☕️ REVIVED ☙ Monday, April 24, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Proxy War news; hypersonic missiles may obsolete U.S. fleet; NATO bunker blown up; official confirms Putin's view of the war; Ukraine courts US energy giants; new mask study links long covid; Revival.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday, which means it’s time to kick off the week with a terrific roundup! Your stack of news today includes: lots of Proxy War news, as game-changing technology hits the battlefields, leaving the U.S. with its military pants down; underground NATO bunker in Ukraine, along with hundreds of top military officials, may have been wiped out by Russia in March; a theory on all the recent Ukraine leaks and how the US can get out of dodge; NATO doubles down on Ukrainian membership; top NATO official accidentally admits Putin’s war theory was correct; Ukraine starts talks with US energy companies, suggesting an end to war; yet another mask study links chronic mask-wearing to long-covid injuries (reprinted from Sunday); and maybe the best news of all, worldwide religious revival appears to be a possibility.

🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞

🚀 Last week, the Washington Post ran a game-changing op-ed titled, “The Most Shocking Intel Leak Reveals New Chinese Military Advances.”

Life moves pretty fast. And so, apparently, do new-generation hypersonic missiles that are already being deployed in China and Russia.

Josh Rogin’s piece began with this eye-popping claim: “China has tested and deployed a new longer-range hypersonic missile that is probably able to evade U.S. defenses, according to an overlooked top-secret document among those recently leaked.”

One of the leaked Minecraft Papers is a top-secret report dated February 28th, written by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s intelligence directorate. It stated China’s military successfully tested a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile called the DF-27. The daily intelligence update explained, “The DF-27 is designed to enhance [China’s] ability to hold targets at risk beyond the Second Island Chain and possesses a high probability of penetrating U.S.” ballistic missile defense.

Oh.

It travels up to 8,000 kilometers at up to five times faster than the speed of sound, is maneuverable, and can evade our current anti-missile systems. In other words, it’s a carrier-killer.

Some people are saying the DF-27 instantly made our carrier fleet obsolete.

The day after Rogin’s piece, fueled by the details exposed in the op-ed, U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz challenged Pentagon officials in open session to explain whether our carriers have any defense capabilities against the threat posed by hypersonic missiles:

https://twitter.com/RepMattGaetz/status/1648370030956933120

Representative Gaetz angrily concluded, “For the last 30 years, the United States has been building aircraft carriers that will never get into the fight.” The lawmaker’s questioning — and a top admiral’s reluctant answers — made it perfectly clear the Biden Administration knew about the country’s hypersonic shortfall since early 2021, and failed to do anything about it.

Elon Musk, who knows something about rockets, chimed in, also noticing the problem:

In late March, Defense News ran a story confirming the United States’ poor hypersonic preparedness. We lag far behind:

Defense News also confirmed that China and Russia lead the U.S. in hypersonic capability:

Hypersonic weapons travel at speeds topping Mach 5 and are highly maneuverable, making them difficult to track and shoot down. China and Russia have invested considerable resources in developing these weapons for their militaries, and several U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern that the country is not doing enough to field its own hypersonic capabilities.

While the emphasis seems to be on China, which just completed successful missile tests, two days ago, an article in Consortium News confirmed that Russia has ALREADY deployed hypersonic Kinzhal missiles in Ukraine, but did not say where:

Another area receiving extensive Pentagon attention is hypersonics, because such projectiles will fly so fast and maneuver with such skill (while skimming atop the atmosphere’s outer layer) that they should be essentially impossible to track and intercept. Both China and Russia already possess rudimentary weapons of this type, with Russia reportedly firing some of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles into Ukraine in recent months.

I’ll pose this question: since Russia already has battlefield-capable hypersonic weapons, but China is just completing testing, did Russia give China some hypersonic technology as part of the deal to recruit China’s military assistance?

Defense News also confirmed the United States is still playing catchup:

…the 2024 Pentagon budget request includes $209 million for the development of a hypersonic interceptor, only the first installment in costly development and procurement programs in the years to come in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

Altogether, I think it is safe to assume, absent contrary evidence, that the United States has been caught flat-footed by a superior military technology that probably instantly rendered an entire generation of warfare obsolete. What this means for the Proxy War, or for Taiwan, remains to be seen.

Military C&Cers — what do you think?

