☕️ MUD MAN ☙ Labor Day, September 4, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Happy Labor Day, C&C! Today: has Burning Man mysteriously become an Ebola Hot Spot?; major moves in the proxy war; and climate consensus gets shredded.

Happy Labor Day, C&C Army! C&C is officially closed for the holiday, but to tide you over, and so you don’t get behind, I strung together some shreds of a few very entertaining top stories for you. Never fear, C&C will return tomorrow with a regular roundup.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Yesterday, after local officials closed down road access to the so-called Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, an epidemic exploded , an epidemic of theories sustained by earnest video reporters who claimed that it was not, in fact, the weather, but a mutant form of ebola that was slaying festival goers in droves.

I looked into it, and am happy to report there are no credible firsthand reports of people dying from ebola or any other tropical disease, and though travel to the festival site has, in fact, been closed off, many attendees are communicating with the outside world and seem fine, if disappointed and greatly inconvenienced.

According to the lore, in 1986, two progressive San Fransisco men, presumably under the influence of some substance or other, conceived and carried out plan to burn an eight-foot tall human-shaped sculpture down at San Francisco’s Baker Beach. A small crowd gathered to watch the bizarre event unfold, and the first annual Burning Man accidentally occurred.

What you will not find, not anywhere, is any discussion of the why. Why burn a pretend human? What, or who, it is being sacrificed to? To ask questions is to miss the point, to destroy the ineffable, chaotic, bohemian insubstance of partying without a reason. Describing it also destroys it.

Since then, the party moved to the middle of Nowhere in Nevada’s Black Rock desert, and the number of attendees has increased (over 70,000) along with the size of the wicker human sacrifice and the event’s length (it’s now nine days long).

While an entire pagan folklore has emerged over the years, with its own insider vocabulary, temple of worship, ever grander and more bizarre costume rituals, some of the trappings of modernity have crept in. Entry tickets cost $425, over $500 after taxes and fees (subsidized low-income tickets are available for a bargain $210).

What the festival does not offer, however, are upscale conveniences. But for a few high-net-worth folks in RVs (rental cost $150,000 and up), attendees go showerless, use portable restrooms, and prepare food in less-than-perfectly sanitary desert conditions.

So, folks can be forgiven for assuming that a perfect place for an ebola outbreak would be the harsh conditions of the Nevada desert and the melting pot of 70,000+ stinky attendees-under-the-influence. But what actually happened is, it started raining, and Burning Man got a lot less ‘burning’ and got a lot more bogged down in the mud, which apparently has become a sludgy buzzkill.

Mud Man!

Here’s the New York Times’ headline, as the problem started:

Yesterday a variety of media responded to the internet rumors of Ebola outbreak, but I agreed most with Business Insider’s headline. If there isn’t a squelchy infectious outbreak, there very well soon could be:

Mud Man is the great equalizer. While attendees who were not completely invested in Burning Man’s radical self-reliance values struggled to find ways to get themselves out of the slop and back to civilization, even celebrities were forced to trudge shoulder-to-shoulder with regular folks through the pasty, damp, ankle-deep soft clay.

Here’s a video clip of comedian Chris Rock hiking out of Burning Man and begging a ride in a pickup:

diplo

A post shared by @diplo

Other attendees who hiked out described surviving harrowing ordeals in the wet desert. While they had expected to rough it to some extent, they weren’t quite expecting to get their hands, feet, legs, arms, noses, and personal areas dirty.

The mud was just too much, dude.

So that’s it for the Mud Man, I mean the Burning Man report.  Their access road is scheduled for re-opening tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.

🔥 Gender identity is an immutable characteristic people are born with; it’s definitely not a personal lifestyle choice or anything. Gender identity is also completely fluid, more of a journey of personal discovery, but is definitely not a choice.

Just deal with it.

Exhibit A appeared yesterday in the UK Daily mail. Remember Kerry Lemieux a/k/a “Kayla Lemieux”? He’s the infamous Canadian trans shop teacher with the ‘ZZ’ sized prosthetic boobs. Well. He was.

