s least reported stories, NBC ran its dramatic, little-green-men article blandly headlined, “Video shown at House UAP hearing appears to show missile fired at object near Yemen.” In the dramatic video clip presented to the House Oversight Committee, some MQ-9 Reaper drone operators exclaim about an unidentified orb, launch a Hellfire missile right at it, and then, astonished, watch it sail off with smaller orbs trailing behind, with the missile flying into parts. So … it was probably not a weather balloon.

CLIP: Hellfire missile fails to destroy UAP orb (0:50).]

The video, grainy and gray-tinted with the telltale jitter of military instrumentation, opens on a swirling desert sky over Yemen’s troubled coastline. In the center of the frame is a glowing orb, suspended and unmoved by the chaos swirling around it. It’s a textbook “unidentified anomalous phenomenon.”

Moments later, the drama escalates. A Hellfire missile, streaking with inhuman speed and cold mechanical purpose, hurtles directly toward the orb. For a split-second, the viewer expects the target to shatter, scattering debris across the sands below. Instead, something inexplicable happens— the missile strikes, but instead of an explosion, the orb appears to absorb or deflect the blast. It doesn’t flinch, doesn’t wobble. In the aftermath, smoke, fragments, or electronic debris seem momentarily tangled with the object; then, impossibly, the orb glides away, almost serenely, as if nothing of consequence had occurred.

The voices from the congressional hearing room sound almost distant: “It kept going, and it looked like the debris was taken with it,” one representative remarks, echoing the bewilderment of anyone watching. There’s an irresistible sense that whatever this object is, it follows physics of its own. In a military landscape defined by precision and predictability, this shimmering enigma is a rebuke to certainty— a silent question mark hanging over the battlefield.

Echoing what all observers must surely have been thinking, Florida’s photogenic Representative Anna Paulina Luna said, “in the name of science and in the name of national security, we should be getting answers to these questions— and we should be taking this seriously.”

👽 None of the top corporate media platforms carried the story, which was especially weird since, before this year, you’d think this kind of thing would have been bigger news. It threads together multiple media-favorite storylines: Aliens, UFOs, active combat, unexplained phenomena, national security, overclassification, transparency, cover-ups, whiffs of conspiracy, and … I mean … aliens.

The whistleblower-supplied video was played for the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets hearing. “It kept going, and it looked like the debris was taken with it,” Representative Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said about the object. “I’m not going to speculate what it is, but the question is: why are we being blocked from this information?”

The reality —military footage, a missile bouncing off an unexplained object, a U.S. congressional panel discussing it in public— sounds like the stuff of sci-fi blockbusters or classic tabloid covers. Yet NBC’s mind-numbing headline could have been about any ordinary military incident if you didn’t know the backstory.

It’s surreal. The whole thing. It’s surreal we’re holding congressional hearings about UFOs. It’s surreal that major media platforms seem so disinterested in the story, even if just to run it for comic relief, like with amusing stories about the X-Files and people wanting to believe.

CLIP: Yesterday’s entire House UAP Hearing (2:33:11).

Where, one wonders, is this line of inquiry ultimately headed? The one tangible outcome of these hearings so far is deepening distrust in the institutions. For years, we’ve been repeatedly berated that the government had zero evidence of non-human objects flitting about the skies. Now, we’re being treated to a constant trickle of evidence, which, if it proves nothing else, proves the government has been lying or at least gaslighting us. Again.

Something isn’t adding up. Pentagon officials are obfuscating like the UAPs were shipping mRNA to Wuhan or something. One possible explanation is they’ve long had at least some UFO evidence, but lied. Or, they know about serious Russian or Chinese threats, and they covered it up. Or, they have developed highly advanced technology they’ve kept secret for security purposes, but that could have massively improved civilian technology, productivity, and quality of life.

We live in an indescribable time where, in just a few short years since the pandemic, long-held trust in the institutions has been flipped on its head.

Fox Mulder famously said, “I want to believe” … but believe in what?

The crisis isn’t just about “aliens,” but about reality itself. What is real? Pharma? UAPs? Elections? AI deepfake videos? Unbiased judges? Wildfires (or space lasers)? The concrete edifice of consensus is crumbling before our eyes. Maybe the only truly reliable reality is the Gospel.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Swing back tomorrow morning, for more essential news and commentary, Coffee & Covid style.

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