🚀 I couldn’t officially confirm this next bit, so I am departing from my usual practice of reporting only from verified sources, because it is likely this story, if true, will be memory-holed deeper than the deepest Deep Underground Military Base. But if it IS true, it connects a lot of dots.

What we DO know is that Ukraine (apparently assisted by US forces) conducted an attack on a civilian neighborhood inside Russian borders in February. We also know that Russia has recently used hypersonic Kinzhal missiles in Ukraine. The highly-suggestive but unverifiable part is the claim that Russia retaliated by attacking Kiev (or Lviv) with six hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, destroying a 120-meter-deep military bunker housing 100-300 top Ukraine and NATO generals, who were leading Ukraine’s military campaign until they were hypersonically snuffed out.

Here’s the video burning up social media:

https://twitter.com/Sander_2021/status/1648848040340406273

Again, no corporate media source has confirmed or even discussed the alleged attack at all. Nor would they, if it did happen, for obvious reasons.

Various sources claim the NATO bunker was busted in late Feburary, days after the Ukraine-led terrorist attack on Russian civilians. That would put the slaughter of nearly all Ukraine’s top general and their NATO facilitators just a few days preceding the Minecraft Papers initial leak on Discord on March 4th.

Isn’t THAT interesting?

And a few weeks later, Sy Hersh got an anonymous insider scoop on the story about the $400 million stolen by Zelensky and his top generals — including details from inside a top-secret meeting between the former comedian and the head of the CIA, even quoting what was said at the meeting. Who could’ve been the source?

Between the two leaks, is the Deep State deep-sixing Ukraine?

The story about the NATO attack wasn’t confined to that single video report. The story also appeared in foreign media:

And the story appeared in US military / intelligence industry media as recently as yesterday:

The Intel Drop described the attack like this:

“In fact, the attack hit control and planning centers in bunkers, as well as air defense/radar stations. Heavy losses of officers, including Americans, were recorded. It seems that NATO’s proxy ‘Shadow Staff’ got quite a bit,” the authors of “Military Materials” wrote.

After that, according to the publication, representatives of the Ukrainian General Staff came to the US Embassy, ​​most likely to transfer the lists of the dead.

So here’s a theory. The U.S. has a hypersonic problem, racing straight at our military at five times the speed of sound. If the Russians have proved their hypersonic missiles are battlefield-effective, bypassing Ukraine’s previously-reliable air defense systems to destroy a deep underground military base housing top commanders, and if the Chinese hypersonic capacity is also coming online, the war calculus MUST shift.

It has to. All the priorities need to be re-shuffled until the U.S. develops effective countermeasures, which are unlikely to be available to Ukraine in any helpful period of time.

But it would be political suicide for Biden to suddenly pull the plug on U.S. support for Ukraine after what happened in Afghanistan. He might as well move to Siberia. Rank and file dems have been spun up to conceive of the Proxy War as an ultimate life-or-death battle to save worldwide democracy, an existential struggle justifying the risk of global thermonuclear war. Therefore, before we can end Ukraine support, and pursue a previously-eschewed “peace deal”, a peace deal that DOES give up more than “one inch” of Ukraine, the deep state must first undermine the political support it previously created for the Proxy War.

And so here’s the question: were the Minecraft Papers and the Sy Hersh leaks actually limited hangouts intended to soften Proxy War support? The Minecraft Papers — which called the hypersonic deficit into Congressional view — they suggest the war CAN’T possibly be won, and the Sy Hersh leak explains WHY the war SHOULDN’T be won, since it has exposed the Ukrainian commanders as untrustworthy thieves and grifters.

The two recent, unprecedented leaks are two legs of the classic Aristotelian argument: logos (logic) and ethos (ethics). That only leaves pathos (emotions).

🚀 If there IS a secret plan to Afghanistan Ukraine, it was not obvious in this weekend’s public statements by US and NATO officials. Newsmax ran a story this weekend headlined, “Secretary-General: All NATO Allies Agree Ukraine Will Join.”

Statements like that are GUARANTEED to escalate the war. The article even noted the problem:

The Kremlin has given various justifications for going to war, but repeated Thursday that preventing Ukraine from joining NATO is still a key goal of its invasion, arguing that Kyiv’s membership in the alliance would pose an existential threat to Russia.

Even if our goal was in fact Ukraine’s NATO membership, it’s hard to understand why we would make these kinds of hard-line public commitments. Normally you’d save something like that for the negotiating table.

