Better in their words…

Source: SIGNS ☙ Thursday, November 2, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

The other night, plumb spang in the middle of dinner, Michelle suddenly and decisively put down her fork, looked dead at me and announced, “I want to ask you something.” I mumbled “sure” through a mouthful of extra-chewy but slightly-less-expensive discount steak, and gave her my undivided — albeit slightly wary — attention.

Her eyes narrowed, and she asked firmly and clearly, “Do you think about the Roman Empire every day?”

I pleaded ignorance. “I don’t know, honey, I haven’t kept up with my journaling.”

But Michelle is an expert at this kind of interrogation. “I saw something on Instagram today claiming men think about the Roman Empire at least six times a day. Did you think about the Roman Empire today?” she asked, putting it to a point.

“That’s easy,” I explained, showing myself to be the open book that I am. “I thought about the Roman Empire right before dinner, when you mentioned wanting to go out soon for some Italian.”

At that point, she had me dead to rights. Her pointedness got even more pointy, her eyes flashed like surgical scalpels, and with a deafening implied “Aha!” she asked, “Did you think about the Roman Empire more than oncetoday?”

I considered this carefully, nibbling contentedly on a much-softer grilled broccoli floret. Finally I gave her the honest answer: “Definitely. A hundred percent.”

For as long as I can remember, people have predicted the imminent Fall of America, comparing current events to the Fall of the Roman Empire. But I never credited it much, since the Roman Empire was falling for centuries, taking longer to clear itself off the world’s stage than America has even been hanging around bothering everybody.

But I’ve been thinking more about Falls recently. We sure seem to be on a civilizational speedway bypass of some kind, racing past the Romans going about 90 mph.

For example, I wonder whether the Emperor ever tried defunding the Roman Police Departments in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and the Empire’s other big cities? I wonder whether the Empire deliberately knocked down parts of Hadrian’s Wall so that the barbarian hordes could clamber through more conveniently, not having to do so much climbing, per se, and so they could enter in larger, much more comfortable traveling groups? Et cetera, ad infinitum.

I’m thinking: probably not. Romans might have lacked A.I. and “smart” phones, and at times their emperors may have been crazier than sprayed roaches, but despite those handicaps the Romans were still smart enough not to do any of those birdbrained things like we are.

I know for a fact the Romans weren’t flying the barbarians all over the Empire, putting them up in hotels, and handing them $2,400-a-month EBT cards for doing nothing. I mean, they literally couldn’t have. They were good at war and plumbing, but the Romans never even considered using airplanes and fiat money to get to the end even faster.

Are the Barbarians inside the gates?

A couple highly-suggestive items popped up on my social feeds yesterday, which seemed to me much like signs of the times. At minimum, I think they show where people’s heads are at these days. We have transcended disbelief and anger and are entering some kind of apocalyptic acceptance phase.

The first example was a tweet from usually-secular Human Events editor Jack Posobeic (2.3 million followers), in a video clip interviewing someone about the Antichrist.

Shortly after spotting that one, I discovered a brand-new video podcast from Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk (1.2 million subscribers), interviewing the excellent, pro-America, Calvary Chapel Pastor Jack Hibbs … about how to recognize we’re in the End Times. It’s a good interview, actually. But it is telling about America’s psychology.

CLIP: Charlie Kirk — It’s The End of the World As We Know It with Jack Hibbs (32:29).

For non-Christian C&Cers: oddly, Christians believe the End Times to be a good thing, although perhaps temporarily uncomfortable. Kind of like getting a rabies shot. It stings like the dickens but then cures what ails you. Likewise, the End Times are to be a bit of a rough patch for a few years, but after that comes 1,000 years of peace in a perfect world.

That, however, is not the point.

The point is, world events apparently seem so dire that mainstream Christians are now openly discussing the End of The World as if it were no more out of the ordinary than discussing more woke politics in the latest Netflix series. But is it justified? Are world events really that dire?

On the one hand, clearly things have been worse in American history than they are now. We once had a bloody civil war where we fought ourselves. The rejoinder might be, the Civil War only affected America, and not the whole world.

