Good morning and Happy Saturday, C&C! It’s now October, the month of pumpkin spiced-everything and jack-o-lanterns and the speed-ramp to Christmas. Today’s roundup includes an Ian multiplier, and looks at Putin’s major speech yesterday, along with some eyebrow-raising historical context, plus a little good news to warm your heart. Literally.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 OPERATION MULTIPLIER: Today we aim the mighty power of the C&C Army at Hurricane Ian and our fellow citizens and Floridians who struggling with wrecked homes and broken businesses and crushed cities today. Many, many people have lost everything they owned.

There were lots of great options and suggestions, it was very difficult to decide, but ultimately I settled on the fund created by the Governor’s office, which is a public-private partnership. I did communicate with the Governor’s office to confirm the details. Only 3% of donated funds, up to a maximum of $30,000, will be used for administration.

Right now, click over to https://www.volunteerflorida.org/donatefdf/ and give any affordable amount ending in a ‘2’. It doesn’t matter how much or how little, $2, $12, $22, or whatever. You get the idea. (This one doesn’t take decimals, like $5.02.). Working together, each with our small individual gifts, we form a tsunami of help. You’ll feel terrific after you do it, it only takes a minute, and then you’ll be right back here to finish reading today’s post.

Again: https://www.volunteerflorida.org/donatefdf/

I’m not sure we’ll get feedback on this one, although I’ll try. But things are, well, kind of hectic.

🪖 These days, trial is never certain till it’s here, but next week I’m lead counsel in a four day jury trial. Given the dawn-to-dusk demands of jury trial work, posts next week could be spotty or missing. So get ready. To bridge the gap, and give you something to gnaw on while I’m out, I’ve arranged two very cool guest bloggers. Plus, since the courthouse is closed Wednesday for a jewish holiday, you’ll get your rhetorical caffeine then for sure.

🪖 Next Thursday, October 13th, from 7-9pm (doors open at 6pm), I’ll be speaking at Abundant Life church in Largo, Florida, at the “One Nation Under God” event, along with Trevor Loudon. Should be great if you’re around and free. If interested, you can register at https://alm.churchcenter.com/registrations/events/1449434.

🗞*WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

The big news yesterday was Russian president Putin’s speech, largely ignored or misquoted by corporate media, of course. Before we get to the details, let’s start with some historical background first.

🔥 Back in 2014, Condoleeza Rice was being interviewed about the then-conflict in Ukraine, and in her mild, sweet voice, suggested regretfully that the key to solving Ukraine was much, much tougher sanctions on Russia, no matter the cost, with a you-can’t-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-a-few-eggs sort of tone:

… we need to have tougher sanctions [on Russia]. And I’m afraid at some point, this is going to probably have to involve involve oil and gas. The Russian economy is vulnerable. Eighty percent of Russian exports are in oil, gas, and minerals. People say, well, the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. And I understand that it’s uncomfortable…

Over the long run, you simply want to change the structure of energy independence. You want [Europe] to depend more on the North American energy platform of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia. For years, we’ve tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes.

It’s time to do that.

Huh. Rice’s plan sounds EXACTLY like what’s happening now. SO weird. It almost sounds like it’s a State Department plan that came off a top-secret shelf somewhere, and I don’t mean Mar-a-Lago. A “Use In Case Of Ukraine Conflict” kind of plan.

If they ARE following the plan, they totally mucked it up. They gave Putin too much time before they blew up the pipelines, time to coordinate replacement customers for his European energy products. If the deep state did plan to blow up the pipelines, they should’ve done it to start with, when it would’ve made a difference.

Anyway, in the clip, Rice referred to a meeting between President Obama and Angela Merkel in Washington. I think I found it, in a telling article from the World Socialist Website:

The article starts out complaining about Obama’s meddling in Ukraine, and noting all his problems working with the German Chancellor, mostly because Edward Snowden just leaked that the NSA had been spying on her. In language that would be familiar to all of us, the article described nazi forces (real ones) brutally attacking Eastern Ukrainians living in pro-Russian areas, and speculated that the U.S. was encouraging or even directing the violence. It even complains about Victoria Nuland.

Remember, this article is from 2014. Not yesterday.

It was all so eerily familiar. But I was really gobsmacked when I reached these prophetic paragraphs from the 2014 article:

What are Washington’s aims? It would appear that the US has decided to deliberately escalate tensions with the aim of drawing Russia into an invasion of eastern Ukraine, thereby creating the conditions for roping Western Europe into draconian sanctions and even war. …The US is intent on drawing Putin into an intervention in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic on Russia’s border, to protect pro-Russian protesters against the violence of the state. This will then be used by Washington to justify an escalation of economic warfare and military deployments against Russia, potentially igniting a nuclear Third World War.

If you listened to corporate media, you would think that Vladimir Putin cooked up the invasion of eastern Ukraine in February of this year, without any provocation or warning at all. Dumb reporters.

