☕️ DRASTICALLY SHORTENED ☙ Thursday, October 10, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

C&C is still here but hurricane news is still rolling in; helpful inmates and dog-saver stories; perils of self-medication; hallucinatory weather news; a satisfying end to trans lawfare story; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! As you can see, here in Gainesville we weathered Hurricane Milton just fine. I don’t know yet how our team members in Polk County and Orlando fared. Your roundup this morning includes: Hurricane Milton hot takes while we wait for the lights to come back on in Central Florida; inmates to the rescue; dog-saving Governor; an extremely cautionary tale about the perils of holistic self-medication; mind-bending weather news from the least likely place; and more terrific, counter-revolutionary legal news.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🌪️🌪️ After crossing the Sunshine State last night in the dark, Hurricane Milton sailed out into the Atlantic early this morning. The worst is over. At 5am, the National Hurricane Service lifted all hurricane and tropical storm warnings for Florida’s west coast. However, citizens are still advised caution, as other hazards remain in the threat vector, such as sharks, alligators, oversized flying cockroaches, and the odd crack-addled Democrat cavorting with male prostitutes in a hotel room somewhere. (It’s happened before.)

The good news was Turbo Hurricane Milton shot across the state like a bullet. Fast storms are the best storms. It’s hard to say yet just how damaging the storm was, since much of the affected area is now running on batteries — over 3 million lack power, according to NBC’s latest report this morning. But, with any luck, things might have been nowhere near as catastrophic as the weather channels breathlessly advertised.

We do have spot reports of damage, like the dramatic removal of the entire roof of St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Bowl (above), where the Tampa Bay Rays play. Ironically, the Trop was being used as a shelter for first responders, who must have endured a sleepless but very exciting night. South and Central Florida was also stirred up by several tornadoes yesterday as the storm approached, and the local damage was quite dramatic in spots.

That said, I have not yet seen any evidence of any widespread “15-foot storm surge.” Hopefully that didn’t happen. We’ll keep praying for folks in the affected areas and enjoy watching the Nation’s best hurricane recovery state get into gear.

Other states could learn a lot from Florida.

For instance, Lake County gave its inmates a chance to give back to the community, by working in several sandbag locations. It was Restorative Justice!

Being a lifelong Floridian, I have considered the sandbag calculus many times. It’s not just all the back-breaking effort to get, bring home, and place the sandbags. They’re heavy. After the storm, you must take them back up —now wet and twice as heavy— and move them to whatever location behind a nearby bush or the neighbor’s yard to dump the wet sand. You’re on your own for that laborious second part, which is, sadly, sans inmate.

According to reports online, President Trump gave out-of-state electrical linemen free room and board in his four-star Florida hotels.

And yesterday, a dramatic dog rescue swelled social media and even garnered comments from Florida’s best Governor, Ron DeSantis. Fox reported the story headlined, “Florida trooper rescues dog tied to pole in puddle as Milton heads toward state, DeSantis calls owner 'cruel’.”  Apparently, a neér-do-well of some sort left their dog tied to a fence on the side of the highway.

CLIP: DeSantis handles dog abandonment during Hurricane Milton’s approach (0:42).

In the scheme of things, it’s a small story. You could argue the Governor has better things to do in the face of historic hurricanes than deal with abandoned dogs. But something about this lost-doggy tale goes to the heart of what makes Florida and its amazing Governor great.  Leave no dog behind!

🔥🔥 Now for a cautionary tale. Many folks in the holistic community swear to the healing properties of psilocybin, otherwise known as psychedelic mushrooms. “Make no mistake,” HealthLine soberly advised in 2019, “Psilocybin has a number of potential medical benefits:”

That may be true. Which is why some folks are vexed that psilocybin remains illegal for home use. Still, the FDA approved the natural intoxicant in 2018 as a “breakthrough therapy.” But I would be remiss if I did not also caution readers with last week’s mind-expanding Daily Mail headline:

According to the remarkable post-op Journal of Surgery case study, the unidentified male self-healer, 37, traveled to Austria and dosed himself with possibly too much of the healing fungus. During the resulting blackout, he somehow obtained an axe and chopped one of his favorite body parts into several pieces, which he then carefully saved in a jar for an undescribed future purpose.

By the time he came to and sought help from traditional medicine, his wee bits had been jarred for around nine hours. Doctors heroically stitched together the dismembered member, but unfortunately, several odd component bits were damaged beyond repair and, no longer being useful for any non-psychedelic purpose, were rudely discarded.

During his recovery, which included a painful bout of penile necrosis —two words that should never go together— the patient had to be restrained when doctors found more happy mushrooms in his hospital room’s nightstand. But eventually, and happily, he recovered, with full erectile and urinary function.