On a broader stage, we’ve also faced World Wars before, twice. Of course, those previous times there weren’t two dozen (or more) unstable countries bristling with nuclear weapons, not to mention whatever biological terrors the white coats have obviously been cooking up like they’re preparing for Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe something like super monkeypox, or even worse.

What I see today are some admittedly mixed signs of cooling off.

💣 On the cooler side, the BBC ran a widely-reported, highly-suggestive story yesterday headlined, “Israel / Gaza: Joe Biden calls for ‘pause’ in conflict.” (Haha: ‘Joe Biden’. BBC left the word “president” out of its headline.)

Anyway, yesterday during a limp Minneapolis campaign event (attended by only 200 people), a female protestor shouted at Biden about Israel, and Biden placated her by agreeing that, “I think we need a pause” in the fighting. Joe then added that a pause would “give time to get the prisoners out.”  Later the White House “clarified” to add that a pause would also allow humanitarian aid to come in.

It wasn’t any kind of official statement. And not one of the three big Establishment papers even ran the “pause” story. So it almost didn’t happen. But … it was a tentative first step toward cooling things down.

💣 Bloomberg ran a “cooling off” op-ed yesterday headlined, “Iran Doesn’t Want Hezbollah Fighting Israel.”

Hezbollah is a well-equipped, Iran-backed, Lebanon-based terror group that everybody had expected to attack Israel while it was down right after October 7th. An attack from Hezbollah would make the Gaza action look like playtime at a nursery school (where the kids all carry hand grenades, but you get the idea).

But so far, Hezbollah has satisfied itself with making mischief on Israel’s northern border. Then yesterday — despite Hezbollah’s widely-reported advertisement a “major announcement” the group will make tomorrow (Friday) — the author predicted that Iran will decide to keep Hezbollah out of the fight.

The rationale is a little complicated, but it relies on two basic arguments: first, Lebanon has serious economic problems of its own, which would not be helped by war.  Second, Hezbollah is Iran’s best-equipped and trained proxy army — kind of like its version of a Wagner Group — and Iran doesn’t want to “waste” the group’s men and materiel on this particular fight.

Maha Yahya (if that’s her real name), the director of Carnegie’s Middle East Center in Beirut, told the New York Times yesterday that she thinks Iran is unlikely to “squander” Hezbollah’s forces right now, because the stakes are sky high, especially with “two U.S. aircraft carriers stationed in the Mediterranean, which could strike the group.”

It was a fair point, and that is probably exactly why those carriers are bobbing around the neighborhood.

Personally, I doubt very much that Hezbollah intends to declare war tomorrow, since announcing war ahead of time kind of ruins the surprise, and it totally destroys any first-mover advantage.

The war is unlikely to spread if Hezbollah just tosses a few rockets from the sidelines. So — right now — it looks like there’s a realistic chance things won’t escalate.

💣 On the other hand, yesterday Military.com ran a story headlined Marine Corps Command in Charge of Middle East Cancels Annual Ball Due to ‘Unforeseen Operational Commitments.’”. The U.S. Marine Corps’ Central Command — which was just in the news yesterday when its top commander suffered a medical emergency  — also announced yesterday that the Marine Corps’ 248th Annual Birthday Ball — long-scheduled to start just over two weeks from now (November 16th) — was abruptly cancelled, due to “Unforeseen Operational Commitments and the Nature of our current Mission.”

Major General McPhilips’ announcement didn’t say what unforeseen operational commitments, nor did he offer any details about the nature of the current mission.

The Military.com article added that Marines spokesman Capt. Joe Wright confirmed that the ball’s cancellation was due to the situation in Israel and the resulting uncertainty in the region, but he stressed there were “no major operational changes or changes in force posture.” That seems to conflict with the words of the announcement (‘unforeseen operational commitments’), but okay. Wright also said the move was meant to free up ‘planning staff’ in case the situation in the Middle East changes.

Of course, one wouldn’t expect the Marines to advertise their war planning. Nor would we want them to. We don’t know anything for sure, but we canfairly assume that the military branch is at least considering a significant, fancy dress-ball-destroying deployment.

🔥 In good news here at home, on Tuesday NBC ran a story headlined “In his first act, Speaker Mike Johnson uses Israel aid to pick a fight with Joe Biden.”  I already liked how the story sounded even before I read the rest.

