☕️ STORM CONDITIONS ☙ Monday, September 30, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Hurricane's second week brings sister state relief operations; triple-weird chemical plant fire; Israel re-defines modern warfare and decapitates foe; October's long list of Heavenly Signs; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It is also the day September sails away, and we begin the final countdown to the most significant elections in modern, or possibly human, history. Vote for Harris and for more, bigger war, or for Donald Trump, and give peace a chance. Today’s roundup includes: Hurricane Helene roundup; Florida accelerates sister-state aid program; weird chemical accident in weirdly named plant prompts weird evacuation orders; Israel re-defines modern warfare in series of deadly strikes on historic middle east enemy; and October promises to be packed with Signs in the Skies — but what do they portend?

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🌪️🌪️ When folks begin to realize the electoral implications, Hurricane Helene will become an even bigger disaster. But more on that in a moment. After facing fully justified, concentrated criticism this weekend for under-reporting Hurricane Helene’s aftermath, corporate media has properly repositioned the astonishing story back at the top of the fold. One of yesterday’s many hurricane stories appeared in CNN under the headline, “‘We just don’t really know what to do’: Helene flooding strands hundreds of North Carolina residents.”

It’s not clear how CNN counted; the actual numbers of the ‘stranded’ must be in the thousands or tens of thousands. Maybe it’s the new math or DEI or something. Either way, unthinkable numbers of Americans are literally stranded in elevated pockets scattered across mountainous Western North Carolina. Many of the region’s small towns are accessed by only two or three roads, most of which feature any number of bridges located on the sides of mountains, inconveniently positioned for repair crews.

There’s no official tally of road losses. But in the aftermath of the storm, all roads in Western North Carolina were closed. Whatever the number of substantially damaged roads, many roads have been mangled beyond easy repair, and many bridges were washed away in floods and mudslides. Those tiny mountaintop towns unlucky enough to lose both their access roads have been captured by nature and are completely cut off:  no power, no communications with the outside world, no water, no meds, and no easy way to get in or out.

They can’t even tell us they’re in trouble.

North Carolina’s state government is frantically working its way through the list of small mountain towns and sending rescuers to check on them. At this point, the only options for desperately needed resupply are either helicopter airdrop or a combination of adventurous hiking and rappelling.

Four days ago, these stranded folks were sitting on the couch, in the air conditioning, surfing the Internet just like you and I are doing right now.

Now, Meredith Keisler, a school nurse, informed CNN she was “collecting wood because we have to make fire, to cook food.” Meredith isn’t even in one of the trapped towns, just one where a 25-minute trip to the next town now takes 2.5 hours.

🌪️ The official death toll is up to 90 and will almost certainly see triple digits. That number is miraculously low considering the extent of property damage. It could have been so much worse. For comparison, 2022’s Hurricane Ian extinguished 150 Floridians.

Helene’s cleanup has barely begun; in many places, they are still scrambling to conclude the search and rescue phase. As of this morning, over two million people remain without power across six states. While Western Carolina was the most affected, other states also have tragic tales to tell.

Just a few miles from where I live in North Central Florida, the scenic fishing village of Steinhatchee —where several outdoor-minded neighbors had vacation homes— has been completely erased. There’s now a giant pile of construction debris where a town once stood. (Fortunately, all the Steinhatcheeans evacuated.)

Yesterday, Accuweather forecasted Helene’s recovery costs at $110 billion, which, if correct, would make the storm one of the most expensive in U.S. history. In other words, estimates already place this storm alongside Florida’s Hurricane Ian, New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina, and Texas’ Hurricane Harvey. In light of the widespread infrastructure damage we can already see, Accuweather’s estimate is laughably low. It could be multiples of that figure.

But, using Accuweather’s conservative $110 billion estimate, we could restore every single citizen whose home was destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Helene, and rebuild every single washed-out small business — for less than the cost of the next Ukraine weapons package.

Congress has not even tried to reallocate any Ukraine Aid to Helene Recovery.

On a hunch, I searcheed North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper’s Twitter account. While he’s been very busy tweeting and re-tweeting hurricane news, the Governor has not mentioned FEMA, not a single time. It’s not Cooper, since the search of his social media returned many results thanking FEMA in previous disasters. The same was true for Governor DeSantis.

Where’s FEMA? Neither Biden nor Harris have visited the disaster area.

🌪️🌪️ Not everyone in government is waiting around for the feds to do something. In a terrifically encouraging story only covered by local media, and assiduously ignored by corporate media, Tallahassee’s CBS-12 News ran an article yesterday headlined, “Operation Blue Ridge: Florida's multi-state mission to assist in hurricane aftermath.”