That wasn’t all NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said. On Friday, he was in Kiev, not in a bunker, and gave a press statement that sounded exactly like what Russian President Putin has been consistently saying since the start of the Proxy War, and what Ukraine-defenders have been braying was a defamatory lie and a complete conspiracy theory.

Stoltenberg admitted we’ve been provoking Russia since 2014:

“The war did not start in February last year, the war started in 2014. And since 2014, NATO Allies have provided support to Ukraine, with training, with equipment, er, so that Ukrainian armed services were much stronger in 2022 than in 2014. And, of course, that made a huge difference when President Putin decided to attack.”

https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/1649189680674422786

So there you have it, straight from the top of NATO. We’ve been secretly, or at least non-publicly, building up Ukraine’s military capability since its deep-state fueled color revolution in 2014, and we’re STILL poking the Russian Bear with a non-hypersonic stick.

🚀 On the other hand, Reuters ran this remarkable headline yesterday: “Naftogaz Held Talks With US Oil Companies About Energy Projects in Ukraine, Financial Times Reports.”

Naftogaz is Ukraine’s state-owned energy company.

Ukraine, which is practically a failed state in the middle of a nearly-nuclear Proxy War, and whose energy infrastructure has been bombed into the Stone Age, would seem to be in no position to be negotiating to sell its natural gas to US energy companies like Exxon, Chevron, and Halliburton.

But that, apparently, is exactly what it is now doing.

And it is equally impossible to believe that private civilian energy firms would start building anything while the missiles are still falling.

Reuters acknowledged the problem: “We understand that it’s rather hard for the private companies to step in during the war,” Oleksiy Chernyshov, Naftogaz’s chief executive, told the Financial Times, adding that Ukraine is “working on” insurance mechanisms to protect the private companies’ investments.

Could the “insurance mechanisms” be an anticipated peace deal ending the war? It is difficult to imagine any other way that Exxon and Chevron would even CONSIDER building new energy infrastructure in the middle of a war zone.

None of the involved parties, Naftogaz, Chevron, Exxon or Halliburton, responded to Reuters’ request for comment, not even to say how excited they were at the prospect of helping the war effort by investing in the war-torn country.

Weird!

If you wanted to lock up Ukraine natural gas deposits, it might make sense to start before the end of the war. Either way, this news suggests that Ukrainian energy officials have a theory that conditions are about to improve, or at least stabilize.

What could their theory be?

💉 In another remarkable example of the crumbling omertá on jab-critical stories in corporate media, the UK Times ran a startling story Friday headlined, “Doctor Told Wife Covid Jab Was Safe. Days Later He Died.” The sub-headline explained, “Widow urges openness about vaccination risks after inquest records fatal side-effect.”

Dr. Stephen Wright, 32, died suddenly 10 days after getting jabbed in January 2021. Last Wednesday, an inquest determined his untimely demise was due to “unintended complications of the vaccine.”

Well, PROBABLY unintended.

The Times explained that Mrs. Wright, 36, was on maternity leave from her job as deputy manager of a private day nursery, and was wondering about whether she should get the shot. “I asked Stephen, ‘Is it safe?’,” she said, and he replied, “Yes, it is.”

No, it wasn’t.

The story reported Dr. Wright, one of the first to receive the experimental shots, experienced the “normal” side effects of a sore arm and a light cold, but was better within four days. Four days of feeling sick is normal? Does that mean it’s working?

Anyway, nine days after taking the jab he complained of a headache, and took a painkiller so he could go to work. 24 hours and a short hospital stay later, he was dead as a doornail.

On the day he died, Mrs. Wright helped her ailing husband get his jacket on, but because of UK’s 2021 lockdown restrictions, she could not come with him to the hospital. “I could see he was pretty terrified but was not wanting to worry me,” she recalled. “We managed to say we loved each other twice before he left.”

Mrs. Wright told the Times that at first, she was invited to appear on a leading morning TV show to talk about her husband’s death. But her appearance was abruptly cancelled since, she was told, it might deter people from taking the vaccine.

You don’t say. Why give people information? They might start to question the “safe and effective” gag.

The young doctor’s condition rapidly worsened, with a fatal combination of brainstem infarction and a brain bleed. (Like Jamie Foxx.) Mrs. Wright said his neurologist assiduously assured her that fortunately, her husband’s untimely death was “absolutely not” linked to the vaccine. The death certificate also recorded he died from “spontaneous” natural causes.