Well. Mostly full function. His male appendage was described in the Journal as being “drastically shortened.” It can’t reach as far as it used to. Not even close.

So, FYI, even holistic treatments can have unanticipated side effects. True, Alice shrank only temporarily after eating the mushroom, but this story shows the shrinkage can be more, well, permanent. Feed your head if you want to, but first make sure the sharp tools are safely stored, and keep the delicate bits in your trousers.

I’m not anti-mushroom! Don’t cancel me! I’m just the messenger.

🚀🚀 Highbrow blogging site UnHerd ran a thoughtful Proxy War article yesterday headlined, “Emmanuel Todd: Nato will disintegrate if Ukraine loses.” The titular Todd is a French historian and a “public intellectual,” whatever that means, who publishes books critical of American hegemony. His most recent book The Defeat of The West argues that in Ukraine, America may have sheared away more than can be successfully reattached.  In other words, we chopped our own d—k off.

Historian Todd made several observations with which most C&C readers would agree. For example, he thinks World War III has already started, that NATO will suffer irreparable shrinkage if Russia wins the Proxy War, that Western governments have been captured by what he neatly described as the “liberal oligarchy,” and that “Western economic sanctions have done more damage to the European economy than to the Russian one.”

My only quibble was he forgot to mention sanctions’ self-inflicted injury to the American economy. It also appears to have been drastically shortened. But I digress.

There was nothing particularly novel (for us) about Todd’s political analysis, except of course that it is the complete opposite of the government-approved, corporate media-sustained narrative. But I found the article’s closing paragraph stunning. Reporters interviewing Todd about his book provocatively asked him whether he’d move to Russia since he hates the West so much, and he declined. But look what he said about the U.S.:

Ouch! Touché, Frenchman. Indeed, nihilism is the danger we face. But the rest of the West also faces that danger, including France. Psychedelic nihilism is the last stop on the liberal oligarchy’s high-speed rail line.

🔥🔥 Chalk up another remarkable 2024 weather record this week. While our hurricanes and floods dominated the rest of the media, the UK Independent quietly ran a story Tuesday headlined, “Flooding hits Sahara Desert after extremely rare rainfall. Flooding. In the desert. Flooding. It may sound like a mushroom-inspired hallucination, but it’s true.

It wasn’t a hurricane, typhoon, or tornado. It was just two days of hard rain. Satellites showed water rushing in to fill Lake Iriqui, a famous desert lakebed that has been bone dry for over 50 years. But this week, in only 48 hours, Lake Iriqui was refilled.

The most recent downpour followed a historically wet September. Intriguingly, all the new water promises to potentially change the arid climate permanently:

Saying they weren’t prepared for this kind of weather is an understatement. This week’s desert floods killed 20 people and created a regional state of emergency.

Scientists are baffled. Where is all this water coming from? Ahem, Hunga Tonga.

🔥🔥 Finally, we got some more great legal news this week. The New York Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Colorado Supreme Court tosses suit against baker who refused cake for trans woman.” Cross-dressing activists have been suing quiet, unassuming Christian baker Jack Phillips since 2017. Two of his cases have been to the U.S. Supreme Court, and now his long legal nightmare may finally be over.

The latest case against Masterpiece Cakeshop began when a disgruntled trans lawyer  —furious about Phillip’s victory at the U.S. Supreme Court— called up and ordered two custom cakes, an obscene one to celebrate a transgender surgery and a second dessert depicting Satan smoking marijuana, to “correct the errors of [Phillips’] thinking.”

The lawyer, ‘Autumn’ Scardina, claimed his goal in ordering the cake was to prove false Phillips’ public statements that he would always provide services for LGBTQ+ cake buyers. (Just not obscene ones.)

But when Jack politely declined Scardina’s vulgar and irreverent pastry orders, the lawyer sued Jack under Colorado’s Orwellian “Anti-Discrimination Act.” But on Tuesday, Colorado’s all-Democrat state Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit on procedural grounds.

I have met Jack Phillips. He is a humble, honest solo entrepreneur who has heroically resisted the full might of the state trying to cancel and destroy him with lawfare. We undoubtedly owe Jack a debt of gratitude. We should also thank the terrific lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom, which has defended Jack for free all these years.

If it weren’t for Jack sticking up for himself, we wouldn’t have last year’s terrific landmark Supreme Court decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis, which found that creative professionals —including bakers— enjoy protective free speech rights and can turn down ridiculous requests from cross-dressing lawyers.

Progress!

Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll update you with reliable intel about Hurricane Milton’s aftermath in tomorrow morning’s deliciously sweet, snarky, and free speech-packed roundup.

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