Starting yesterday, Florida —itself reeling in Helene’s aftermath— has begun sending SAR (search and rescue) teams, helicopters, food, water, emergency management planners and personnel, StarLink connectors, generators, and a long list of additional supplies and help to North Carolina and Tennessee in a charitable sister-state rescue operation Governor DeSantis labeled “Operation Blue Ridge.”

There can no longer be any doubt: Florida is the hurricane Boss. And God Bless Governor DeSantis. He will make an amazing President one day, hopefully soon.

🌪️ Now let’s talk politics. One understandably under-reported element of the Hurricane Helene disaster will surely soon appear in force on the social media radar: the political calculus, since North Carolina is one of the critical electoral tossup states. And Western North Carolina is the state’s conservative enclave. The eastern half of the state is dominated by the deep-blue “Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, and the even more liberal “Triad” of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point. Here’s a political map of the state, from the 2020 election:

As you can see, Western North Carolina is the most consistently conservative section of the state. Removing those votes would probably flip the state bright blue.

Right now, everyone is rightly focused on ensuring people are safe and sound. But North Carolina’s GOP should quickly consider ensuring that people displaced in Western North Carolina can vote next month. They should be rapidly organizing to flood the zone with mobile voting buses, sent to precincts where voting places are now closed or are simply gone.

The legislature should be speedily working on emergency laws extending voting hours and days, and authorizing late requests for mail-away ballots for people in affected areas.  Having sufficient provisional ballot supplies will be critical, and there may be many more provisionals needed than usual.

This time, instead of a giant national disaster affecting the whole country’s ability to vote, we are confronted with a giant regional disaster affecting a few critical conservative counties’ ability to vote. It’s like a more targeted version of covid, from an election standpoint.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking about a cryptic government weather program whose name rhymes with an unwieldy, ethereal-sounding musical instrument. You’re probably thinking about how odd and how, well, unnatural is a historically speedy turbo hurricane that in less than 48 hours grew from a tiny tropical storm into one of the largest Category 4 monster hurricanes in history, what they are calling a 1,000-year storm, and which landed on one of the most critical electoral districts in America right before the election.

What can I tell you? I’m just a lawyer, not a turbo hurricane expert, so I’m guessing just like everyone else. I’m certainly not encouraging any conspiracy theories. I’m just asking. Don’t cancel me.

🔥🔥 But if you’re feeling conspiracy-minded, the New York Times ran an intriguing story this morning with more questions than answers headlined, “Plume From Chemical Plant Prompts Evacuation of 17,000 People.” The ‘chemical plant’ is named ‘BioLab.’ You can’t make this stuff up.

As if a hurricane weren’t bad enough, residents of Conyers, Georgia faced a second, totally different evacuation order on Sunday. Harried Conyers citizens must have felt downright oppressed with all the one-damned-thing-after-anothering that was going on this weekend.

The second Conyers evacuation order issued after the BioLab plant caught fire and a giant plume of dense, acrid, chemical smoke began rolling over the county in a nightmarish scene reminiscent of Steven’s King’s The Mist.

Residents who wouldn’t or couldn’t evacuate were told to tightly shut their windows and turn their air conditioners off. Churches were asked to cancel Sunday services. I didn’t see anything about putting on covid masks, which makes things even weirder when you stop and think about it.

The weirdest part was that local law enforcement reported that, according to BioLab, the fire started when a malfunctioning sprinkler system watered “a chemical” which responded quite rudely by lighting itself on fire in some kind of anti-water chemical reaction. Here’s the weird part. The BioLab folks have refused or declined to say what chemical it was. Even the New York Times couldn’t find out:

And he never will. BioLab told the local sheriff that several pallets of the unidentified mystery chemical were removed from the plant for safety. Never mind the safety analysis of putting the chemicals there in the first place.

Fortunately, the crisis appears to be over. Last night, BioLab issued a statement saying, “Our employees are accounted for with no injuries reported.” The quarantine zone has lifted. Problem solved, crisis over.

But … what was the crisis?

🚀🚀 I told you this would happen. Despite the ceaseless and diligent efforts of our crack CIA diplomatic team, including the Director himself, the Middle East war has not ended in peace but erupted into even fiercer flames this weekend. The New York Times ran a regretful story headlined, “Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War.” Hint: it’s never their fault.

This remarkable year began with the Crossfire Hurricane disclosures and has only picked up pace since then. Over the last two weeks, for better or worse, Israel completely re-defined modern warfare. First, using exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, hitting Hezbollah below the belt, Israel killed, maimed, or castrated thousands of key civilian employees responsible for the terror organization’s logistics and communications.