Last year, Joe Biden and the democrats passed a megalithic bill with the Orwellian moniker of “the Inflation Reduction Act.” Among other historic largesse, it awarded the IRS $80 billion  dollars to hire the world’s largest army of 80,000 new IRS agents to “go after wealthy tax evaders.”

Some folks have wondered just how many ‘wealthy tax evaders’ Biden thinks there are.

They might not need to look very far. One of the wealthy tax evaders could even be living in Biden’s house in Maui right now. The irony of Hunter’s tax problems has completely escaped the corporate media, which have wasted tons of chances to sprinkle some sly humor into their otherwise-obsequious stories.

Anyway, showing skill at his job, Speaker Johnson successfully and promptly passed a $14 billion Israeli aid package — just what Biden wanted — but without any aid for Ukraine. So that was good. But even better, the House bill required an offset, to pay for the emergency aid, by downwardly-adjusting the IRS’s $80 billion bonus by the same $14 billion in Israel aid.

It was political genius.

Biden and democrats in the Senate were outraged! How dare he. Democrats vowed to oppose the bill come what may. Israel be damned! This is the IRS! For example, Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-Va.), sputtered in a recent tweet that, “This isn’t an offset, it’s exploiting a war to pass a tax cut for the rich.” In other words, democrats argue that decreasing all the newly-planned audits will shake down, I mean ‘recover’ less money from taxpayers.

Biden has vowed to veto the bill if it somehow passes the democrat-controlled Senate, which seems unlikely. In the meantime, government money-hemorrhaging remains on hold. The Republicans are starting to look very smart indeed, which is a long-overdue boost for the GOP.

💉 Yesterday I reported on the recent heart attack death of a General Hospital actor, Tyler Christopher. What I omitted due to time constraints was that Tyler’s death makes four General Hospital actors who’ve died just in the last twelve months.

Here the list:

— December 21st, Sonya Eddy, 55, played Head Nurse Epiphany Johnson, died from an “infection following nonemergency surgery.”

— May 12th, Jacklyn Zeman, 70, played Nurse Bobbie Spencer, died after “a ‘short battle’ with cancer.”

— September 17th, Billy Miller, 43, played twin brothers Jason Morgan and Drew Cain, “surrendered to manic depression.”

— Tyler Christopher, 50, had a heart attack (reported yesterday).

Just three sudden deaths on one show in one year is still plenty, even without counting Billy Miller. But sadly, these days we must consider the jabs even in tragic cases of suicide:

What are the odds? I mean, what are the odds General Hospital got a ‘hot’ vaccine lot number?

🔥 Yesterday, about two hours after C&C reported on the Wuhan-Montana story, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis posted about the same story:

Without wading into Presidential politics, I do like very much that DeSantis is shining a light on all these cockroaches. Thanks for highlighting this story, Governor!

🔥 Finally, I guess election fraud does happen, after all. The Connecticut Examiner ran a story yesterday headlined, “Court Overturns Ganim Win in Bridgeport Primary, Calling Evidence of Fraud ‘Shocking’.”

After a two-week trial, in a 37-page opinion (which is linked in the story), democrat judge William Clark ordered a new democrat primary — a do-over — after video evidence showed elections officials stuffing ballot boxes with absentee ballots — which in Connecticut may only be dropped off by the voter or a close family member.

With the fraudulent ballots included, incumbent Mayor Joe Ganim won the primary. Without them, his opponent John Gomez, pictured above, would have won.

When he testified, even Mayor Ganim, the beneficiary of the fraud, testified that he was “shocked” — shocked! — at all the evidence. I bet he was. The judge’s opinion noted that, “Mr. Ganim was also correct to be ‘shocked’ at what he saw on the video clips in evidence that were shown to him while he was on the witness stand. The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties.”

Everybody’s shockingly shocked. How could this happen, and so forth.

So — this is another article you can forward to anyone insisting there is “no evidence” of election fraud. Courts can find election fraud when they want to. We only need to encourage this same kind of careful consideration for general elections — and not just democrat primaries.

Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow, for what I hope will be back to our regular programming.

Share

We can’t do it without you. 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:  ☕ 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