I know, it’s the World Socialists. Forget about the source. At best, the World Socialists are kooks. At worst, the website is a fake, a Russian cyber-military propaganda farm. I might even lean toward the latter, given the article’s overheated rhetoric. Whatever the truth about that is, the article still clearly predicted exactly where things were headed. It just took until 2022 to get there.

In other words, it sure looks like the Ukraine war has been marinating in the State Department’s deep state pressure cooker, for years, in a cunning covert operation spanning multiple administrations. If you don’t agree, point to where we did anything to relieve tensions and head off the war. I think you’ll find that our government did the reverse opposite of that.

I can speculate with the best of them, but it’s true that I have no actual idea what dark plans echo down Washington’s marble corridors of power. So my interest in this story is confined, once again, to marveling over our utterly useless and beyond-pathetic media. Why do non-journalists have to do all the heavy-lifting connecting the dots? Why, for Pete’s sake, isn’t anyone in the media asking our government actors the obvious questions?

In the movies from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s featuring plucky heroes chased around by out-of-control government agencies, there’s a reason the happy ending was always when the good guys — at the last second — delivered evidence of the massive illegal government operation to A JOURNALIST AT A MAJOR NEWSPAPER. It was an homage, of sorts, to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. But these movies all ended the same way for a really good plot reason: because it was the only believable way for ordinary citizens to beat an out-of-control government.

In other words, it was common knowledge that the media held the government in check. So what happens when the media stops doing its job?

🔥 Which brings us to Putin’s dangerously attractive and fundamentally deceptive speech yesterday. Here’s a link to the transcript, you should read it when you have 10-15 minutes.

Now don’t start with me arguing that I shouldn’t link to “Putin’s propaganda.” It’s a historic speech by possibly the most important man in the world right now. In a democratic republic, the citizens govern themselves, so citizens must be informed. This isn’t just a job for the State Department’s skunkworks team.

As I said, it’s a long speech, so I’ll just touch on a few highlights, or low lights, depending on your point of view.

I called president-for-life Putin’s speech dangerously attractive because it is lucid, logical, and moral, which is the opposite of what we always get from our own Glorious Leader, even when he’s banging the podium delivering a carefully-scripted teleprompter oration. See, e.g., Biden’s Anti-MAGA Hate Speech. The dangerous part of Putin’s speech was that, while fairly criticizing the West and the U.S., it completely whitewashed Russia’s own murderous history and glorified the former Soviet Union, which was itself organized by the very same dirty tricks he now accuses us of doing.

Ostensibly, the address was intended to announce Russia’s integration of the four new Ukrainian territories. Putin argued persuasively that democracy and history approved, and escalated the rhetoric by promising that Russia would defend its Homeland with all the tools in its arsenal. Meaning you-know-whats.

Today we will sign treaties on the accession of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Lugansk People’s Republic, Zaporozhye Region and Kherson Region to the Russian Federation. I have no doubt that the Federal Assembly will support the constitutional laws on the accession to Russia and the establishment of four new regions, our new constituent entities of the Russian Federation, because this is the will of millions of people.

It is undoubtedly their right, an inherent right sealed in Article 1 of the UN Charter, which directly states the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.

Delivering the counterpoint, disgraced ex-prime minister and maskless party boy Boris Johnson gave Putin’s speech an F-minus:

Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson

Vladimir Putin your speech is a fraud and a disgrace. The world must never accept your sham referendums or your cruel and illegal attempt to colonise Ukraine. We stand with the people of Ukraine and will support them without flinching until their country is whole and free.

1:54 PM ∙ Sep 30, 2022

---

163,113Likes20,404Retweets

Continuing, Putin next said it’s all over now; he called for an immediate cessation of hostilities to negotiate a peace based on the new geography:

I want the Kiev authorities and their true handlers in the West to hear me now, and I want everyone to remember this: the people living in Lugansk and Donetsk, in Kherson and Zaporozhye have become our citizens, forever…

We call on the Kiev regime to immediately cease fire and all hostilities; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table… But the choice of the people … will not be discussed. The decision has been made, and Russia will not betray it…

We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people. This is the great liberating mission of our nation.

He then goes into a long discussion of how, after the collapse of the USSR, the West used bribery, trickery, and colonial expansion to achieve a unipolar world — he calls it a hegemony — led by the United States. Haha, he also pointed out the hypocrisy of the West about borders and illegal migration:

It was the so-called West that trampled on the principle of the inviolability of borders, and now it is deciding, at its own discretion, who has the right to self-determination and who does not, who is unworthy of it. It is unclear what their decisions are based on or who gave them the right to decide in the first place. They just assumed it.

So far, the speech was well-delivered but mostly-expected nationalistic rhetoric. But Putin was only warming up. Mid-speech, he dropped this rhetorical bomb:

The West does not have any moral right to weigh in, or even utter a word about freedom of democracy. It does not and it never did.

He has a point after the pandemic we just went through.