I don’t know whether to label this as progress, or as a mockery of a travesty. For example, we wonder how Mr. Lemieux will identify next semester.

But the real crazy people in this story are the Canadian school board officials, who are treating all of Mr. Lemieux’s back-and-forthing with deadly seriousness, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, it happens all the time. Much more than Lemieux, the officials evidence the profound failure of Canadian public school education.

🚀 We haven’t had a real Proxy War update in a few weeks, apart from noting the steady dribble of the changing narrative. So let me bring you up to speed. In summary: Ukraine went all out, Russia responded in a totally predictable and very smart way, and then Zelensky hired a cleaner.

Media has not covered Ukraine’s “big push” into the south, which started last week. They appear — finally — to be throwing everything in the arsenal at breaking through the Russian defensive lines, with the well-known goal of cutting off the Crimean peninsula. This is supposed to give the Ukrainians strong negotiating leverage or something.

But the Ukrainians remain bogged down in their failing counteroffensive. In the south. So, Russia appears to be starting a significant new offensive in the north. That’s the kind of move you can make when you have a lot more men than your opponent.

Ouch! Ukraine now has to decide whether to move forces out the southern theater to defend against the new Russian incursion in the north. Meanwhile, tick-tock, tick-tock, the time is running out before U.S. election season begins in earnest later this fall, when Ukrainian winter weather makes counteroffensives even harder, and when the democrats aren’t going to want to be stapled to any so-called “quagmire” in Ukraine.

The Hill said it would be a “really big deal” if the Russian northern offensive gets any traction:

For even more context, there’s a perfectly good reason why the narrative is shifting and why the warlike Establishment Media has suddenly gotten all cynical about Ukraine’s chances. Take a look at this recent map showing all of Ukraine’s progress since the start of the CounterOffensive™ three months ago.

After billions of dollars worth of U.S. and NATO war material has been consumed, and after who knows how many Ukrainian lives have been lost, only the teeny-tiny blue areas have been recaptured from the wily Russians:

And then, what do you know? Yesterday Zelensky suddenly and unexpectedly fired his top war leader. Ukraine’s Minister of Defense Oleksiy Reznikov, who has been in charge of the Proxy War since day one, is out. What’s even more interesting is who is in. Here’s the Hill’s headline:

The Hill did not explain the need for the change, of course, and provided no  detail whatsoever:

In a statement, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky said he thinks the ministry “needs new approaches” and noted that Minister of Defense Oleksiy Reznikov had served in the position for 550 days of “full-scale war.”

But, what kind of new approach? The replacement Defense Minister, Rustem Umerov, 41, is the current head of State Property Fund (a government agency that sells state assets to private investors), has a background in telecommunications and finance — not military — and is an Uzbekistani muslim. He wasn’t born or raised in Ukraine.

So why him? Umerov is a dealmaker.

The New York Times reported that Umerov was the chief Ukrainian negotiator of the deal with Russia allowing Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea, and has also been a prominent negotiator on ongoing prisoner exchange dealmaking with Russia.  Shortly after the war started, Umerov — who attended early peace negotiations in March — told the BBC he was determined "to find  political and diplomatic resolution to this brutal invasion.”

A political and diplomatic resolution with Russia.

So. If the incoming Minster of Defense has a background, not in military, but in negotiation and finance, what do we suppose they expect him to negotiate?

The obvious answer, which none of the newspapers I reviewed had the stones to even suggest, is a peace deal.

🔥 Over 1,600 scientists have now signed a declaration titled, “There is no Climate Emergency.

Here’s the link, share freely: https://clintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/WCD-version-081423.pdf

Do you suppose these 1,600 scientists’ opinion will stop the climate psychos from claiming there is “consensus” among scientists about global warming? I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

Have a joyful and refreshing Labor Day! We’ll be back tomorrow with a full-sized roundup. See you then.

Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com