Next, with Hezbollah reeling in shambolic disarray, and with Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu addressing the U.S. Congress, Israel conducted a series of dramatic, high-profile, bunker-busting air strikes in Lebanon that seem to have collectively canceled Hezbollah’s entire leadership cadre, from its strongman Nazrallah down two or three layers deep on the terrorist group’s org chart.

They are calling it an organizational “decapitation.”

On Saturday, Al Jazeera ran a story with this highly suggestive headline:

Will it, though? The fact that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei had to say it means a lot of folks are rightly wondering whether high-tech Israel has managed to permanently erase one of its most problematic historic enemies over just a handful of days, in what might better be described as mass assassination than any kind of recognized combat.

🚀 Consider just three ways Israel has now changed warfare forever. I realize that seems like a strong claim, and there’s no tangible evidence yet, but that’s because every other country in the world is watching what’s happening in the Middle East in shocked horror and thinking hard about how it affects them.

First, Israel shattered an unwritten gentlemen’s agreement that has been part and parcel of modern warfare since the Europeans worked out most of those rules while fighting with each other. One essential rule was that nobody targeted the other side’s leadership. Kings and other royals and elites were off-limits. Only plebes are supposed to fight and die, not planners. The rule was only rarely breached, in brief outbursts of uncontrolled barbarism by unschooled mobs like French and Soviet revolutionaries.

But Israel just put back on the menu leadership decapitation as an official state strategy. Is anyone safe?

Second, Israel showed the world a whole new cheaper, more accessible way of winning. Its high-tech-but-also-low-tech pager and radio bombs put the entire global supply chain into high relief. It’s probably much simpler to get a few operatives into a subcontractor’s manufacturing line or into a dock workers’ union than do whatever NATO thinks it is accomplishing in Ukraine.

I guarantee the pager bombs cost nowhere near $60 billion dollars. I’d be shocked if the whole operation cost more than $6 million —including bribes— far less than the cost of a single throwaway Abrams M-1 tank mired in the Ukraininan rasputitsa. Operation Below the Belt might have cost even less than that.

Third, the critical importance of security must be on every world leader’s mind right now (if they have a working mind, cough). Israel penetrated Hezbollah’s supply chain. It also knew exactly where the top leaders were sitting when it sent its guided missiless. How did Israel know? Did they somehow get into even more Hezbollah devices, in some manner overlooked by the group’s IT teams? Did Israel have compliant human sources that Hezbollah’s security services failed to detect?

How this shakes out is anyone’s guess. We’re off the map, again. But in the short term I expect a trend of countries to start making their own smart devices, and for global supply chains to start contracting.

🛰️🛰️ Yesterday, Forbes ran a remarkable story headlined, “Earth To Get A Comet, A Solar Eclipse, Aurora And A New Moon This Week.” That little list is not even close to all the unusual or super-rare astrological activity to expect in October. It is bad enough that October is the propitious pre-election month, with the outcome literally affecting the entire world, considering how deeply the U.S. has termited itself into everyone else’s business. It turns out the leadup to the election will be decorated with a series of Heavenly Signs, if you believe in those. Otherwise, the month will be an amateur astronomer’s dream.

Feast your eyes on this list, and I’m not even sure it includes all of them:

— A wandering asteroid will briefly orbit the Earth, moon-like, for the month of October before heading back out into space.

— Any day now, astronomers expect the “once-in-a-lifetime” re-ignition of a dead star, T Coronae Borealis, which turns on and off on an eighty-year nova cycle. They call it the “Star of Jacob” star.

— On October 2nd, Israel’s New Year’s Day, a rare “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse will darken Easter Island and astound its enigmatic head statues.

— Between October 6—10 (peaking on the 8th), the annual Draconid meteor shower will grace the skies just after nightfall each evening.

— Around October 12th, a “Comet of the Century” called Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will appear in the October skies and may even be visible in the daytime. It’s been eighty thousand years since it was last in our Solar neighborhood.

— October 17th features a so-called “Hunter’s Supermoon,” the third of four supermoons this year in consecutive months, another rare configuration.

For more information, here’s a link to a Youtube video titled, “October Record Astronomical Events.”

I don’t know about you, but I plan to interpret October’s grab-bag of Heavenly Signs as portents of blessing and great fortune. If they were bad signs, I would expect more crashes, explosions, and stuff blowing up, that kind of thing. Be optimistic! The election is just a month away and our redemption draweth nigh.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow for more delicious and nutritious Coffee & Covid.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

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