Better in their words…

Surprising FL travel hazards; 11th Airborne readied; cash flows via Minneapolis International; Trump ups Greenland tariffs war; Europe fumes; NATO woes; Congress [unanimously] backs major DOGE initiative. oh, and coffee’s possible aid to sedentary Americans.

Source: IGUANAVILLE ☙ Sunday, January 18, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS

ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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During these frozen months, the Sunshine State offers a welcome respite for many Americans. If you’re planning travel to Florida anytime soon, you should inform yourself on the local flora and fauna, and where to obtain critical safety advisories. Hazards tourists should be aware of in the winter months include the difficulty of purchasing jackets or sweaters, the risks of driving icy roads alongside unskilled Floridians, and maybe most important: five foot long iguanas dropping on unsuspecting travelers out of trees.Newsweek ran the informative update this week, headlined, “Florida officials issue falling iguana warning amid plummeting temperatures.”

CLIP: Fox Weather advisory for staying safe in Florida during reptile precipitation (4:08).

As the Cabbage used to say, not a joke. As if alligators lurking in every retention pond weren’t concerning enough, during cold snaps, invasive South American iguanas lose battery power, and their scaly limbs stop working. When they happen to be loitering up in tree branches —a favorite hangout— their little fingers lose their grips and they suddenly plunge down upon anything and anyone below.

Don’t look up. It’s safer just to stay away from trees altogether.

To put it mildly, you haven’t lived until a live, four-foot-long lizard suddenly and unexpectedly impersonates a hat and infests your hair. This kind of airborne excitement tends to discourage tourism and explains why the state issues official “falling iguana advisories.”

Despite the state’s enthusiastic efforts to slow their spread, the scaly critters have crawled throughout South Florida, since they prefer the warmer weather there (just like everyone sane does). But, however cold it may be in your northern locale, it might be better to avoid Miami just now. Come back later, once this arctic blast and reptilian rain is over. Florida isn’t meant to be cold, and things can go sideways fast.

Look out below!

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What can’t coffee do? Let the British keep their damnable tea. In a tragically underreported story this week, Inc. Magazine headlined the latest terrific study on our favorite beverage’s restorative effects: “Scientists Just Discovered That Drinking Coffee Seems to Counteract the Terrible Health Effects of Sitting All Day.”

A new Chinese study published in BMC Public Health was titled, “Association of daily sitting time and coffee consumption with the risk of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality among US adults.” Get ready. In case you needed another reason for swilling the energizing morning drink, here comes another one.

The headline news, buried in scientific jargon, was that coffee apparently reduces the risk of dying from all causes by one-third, and especially cardiacmortality— by a whopping -58%. It’s heart-healthy! So go ahead and have that extra cup. (Note: not medical advice.)

Even better, the researchers looked at sedentary Americans (basically all of us) who sit around for extended periods of time, which everyone already knows is bad for you. Sitting for over 8 hours a day has been linked to +46% all-cause mortality and +79% cardiac deaths. But not for regular coffee drinkers! The scientists discovered that the positive health effects experienced by caffeinated-Americans canceled out many of the deadly effects of sitting down too much.

Specifically, regular coffee guzzlers who sit around all day enjoy a -23% mortality rate compared to non-coffee drinkers. So there.

It’s a mysterious miracle liquid! “No one yet understands how or why coffee has these effects,” Newsweek reported. The scientists speculated that coffee’s well-known antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects improve insulin resistance, dampen inflammation, and make folks talk a lot faster. So.

Newsweek, whose reporters are obviously (and quite rationally) coffee supporters themselves, also helpfully rounded up several prior studies reflecting the healing beverage’s positive effects: reduced cancer rates, reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease, and, I am not making this up, less age-related weight gain. Who needs Monjauro when you can drink coffee?

Of course, don’t get carried away. After all, the study only shows a correlation, which is evidence but not proof of causation. It could be that drinking more coffee helps people live longer, or it could be that people who live longer drink more coffee. It’s a baffling mystery.

Stand by. I’m brewing another cup.

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Meanwhile, up in frozen Minnesota, no iguanas are parachuting onto protestors, but something else might be. Last week, President Trump teased invoking the Insurrection Act to quell astroturfed rioters and even called Governor Walz a criminal fraudster. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Pentagon readies 1,500 soldiers to possibly deploy to Minnesota, officials say.” The subheadline dramatically added, “Troops with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division in Alaska are preparing after President Donald Trump’s Insurrection Act threat, according to defense officials.”

It isn’t hard to predict the frantic, over-the-top corporate media headlines —which have probably already been drafted— that await a presidential order declaring an insurrection in Minneapolis. (Probably something about kings.) That’s what President Trump would need to do before deploying the Army into Minnesota.

But according to unnamed “defense officials” —approved leakers— the Army’s Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division, which specializes in cold-weather operations, is now on “prepare-to-deploy” status. The temperature fell below zero in Minneapolis last night.

