RELIGIOUS FERVOR ☙ Tuesday, October 8, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS
DeSantis ghosts Kamala; Florida's practical hurricane approach; Milton bends physics; more good fluoride news; Middle East proxy war; betting markets surge to Trump; Kamala ghosted by dad; much more. JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! We are in full-on hurricane prep mode now, again, as Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida’s west coast. During a run to Lowe’s for supplies yesterday, I made the mistake of jumping on I-75 northbound. The state has opened the breakdown lanes on both sides of the highway, and let’s just call it an adrenaline-boosting experience. The storm is forecast to hit tomorrow afternoon or evening, so we have one more pre-hurricane roundup before the lights go out.
Your roundup today includes: DeSantis has no time for nonsense and dodges Kamala’s calls; Florida task force takes practical approach to problem of sluggish local officials; Hurricane Milton setting more records as it pushes the atmosphere’s physical limits; sea change in fluoride reporting follows historical federal court ruling; AP accidentally shows secret US destabilization policy in Iran war story; good news from the betting markets while polls remain mired in poly sci bafflement; Kamala’s daddy issues and corporate media covering for them slips astonishing 2024-style coincidence; and Tucker knocks it out of the park again interviewing the world’s richest man.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 
️️ NBC News ran a snarky story yesterday headlined, “Ron DeSantis is refusing to take Harris' call on Hurricane Helene.” Ain’t nobody got time for that. DeSantis responded to querulous reporters saying, after six years as Florida’s Governor, the Vice-President has never called him about a hurricane before. Only now, when the Cackler is fighting a losing political campaign:CLIP: I’m not selfish, SHE is selfish (1:44).
Seriously, people. America’s Governor shouldn’t be wasting time helping Kamala chortle up some Twitter soundbites.
️ Yesterday, teams from Florida’s Emergency Operations Group tore down the closed chain-link fence to the Pinellas County debris landfill so that pre-hurricane cleanup operations could continue through the night. A leaked text from Florida Highway Patrol Director Dave Kerner to Governor DeSantis shows the ‘get it done’ spirit pervading the state right now.Enjoy the video of the Pinellas County landfill gates being liberated, while Pinellas officials (D) slept or whatever:
CLIP: Florida Highway Patrol emergency ops team takes practical approach
️ I told you so! This morning, NBC Chicago ran a stormy story headlined, “Hurricane Milton approaches limits of what Earth’s atmosphere can produce.” NBC said the storm is “nearing historic territory among the strongest storms of all time.”According to a 1998 MIT study, a hurricane’s theoretical maximum possible wind speed is 190 mph. After that, the streams cross or something, and it’s a ticket for reckless blowing and straight to storm jail for breaking the wind speed limit. Only one historical storm has ever reached that exciting apogee, 1980’s Hurricane Allen. Hurricane Milton hit 180 mph yesterday afternoon, just ten miles below the theoretical maximum, joining the ranks of only a handful of storms to earn the “Need for Speed” demerit badge.
As you can see, the spaghetti models show the storm running right across Florida’s “I-4 corridor,” a densely-populated urban belt including Florida’s reddest conservative county, Polk, named for the popular Czech musical style featuring men wearing garters and funny hats. Or it was named for some Civil War general. Either way. We’re not sure yet.
There was some good news overnight. First, Milton is expected to prematurely weaken before reaching the state. Indeed, during the wee hours it slowed from max winds of 180 to its present 155. Maybe it took a nap, because it would be tired. Milton has de-escalated to “only” a moderate Category 4.
The second bit of encouraging news was, like Turbo Hurricane Helene, Turbo Hurricane Milton is speeding across the Gulf of Mexico like a dwarf launched from a cannon. It should cross Florida quickly, leaving little time for mischief along the way. Unlike Helene, which headed inland toward the spots where everyone had evacuated, Milton is aimed toward the Atlanta ocean, where it can sit and spin as long as it likes.
My little town of Gainesville sits more safely in the swampy middle of the and is currently just above the northern half of the cone of possible tracks. Still, after watching Helene’s bizarre behavior, we’re bracing for the unpredictable. We started pre-hurricane protocol yesterday and will continue today. Prepare for impact!
Prayers for everyone who’ll be affected by either historic storm this month.
Last week, I reported terrific news about the first federal decision in history finding that average water fluoridation levels pose an unreasonable health risk to children by potentially lowering their IQ. (Which explains a lot about the last 50 years, if you think about it.) Anyway, mercifully, something like a sort of intellectual exodus is surprisingly underway. It all began with AP’s September 25th headline, “Fluoride in drinking water poses enough risk to merit new EPA action, judge says.”The Associated Press quoted University of Florida researcher Ashley Malin, PhD, who has published studies on the controversial chemical, and who called last month’s decision “the most historic ruling in the U.S. fluoridation debate that we’ve ever seen.”
