Month: March 2021

Dash and Grab, what is going on during the collapse of the United States

Yeah. So today I went and got myself a nice beer, as is my custom on my way to the house for lunch. It’s a nice day. The weather is warming up. Getting a little glare from the clouds and the “feeling” in the air is one of calmness. There was a gaggle of young girls near the elevator. All  in their lower to mid 20’s. Nice. Cute. Entry-level office workers.

Came home, and my damn dog decides to break the afternoon stillness by barking like a mad-dog.

He’s getting old and doggie dementia is kicking in. I had to go up to him let him smell my hand before I could calm him down. Ah. That’s life, you know. There’s always different folk on different wavelengths creating the canopy of life that we know and love.

The wife made me a Cobb Salad to have with my beer. It’s good stuff, I’ll tell you what.

Cobb salad.

Lately I have been a-wondering about what is “next”. You know, World War III, a new beginning, or something else. I have come to the conclusion that we have reached the point that I like to refer to as “The end of the beginning“.

Ah. Isn’t that the case.

It’s like this video (below).

As always, please click on the picture to have the video load and open up in a new window.

It’s not a dreary thing.

It’s a realization that things are changing, and yet the changes will continue.

My top running posts, by far, are my writings on SHTF. As has been the case for the last three months or so. People from all over the internet have been visiting my writings on these matters. They don’t post comments, but they read, stick around and then disappear. Like ghosts in the night. I don’t know who they are, or why they are reading about how to prepare for turmoil inside of America. But they do.

People are scared.

As uncomfortable as things are, they are not yet dire. There is this feeling like an axe is going to fall any day now, and it’s at all levels. It’s like the cats and dogs barking before an earthquake, or that bird migrate South before a disaster. Something is up, but no one can put their finger on it.

The “news” is following the direction that must have been set in place years earlier. It does not reflect this feeling; this situation, or this condition. Instead its the same old bullshit.

The same bullshit.

  • Accuse China of XXXX, and YYYY.
  • Don’t report on radical Marxist legislation or progressive issues, but they continue apace.
  • Harp on the Coronavirus.
  • Promote the super wealthy as if the debt-serfs give a fuck anymore.
  • New taxes on the horizon!
  • But NASA is developing new things!

Yeah. Different subjects, but the same tired old formula.

It’s the end of the beginning.

People know. They KNOW.

The world that we all used to live in, and the ideas and the beliefs that we all used to have are long gone. They are dead. Dead as in two day old fish dead. Dead like Fat Fredy’s Cat  sniffing a dead fish dead.

Fat Fredy’s cat

.

But why?

Why is the human species out in the West (not in China, nor Russia, nor Africa) feel this way?

Why?

Certainly there’s a lot of “chatter” on the social media. Today “Moon Over Alabama” and all sort of “armchair experts” talking and discussing the Tao inside of China and how that defines what China is today. LOL!

Fact of the matter.

Inside of China… no one talks about the Tao.

I do mean NO ONE.

Although Taoism is China's only indigenous religion, its sway now pales compared with its previous status. 

- Corespirit

That’s like assuming all Americans have daily discussions about the influences of President Taft on contemporaneous social media platforms. Especially what President Traft would have to say in regards to selfies on Tiktok, and shadow-blocking trolls.

So silly.

Seriously.

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Perhaps it has something to do with how the West; the American run Western societies have evolved. And to which degree they sit as the world around them evolves in a different direction. Perhaps it is something much more fundamental to this degree…

The End of the Beginning

I believe that the big changes that all of us are due to experience have already been set in motion. And with this understanding comes the realization that “the stage is set”.

What is next…

Well it is the Start of the changes.

All that we have experienced so far is just the prep-work. And it’s all in place. Every single thing is where it needs to be for the big changes to take place.

What am I talking about?

I am talking about this….

This is a most excellent interview from the Greanville post. All credit to the authors. It was edited to fit this venue, but aside from that it is as intact as possible.

It deals with economics and finance and government systems. All stuff that I find boring. But this point of view is refreshing as it looks at what is going on and how the banking class is looking at profiting from the collapse. Yikes! What a great read!

Pepe: So, what’s going to happen in the, let’s say, short to mid-term in the U.S.? 

Michael, we are seeing the corrosion of the whole system, not only externally in terms of foreign policy and the end of the free lunch, but internally with those 70-million-plus “deplorables” being literally canceled from public debate, the impoverishment of the middle classes, with over 50 million people in America who are practically becoming literally poor. 

And obviously the American dream ended a few decades ago, maybe, but now there’s not even a glimpse of it, that there could be a renewal of the American dream. 

So we have a larval civil war situation, degrading on a daily basis. 

What’s the end game in fact? And what exactly does Wall Street, the American ruling class —the guys who have those lunches at the Harvard club — what do they ultimately want?

Michael: Well, what you call a disaster for the economy, isn’t it a bonanza for the 1 percent? 

This is a victory of finance. 

You look at it as a collapse of industrial capitalism. I look at it as the victory of rentier finance capitalism. 