In a certain sense, it’s like the Quality Learing Center is coming to Minnesota.

The ‘defense officials’ emphasized that there were no current plans to deploy the 11th Airborne to Minnesota, calling it merely “prudent planning.” One muses, though, about why they told the WaPo at all. Consider this ‘news’ in the context of the ICE and DOJ surge. Clearly, President Trump is not backing down, lowering the temperature, or kowtowing to what appears to be an out-of-control Democrat GOTV campaign.

🔥 In related escalation news, yesterday Simple Flying reported, “ICE Agents Reportedly Detain Over A Dozen MSP Airport Workers On The Job.” The Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport is, believe it or not, one of the busiest in the country. Over 35 million passengers flow through each year. Many of them, apparently, were headed to Somalia hauling sackfulls of U.S. currency (Portlanders: cash). Headline from local affilate WABC-77, last week:

According to widespread reports, during just the last two years (2024-2025), the TSA recorded —get ready for this— over $700 million in cash stowed in passengers’ luggage. That’s nearly $1 million a day. TSA knows this for certain, because the passengers legally declared the money. WABC reported that “the cash outflow from MSP is 10 to 100 times larger than what’s recorded in comparable hubs like JFK.”

“Officials have noted that these couriers are often Somali immigrants or their associates,” WABC unsurprisingly reported. “Federal agencies like the FBI and Department of Homeland Security,” the article said, “are now investigating potential ties to money laundering, welfare fraud, and other illicit activities.” Finally! It’s long past time.

🔥 This hardly needs saying, but American taxpayers’ generosity in funding welfare was meant to help people who are here, not turn one of our biggest airports into an international ATM machine to enrich people in third-world countries. It’s not particularly clear to me why any immigrants, whether legal or not, should qualify for welfare at all. But it’s beyond obvious that if we aregoing to stupidly dole out the money, every single penny should stay right here at home.

This week, both Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Representative Randy Fine (R-FL) announced bills to bar illegal immigrants from receiving any federal aid, including SNAP, Medicaid, TANF, and so on. But why stop at illegalimmigrants? Why should even legal immigrants need welfare? Most other countries require immigrants to prove they can support themselves. Some even require proof of assets or posting of bonds.

Shouldn’t there at minimum be a ten-year waiting period for benefits, at least?

I would support a federal law going so far as to ban all U.S. governments, including states and cities, from giving immigrants any money, whether in grants, contracts, welfare, cash cards, or whatever, regardless of status as legal, illegal, undocumented, or whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, we are just creating the worst kinds of perverse incentives and —obviously— attracting the world’s scam artists and moochers. But I digress.

According to WABC, ICE has now launched an “enhanced oversight of MSP” as part of a three-week surge operation. ICE agents will be posted all around the airport — including on jetbridges awaiting disembarking passengers. This is a terrific start, but they can’t stay there forever. We need a permanent fix.

🔥 In more related news, this week, President Trump offhandedly dropped a colossal welfare bomb. He said, “If we stop this fraud, this massive fraud, we’re going to have a balanced budget.”

CLIP: Trump discusses economic effects of widespread welfare fraud (0:22).

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Speaking of President Trump dropping political bombs, he did it again yesterday, this time somewhere over Greenland’s icy tundra. The New York Times ran the story, headlined, “Trump Announces New European Tariffs in Greenland Standoff; Allies Outraged.”

He’s not messing around. Yesterday morning, President Trump shot out a 445-word missive, another presidential-announcement-by-tweet, declaring a schedule of escalating punitive tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries— “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” Here is the money part:

Regular readers will recall that, the day after Trump announced his tariff dashboard on Liberation Day last year, I speculated that he would play the dashboard like an electronic piano, pressing the levers and twirling the dials to effect the most harmonious international ‘diplomacy’— all without firing a shot. If it wasn’t already clear that I predicted correctly, this story should end all debate.

Trump was responding to the glacial progress of negotiations. Last week, officials from Denmark and Greenland met in Washington with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance to discuss a lucrative deal. They quickly got nowhere. Denmark stubbornly said Greenland is not for sale at any price. Leaders from Europe stuck their oars in, publicly voicing support for Denmark, which provoked Trump’s tariff announcement.

The Europeans hated the new tariffs even more than the Greenland deal. “The leaders of Europe reacted Saturday with unified outrage,” the Times reported. The sudden escalation seems to have caught everyone by surprise (again). The usual European leaders —Macron, Starmer, Merz— all issued corresponding threats and ultimatums, like unleashing a “trade bazooka” at the United States— whatever that means.

Short of an all-out trade war —a fabulously expensive response that they cannot afford— there isn’t a whole lot they can do about it. “The move appeared to leave little room for Europe to maneuver or negotiate in a harsh and combative era of geopolitics,” the Times conceded. “It also left Europe with few options to counter Mr. Trump without repercussions.”