Putin, using the West’s own woke invective, called us “racists” for “stoking Russophobia,” participating in the slave trade, massacring the Indians, and — in a reference to the UK — using drugs (opium) as a weapon against China. He pointed out the U.S. is the only country that ever nuked anybody. And now he says we’ve intentionally manufactured a global food and energy crisis (see, e.g., Condoleeza Rice’s comments, above):

[P]eople cannot be fed with printed dollars and euros. You can’t feed them with those pieces of paper, and the virtual, inflated capitalisation of western social media companies can’t heat their homes. Everything I am saying is important. And what I just said is no less so: you can’t feed anyone with paper – you need food; and you can’t heat anyone’s home with these inflated capitalisations – you need energy.

That is why politicians in Europe have to convince their fellow citizens to eat less, take a shower less often and dress warmer at home. And those who start asking fair questions like “Why is that, in fact?” are immediately declared enemies, extremists and radicals. They point back at Russia and say: that is the source of all your troubles.

And then Putin dropped the hammer, pointing out the profound insanity of our current social “revolution:”

They do not give a damn about the natural right of billions of people, the majority of humanity, to freedom and justice, the right to determine their own future. They have already moved on to the radical denial of moral, religious, and family values…

[D]o we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, “parent number one, parent number two and parent number three” (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.

Um, I kind of agree with all of that. I don’t want three parents. I don’t want groomers and perverts teaching our kids how to be transsexuals, to twerk, pole dance, or perform for pedophilic adults in kiddy drag shows. I don’t want insane gender fluidity and bizarre medical experimentation on anyone, least of all kids. It’s unacceptable to me. I want a different future for MY kids, too.

Every one of those things leads directly to depopulation and civilizational collapse. Radical environmentalists want that, billionaires want that, twitter crazies want that, but well-balanced, moral people DO NOT WANT THAT.

And that’s where Putin has a better handle on the argument. You have to admit, he’s got us there. No rational civilization wants our woke effluvia. It’s disgusting, offensive, and dangerous. I completely sympathize with the president-for-life on that one.

And how much do you long for our leaders to say something like:

This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.

Our craven leaders are so terrified of being accused of transgressing the ultra-constitutional notion of separation of church and state that they’ve decided it’s safest not to talk about the moral issues at all. In fact the paragraph above is the only full paragraph I saw quoted by corporate media; they mean it to horrify secular folks. Oh my gosh! He said, “Jesus!”

I’m running long. Let me summarize by saying this: If Putin is a threat, it is because we made him a threat. Putin is a product of the communist left. The left in this country paved the way for Putin to properly and accurately criticize — and logically reject — our culture. The communists might have engineered relativism. But it doesn’t matter. It’s still our problem to fix.

In other words, we have to fix OURSELVES before we can fix Ukraine or anybody else.

🔥 Biden responded to Putin’s speech with remarks completely consistent with the 2014 Rice plan. The Wall Street Journal’s article on Putin’s speech said Biden was “quick to condemn Mr. Putin’s move.” I bet he was.

Last night, Biden said, “[Putin] can’t seize his neighbor’s territory and get away with it. It’s as simple as that. America is fully prepared with our NATO allies to defend every single inch of NATO territory. Every single inch. So, Mr. Putin: Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Every inch.”

I’m not sure that *I* understand what Joe is saying, and I’m a native English speaker. Does Joe mean every inch of Ukraine? Ukraine isn’t in NATO. So … which inches is he talking about? I guess it’s not really “as simple as that.” Or maybe it is, to Joe.

Like the rest of corporate media reporting on the story, the Wall Street Journal ignored Putin’s strongest points. They certainly didn’t mention gender reassignment surgery or three-parent households. They mostly just focused on listing all Russia’s military weaknesses, which suggests we are going to be in for a very long war.

Right in line with that prediction, the WSJ quoted a military analyst with the Carnegie foundation, who said “The Ukrainians will keep the situation hot. An insurgency is an important part of what comes next.” Great.

And the New York Times didn’t cover Putin’s speech at all, not in any headlined article.

🔥 You didn’t think I was going to just leave you there, did you? How about some good news? The Hill ran a fabulous article yesterday headlined, “Two to Three Cups of Coffee a Day Could Lead to a Longer Life: Study.

”

The sub-headline quotes the related study, explaining “Our findings indicate that drinking modest amounts of coffee of all types should not be discouraged but can be enjoyed as a heart healthy behavior.”

The article reports a newly-published British study of nearly 450,000 folks found drinking two to three cups of coffee every day was statistically associated with significantly lower risks of cardiovascular disease, irregular heartbeat, and death, compared to people who, for some reason, avoid coffee.

Even decaf helps!

27,809 people died over the course of the study. Instant coffee drinkers had an 11% lower risk. Those who drank two to three cups of decaffeinated coffee had a 14% lower risk of death compared with non-drinkers. But those who drank ground coffee had a whopping 27% risk reduction.

“The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle,” the researchers concluded.

So! Coffee & Covid is good for you!

Okay, late finishers, here’s the link again: https://www.volunteerflorida.org/donatefdf/

Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll see you on Monday unless trial preparations interfere. Hang in there.

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