Liars!

“Nobody would listen, nobody would let me speak,” Mrs. Wright told the Times. “I was at home with two young children and unemployed. As a doctor’s window I had to go to a food bank to feed my children.” Sixteen months after her husband suddenly and unexpectedly died, she received the maximum available compensation of £120,000, or about $150,000.

Kudos to the Times for running the sixteen-month-old story, but it was also quick to point out how “rare” side effects like Dr. Wright’s are. The Times completely missed the point. Sooner or later, we’ll know how rare they were, who cares what the Times thinks about that.

What the story SHOULD have been about is all the lying officials and jab experts who gaslit Mrs. Wright for a year and a half while she fed her fatherless babies from the food bank.

[This next story is reprinted from Sunday’s bonus edition due to requests from commenters who thought you needed to see it.]

😷 It seems like the hits just won’t stop for the masks lately. The Daily Mail UK ran an explosive story Saturday headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: Face Masks May Raise Risk of Stillbirths, Testicular Dysfunction and Cognitive Decline Due to Build-Up of Carbon Dioxide, Study Warns.”

A new German study published in the Journal Heliyon concluded that, because masks create a pocket of dead space between the mouth and mask, the void traps carbon dioxide at levels that are mildly toxic when worn over long periods. According to the researchers, repeated exposure to those levels of CO₂ increase the risks of a long list of serious problems including stillbirths, low sperm production, cognitive impairment, and permanent mental declines, especially in children.

The study explained that by comparison, fresh air has around 0.04% CO₂, while wearing masks for more than 5 minutes causes chronic exposure to carbon dioxide levels between 1.41% to 3.2% in mask-filtered air.

To put it in terms leftists can understand: masks create little individual, personal climate-change spaces.

Another way to look at these results is, for men, long term masking is equivalent to punching themselves right in the family jewels, over and over and over.

The researchers identified the shocking health risks by rounding up a large number of other studies. For example, one study cited by the German researchers found that just 0.3% of prolonged CO₂ exposure in pregnant rats and young mice caused permanent brain damage, heightened anxiety levels and memory problems. Another study found male mice exposed to 2.5% of CO₂ for four hours — equal to 0.5% in humans — led to destruction of testicle cells and sperm. A third study found that 3% of CO₂ (equal to 0.8% in humans) in pregnant rats led to stillbirth and birth defects.

A fourth study found that pregnant guinea pigs’s exposure to just 0.48% of CO₂ for only 10 minutes a day for 20 consecutive days caused stillbirths and birth defects in 68% of the pups.

The academic evidence linking lower fertility to slightly elevated CO₂ rates was so strong that the German researchers opined: “Circumstantial evidence exists that popular mask use may be related to current observations of a significant rise of 28 percent to 33 percent in stillbirths worldwide.”

Think of it. What if mandatory masking policies literally decimated an entire generation?

The study didn’t mention long covid, but their results are remarkably consistent with the last mask study I reported on April 17th, which concluded that long covid symptoms might actually be “long mask” syndrome, which they dubbed MIES, or “mask-induced exhaustion syndrome.”

More and more, it’s looking like mandatory mask policies were not just harmless nuisances but may actually have been profoundly harmful.

Here’s the link to the new German study.

Here’s the link to the previous study linking masks to long covid.

Feel free to trigger hardcore mask lovers by sending both studies to them. It’s for their own good, after all, and not because you told them so.

😇 The Asbury College Revival electrified the Christian community early this year, but its long-term effects, if any, remain unknown. But yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an uplifting article headlined, “The Surprising Surge of Faith Among Young People.”

Earlier this month on April 8th, CNN ran a similar story headlined, “Predictions About the Decline of Christianity in America May Be Premature.”

Yesterday, the UK Telegraph ran a story with a headline asking, “Could Gen Z Save the Church of England?”

The Journal article’s sub-headline explained, “Young adults, theologians and church leaders say the increase is a response to the pandemic.” According to a December survey of young adults aged 18 to 25, about one-third of the group now say they believe—more than doubt—the existence of a higher power. That’s a significant increase from pre-pandemic polling.

The Journal quoted Becca Bell, an 18-year-old college student from Peosta, Iowa, who explained that believing in God “gives you a reason for living and some hope.” Becca doesn’t attend Church regularly, but she’s started following the social media accounts of people who are openly religious.