On the other hand, the CDC’s so-called experts, who were dead wrong during covid, still call fluoride the greatest public health achievement of the last century. So. You choose.
Anyway, in the two weeks since the decision, a storm surge of people hedging their bets took off like a Boeing 747 with its wheels still on. Wait till you see the kinds of formerly verboten headlines appearing now. First, from News Nation, three days ago:
Now they tell us. Similarly, the UK Guardian, last Friday:
NBC News, five days ago:
Of all places, the far-left Vox, last month:
In other words, fluoride’s Overton Window has been smashed open, and it’s okay to question the controversial chemical now. Feast your eyes on this next astonishing headline, from The Concord Monitor and its smug science editor, two days ago:
You don’t say. Consider this shocking mea culpa from the Monitor’s article:
The ‘Granite Geek’ is having a minor redpill epiphany, as well as what appear to be brief flashes of painful introspection:
Soon, everybody will have always been against fluoride. Ladies and gentlemen, behold: another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact.
Yesterday provided a chance to look at current events through the lens of this weekend’s discussion of the secretive Wolfowitz Doctrine. As a reminder, in 1992, before it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the United States federal government, the New York Times published a leaked Pentagon brief outlining an executive policy of ensuring that no other country can ever challenge the U.S.’s lone superpower status. Hi-jinx followed. With that in mind, yesterday the Associated Press ran a Middle East story headlined, “Israel's strikes are shifting the power balance in the Middle East, with US support.”And there it was, the hideous essence of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, explicated right in the article’s opening graf:
I am not qualified to assess the relative ethics, politics, and theologies inherent the region’s myriad of conflicts. Simplistically, it seems fair that Israel is fully justified in righteous retaliation against Hamas and Hezbollah for the brutal and astonishingly well-documented October 7th invasion. But the AP’s article raises a deeper question for us: is the U.S. taking advantage of Israel’s woes, to provoke a new proxy war with Iran, to quash a regional competitor?
The Middle Eastern conflict is complex and many-faceted, bound up with the core truth that Israel is an historic and close ally in a region dominated by aggressive, theocratic muslim nations. But how much of that aggression is rational self-defense to the United States’ obvious (if unofficial) strategy of opposing and undermining any competitors?
In other words, as the AP’s remarkable opening paragraph neatly encapsulated, the U.S. first destabilized the Middle East in 2003, through our pre-emptive military action to force regime change in Iraq. And now that Iran is heading toward regional “ascendency,” the U.S. is funding Israel (like Ukraine!), to squash the rising Iranian threat by proxy.
I wish to avoid fueling controversy about Middle East policy broadly. But I hope we can all agree that we urgently need a President who ends wars rather than unilaterally funding the next conflict through executive orders, without Congress, using un-auditable, murky, black military budgets.
Could the answer to preventing World War III be as simple as ending the Wolfowitz Doctrine? Ending the policy of “competing” through force and color revolutions, while pretending to be the world’s policeman? Would it make more sense to help other nations grow through cooperative economic competition, rather than miring them in political unrest and violence and making enemies wherever we go?
Speaking of needing presidents who end wars, some flashes of national sanity might be leaking through cracks in the polling again.
Polymarket’s betting index on the Presidential election is beginning, once again, to show daylight between President Trump and the Cackler. As the Nation begins learning more about the Democrats’ selected candidate and her aging, China-loving sidekick, the numbers are once again widening in President Trump’s favor:Corporate media polls, of course, show the race much tighter than Polymarket’s crowd-sourced, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is calculus. But as we well know, the polls are the least reliable predictors of presidential elections. Last week, the Harvard Gazette ran a related story headlined, “Why do election polls seem to have such a mixed track record?”
By “mixed results,” the Gazette meant, “always overestimates democrat votes.” The article described polling experts baffled by what they want to call the “Trump Effect,” which means he’s breaking their traditional models of likely voters and enthusiasm.
In other words, it’s Trump’s fault.
To get a better idea of how manipulated the poll numbers are these days, consider the New York Times’ Sunday article headlined, “How One Polling Decision Is Leading to Two Distinct Stories of the Election.” In making some other kind of point, the article described how profoundly the pollsters manipulate the numbers and tweak the questions they ask, trying to find a “fair” voter sampling.
It is hopelessly naive to think the polls represent some kind of pure numerical result of a bunch of phone calls. They might be better described as “models.”