And so the Europeans are convening their latest emergency weekend summit, which meets today. “Ambassadors from across the 27-nation bloc will gather in Brussels for an emergency meeting at 5 p.m. on Sunday,” the article said.

One suspects there have been more emergency EU summits since Trump took office than at any time since World War II. We will watch their progress with great interest.

🔥 The whole debate is very strange. No one meaningfully disputes Trump’s central premise, which is that Greenland is critical for America’s national security, but NATO has failed to prevent Russian and Chinese advances in the Arctic toward the island. Apart from some limp claims that current treaties already allow for some US military expansion on the island, the main argument seems focused more on squishy, effeminate issues of “fairness” and “playing nice” with NATO allies.

But NATO is a Cold War relic. The organization’s modern purposes and benefits are hard to describe in simple terms, and sound more like a salad bar of mission creep. NATO’s eastward expansion predictably created the very threats it claims to seek to prevent (Russian revanchism). The group constantly ensnares the U.S. in ancient European conflicts and EU adventurism. The best argument for keeping NATO is that it provides sites for lots of American military bases, but that’s also an equally strong argument for ditching the damned thing.

If there is a clear theme arising from what we can observe of Trump 2.0’s domestic and geopolitical strategy, a theme that could be expressed in a single phrase, it is this: Trump is hellbent on cutting off the zombified tentacles of the globalist Cold War era —using tariffs as a transition tool— and launching a new multipolar era of global economic cooperation.

🔥 In related news, the New York Times troubled itself to create a genuinely useful “tariff dashboard” in the form of an interactive map. You can hover over any country and see its current tariff level. It’s quite informative, presumably for different reasons than the Times intended. Here’s the link to the latest Trump Tariffs on countries and products. Enjoy.

Hilariously, but quite predictably, the Times refused to label “Russia” on its world map, in spite of all the room for the name (more than any other country). 🙄

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It’s another DOGE win. Congress finally stirred itself to codify the tiniest bit of Trump 2.0. The shot is: In March, 2025, leftwing commenter Matthew Yglesias wrote: “Trump is lying about dead people and Social Security.” The chaser: Lousiana Senator John Kennedy posted a press release titled, “U.S. House of Representatives passes Kennedy, Peters, Wyden bill to end government payments to deceased Americans.” The bipartisan bill passed unanimously. It’s now headed to Trump’s desk for signature. Corporate media ignored it.

It’s actually much bigger than Social Security. The bill requires the Social Security Administration (SSA) to continuously share its Death Master File (a database of reported deaths) with the Treasury Department, so Treasury can flag dead people as “Do Not Pay” across all federal programs.

For decades, SSA has refused to provide this information to Treasury, citing privacy concerns. What kind of privacy dead people need remains an open question.

The reason this story is bigger than just ending Social Security payments to dead people is because Trump and DOGE have created a single bottleneck to trap fraud at the source— when Treasury cuts a check. Before this new law, Treasury had no way of knowing whether any recipient of funds was still alive or not. Now, checks can be stopped immediately, regardless of whether they’re for social security, welfare, grants, contract payments, or anything else.

Now let’s put immigrants on the Do Not Pay list!

Since DOGE raised the issue, Democrats complained there was “no evidence” any dead people were being sent checks from the federal government. But now they’ve voted for the database-sharing bill. I could speculate on what’s changed, like the Minnesota fraud scandal, but I would be guessing.

As a reminder, back in his DOGE days, as early as February of last year, Elon Musk highlighted the oddity of the Social Security database listing large numbers of people with birthdays older than 110 years.

This new bill doesn’t address this particular ‘vampire’ problem, but Musk followed up in March 2025 by announcing a cleanup: 3.2 million records aged 120+ were automatically marked as deceased in the database. According to fact-checkers, most of those people died before mandatory death reporting laws. So hopefully it’s not as big a problem now.

Anyway, eleven months after Elon and DOGE identified the problem and began moving to consolidate all the disconnected federal databases into Treasury’s single Do Not Pay system, we now have the first official law making it permanent. We can hope this is the first of many.

🔥 Can you feel the momentum? It must be a difficult strain for corporate media’s editors, to decide which Trump outrage to focus on, if “focus” is the right word amidst this blizzard of activity. Venezuela? Greenland? Minnesota? Zelensky? Europe? California? Welfare fraud crackdowns? SNAP suspensions? ICE enforcement? Canada? The East Wing ballroom buildout? Falling iguanas?

We will do our best to keep you informed on everything you need to know. (Especially the raining reptiles.) It’s all getting pretty exciting.

Have a blessed Sunday! Have a joyful and rewarding day of rest, then scoot back here tomorrow morning so we can kick off another exciting week of essential news and commentary. And thank you, once again, for your continued loyal support.

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