The figures from various polls are mixed and don’t paint any clear picture yet, but the Journal quoted a number of anecdotal accounts of increased church attendance and young people who’ve now returned to their childhood faith after a period of doubt.

Historically, times of war and widespread suffering have often resulted in social revival of religious belief. My own pandemic experience supports the headlines. My family are regular attenders, and even when traveling we (almost) always find a local church to visit on Sundays. Over the last three years I’ve attended services in over a dozen cities and even more churches. All of them were surprisingly — and encouragingly — full, energized, and active.

But that’s not the extent of what I can report. As many of you know, when the mandates rolled out, my firm and I became a hub of information guiding people on how to successfully request a religious exemption and avoid the traps and pitfalls laid out by devilish lawyers and HR firms. In addition to publishing several exemption guides and sample letters on C&C, Substack, and our website, the demand was so overwhelming I had to start holding group zoom sessions to answer people’s questions.

At times we hosted zooms with up to 100 people each, and because of the volume I even assigned another lawyer experienced in employment and vaccine law to help teach people how to navigate the religious exemption bureaucracy.

Part of our standard advice was, although the law allows a newly-acquired religious faith to serve as the basis for religious exemptions, folks still needed to “walk the talk” and actually start attending services, studying their Bibles, and reconnecting with their faith. That way, their sincere religious exemption requests would be factual and true, and not susceptible to being picked apart by skeptical reviewers.

What surprised me the most was that I never got any pushback to that advice. People all agreed with the advice.

In one case, I had a private zoom with the top cardiac surgeon, and department head of a major multi-billion-dollar regional hospital, a hospital that was regularly in the news during the pandemic. He didn’t want to take the jabs. When he asked me about his chances of successfully getting a religious exemption, I asked him about his faith.

Like many, the top heart surgeon and multi-million dollar fund-raiser blamed time demands and other distractions for his lack of church attendance or even interest in religion. After a long zoom and two follow-ups, the hardened surgeon ultimately broke into tears on the call, while describing how joyful he and his wife were now, after meeting with a pastor and beginning to reconnect with his long-abandoned faith.

He wasn’t the only one, not by a long shot. During the pandemic I also privately counseled airline pilots, politicians, doctors, nurses, college professors, scientists, students, and even top pharma salespeople.

I can’t pin down when the thought finally appeared full-formed in my mind, but at some point I began to actively wonder if the mandates were going to backfire, in the sense that, because of the availability of religious exemptions as one of the only ways to keep your job without taking the jabs, the mandates raised the religion issue to a new kind of ultimate salvatory prominence.

It wasn’t just people reconnecting with their own faith. We also ordinarily advised already-churched folks to share the Gospel and the joyful basis of their faith in their religious exemption statements, so that hardened HR reviewers and corporate lawyers would be forced to read those testimonies over and over.

In another significant example, I once took a call from a high-profile Texas pastor, who’d just posted his very first YouTube video, giving suggestions about writing sincere religious exemptions. But now he needed legal advice. Suddenly, he said, because of his YouTube video, people had started calling him from all over the country, asking him to write letters supporting their exemption requests. The pastor fretted because, since he didn’t know these people personally, he might be somehow legally liable if he wrote an exemption letter for someone but they weren’t truly saved.

I gently and gracefully chided him. “Pastor, you’ve got this all wrong,” I explained. “Every single person who calls you is a an opportunity for you to bring that person to faith, so that their religious exemption letter WILL BE true. God’s put you on a pole, like the bronze serpent, so that you can reach people in a way you never could have before.”

He got it.

The bottom line is, during the worst days of the pandemic, a lot of people spent a lot of time thinking about their lapsed religious beliefs, or their lack of religious beliefs, whether or not they ever actually applied for the exemptions.

In other words, maybe for the first time in many people’s lives, they were forced to consider how an active religious faith provided an undeniable upside and benefit.

Although qualifying for a religious exemption is not any kind of proper basis for having faith in an ever-present, loving Creator, God reaches people in every conceivable — and sometimes inconceivable — kind of way.

Have the pandemic’s mandates helped fuel a worldwide religious revival? I think they may have helped. Maybe a lot.

Either way, SOMETHING is happening, and the querulous headlines are beginning to evidence that. We’ll see if it continues, but if it does, there’s probably nothing besides a pandemic that could have accomplished a worldwide revival.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll see you guys back here tomorrow for lots more Coffee & Covid.

Join C&C in moving the needle and changing 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-

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