And so, with the pollsters claiming utter bafflement, it has come down to this: yesterday, Newsweek ran a story headlined, “Will Trump or Kamala Harris win key swing states: we asked ChatGPT, Grok.” Haha! Ask the chatbots! The fact that a chat query constitutes an article in major media, says a lot about how little people trust the polls.
Spoiler: both chatbots found Trump eking out a narrow electoral college victory. Who needs pollsters, when you have AI? Am I right?
In a 2024-style twist that might explain much, it unsurprisingly turns out that Kamala Harris has serious daddy issues. The New York Times ran a hagiographic story Friday headlined, “Kamala Harris and the Influence of an Estranged Father Just Two Miles Away.” Perhaps even more astonishing than the fact that Kamala and her father haven’t spoken in decades was that Kamala’s father’s first name and middle initial are “Donald J.” I am not making that up.The Times’ article is an overlong, over-the-top biography of far-left economist Donald J. Harris that tries its best to excuse Kamala’s absence from his life, bizarrely attempting to paint a picture of a strong, albeit absent, father figure who positively influenced his daughter even though the two can’t stand each other. Without evidence, the Times hilariously described their nonexistent relationship as his “spectral presence” in her life.
In other words, he ghosted her.
Dr. Harris,” the Times earnestly informed readers, “has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one.” Uh huh. The excruciatingly lengthy, excuses-packed, race-baiting, meandering article never quite got around to putting its finger on the family’s problem, even though that would seem to be the most interesting question for readers. The closest the article came was quoting a family friend who said the trouble “is that they’re so much alike.”
I think that is called damning someone with faint praise. What common element of their similar personalities precludes familial affection?
I’m not slamming Kamala Harris for having a troubled family life. Who among us can claim a halcyon Leave It To Beaver legacy? But all this blackwashing has got to stop.
Donald J. What are the odds? I mean, come on.
Tucker stole my tagline! Yesterday, Tucker Carlson posted his latest, nearly two-hour interview with Elon Musk under the caption, “Elon Musk is all in.” I forgive him, of course. Or maybe it was just obvious.CLIP: Tucker Carlson interviews Elon Musk (1:48:00).
The interview started strong, noting Elon’s muscular Trump endorsement. “If he loses,” Elon wryly —and correctly— noted, “I’m f*cked.” As Tucker laughed, Elon followed that noteworthy observation by asking, “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”
The wide-ranging interview has already racked up 26 million views. “I’m not anti-vaccine,” Elon said, invoking the exhausted specters of smallpox and polio. But he was firm on one thing: “we shouldn’t force people to take vaccines. I believe in freedom.” Elon developed the theme, adding, “We should try as much as possible to maximize people’s personal freedom. That’s what’s made America great.”
It was a fascinating, funny, sweeping interview. I’m reluctant to call it Tucker’s best or his most important interview, because there are so many great candidates since the former Fox anchor got fired and started his own gig. But you cannot deny that we live in a remarkable period in history where we enjoy the opportunity to hear directly from the world’s richest and most productive man in something close to real-time.
We are the first generation in human history to enjoy that opportunity. Think about that.
Speaking of productivity, a topic about which Elon is a real expert, he described the left’s appalling war against builders. “Every year,” he explained, “we’re making it harder in America for actual builders to get things done. We’re in this weird Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged scenario, where there’s yet another regulation, another rule. That phrase from Atlas Shrugged, ‘oh you’ll manage, oh you’ll manage.’ Eventually, you’re like, you can’t get anything done.”
Elon said his whole once-democrat family is becoming Trump voters. “You know what’ll turn you from a democrat to a Republican pretty fast? Getting punched in the face while you walk down the street,” he explained, adding “and then no action being taken against those who hurt you.” The space billionaire described how his former-democrat mother lives in New York City, and several of her previously-democrat friends have been red-pilled by enduring a transformative experience that literally woke them up like a punch in the nose.
Not himself especially religious (Elon called himself a “cultural Christian”), the world’s most successful and biggest-thinking entrepreneur spoke to the critical importance to civilization of religion. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he explained. “So when you have an increase in the secular nature of society, for most people, they need something to fill that void. And so they adopt a religion —it’s not called a religion. But like, woke, the woke mind virus. It takes the place of religion, and they feel it with religious fervor. Essentially like a holy war.”
It’s a long interview. But how often do you get the chance to hear unfiltered thoughts of the most transformative and influential man on the planet? Make time to listen to the whole thing. You can thank me later.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Stay safe, get your extra batteries, and get back here tomorrow morning for the final pre-hurricane roundup.