You’re having probably 10 million Americans that are going to be thrown out of their apartments and their homes in June when the moratorium on rents and mortgages ends. 

You’re going to have a vast increase in the homeless population. 

That will probably represent an increase in people who use the subways. Where else are they going to live? 

And all of this, there’s an immense amount of private capital firms that have all been created in the last year of just wealth accumulations and they’re saying there are going to be such great opportunities to pick up real estate at bargain prices, all of this for the commercial real estate, that’s broken, all the buildings and the restaurants that have to be sold because they can’t meet their mortgage payments and their rents, all the houses that are going to be under, private capital can come in and do what was done after the Obama evictions.

We can do what Blackstone did. We can buy them all out for pennies on the dollar. So, for them, they’re looking at their own 20-year plan. And their 20-year plan is to grab everything!

Ouch.

Here’s the article…

Part one and part two. Bam! And Bam!

Pepe Escobar in conversation with Michael Hudson

At The Henry George School of Social Science
The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns everything and there’s no exploitation, no unearned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and there’s no 1 percent..."

Michael Hudson: Well, I’m honored to be here on the same show with Pepe and discuss our mutual concern. And I think you have to frame the whole issue that China is thriving, and the West has reached the end of the whole 75-year expansion it had since 1945.

So, there was an illusion that America is de-industrializing because of competition from China. And the reality is there is no way that America can re-industrialize and regain its export markets with the way that it’s organized today, financialized and privatized and if China didn’t exist. You’d still have the Rust Belt rusting out. You’d still have American industry not being able to compete abroad simply because the cost structure is so high in the United States.

 

The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It’s made financially, mainly by making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds.  In the last nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1 trillion. It’s been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we’re just not producing materials.

America doesn’t make its own shoes. It doesn’t make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it doesn’t make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company it’s to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company’s production. New York City, where I live, used to be an industrial city and, the industrial buildings, the mercantile buildings have all been gentrified into high-priced real estate and the result is that Americans have to pay so much money on education, rent, medical care that if they got all of their physical needs, their food, their clothing, all the goods and services for nothing, they still couldn’t compete with foreign labor because of all of the costs that they have to pay that are essentially called rent-seeking.

Housing in the United States now absorbs about 40 percent of the average worker’s paycheck. There’s 15 percent taken off the top of paychecks for pensions, Social Security and for Medicare. Further medical insurance adds more to the paycheck, income taxes and sales taxes add about another 10 percent. Then you have student loans and bank debt. So basically, the American worker can only spend about one third of his or her income on buying the goods and services they produce. All the rest goes into the FIRE sector — the finance, insurance and real estate sector — and other monopolies.

And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?

America used to have industrial capitalism in the 19th century. That’s how it got richer originally but now it’s moved away from industrial capitalism towards finance capitalism. And what that means is that essentially the mixed economy that made America rich — where the government would invest in education and infrastructure and transportation and provide these at low costs so that the employers didn’t have to pay labor to afford high costs — all of this has been transformed over the last hundred years.

And we’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism. Before, the idea of capitalism in the 19th century from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to John Stuart Mill to Marx was very clear and Marx stated it quite clearly; capitalism was revolutionary. It was to get rid of the landlord class. It was to get rid of the rentier class. It was to get rid of the banking class essentially, and just bear all the costs that were unnecessary for production, because how did England and America and Germany gain their markets?

“We’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism.”
They gained their markets basically by the government picking up a lot of the costs of the economy. The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so, government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.

And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten at the Wharton School, it’s very much like socialism. In fact, it’s very much like what China is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way of getting rich that America followed.

It had its government fund basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It invests in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So, the government bears most of the costs and, that means that employers don’t have to pay workers enough to pay a student loan debt. They don’t have to pay workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the United States.  They don’t have to pay workers to save for a pension fund, to pay the pension later on.  And most of all the Chinese economy doesn’t really have to pay a banking class because banking is the most important public utility of all.  Banking is what China has kept in the hands of government and Chinese banks don’t lend for the same reasons that American banks lend.

(When I said that China can pay lower wages than the U.S., what I meant was that China provides as public services many things that American workers have to pay out of their own pockets – such as health care, free education, subsidized education, and above all, much lower debt service.

When workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to keep solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have to earn more. The same is true of education and student debt. So much of what Americans seem to be earning — more than workers in other countries — goes right through their hands to the FIRE sector. So, what seems to be “low wages” in China go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.)

Eighty percent of American bank loans are mortgage loans to real estate and the effect of loosening loan standards and increasing the market for real estate is to push up the cost of living, push up the cost of housing. So, Americans have to pay more and more money for their housing whether they’re renters or they’re buyers, in which case the rent is for paying mortgage interest.

So, all of this cost structure has been built into the economy. China’s been able pretty much, to avoid all of this, because its objective in banking is not to make a profit and interest, not to make capital gains and speculation. It creates money to fund actual means of production to build factories, to build research and development, to build transportation facilities, to build infrastructure. Banks in America don’t lend for that kind of thing.

“So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.”

They only lend against collateral that’s already in place because they won’t make a loan if it’s not backed by collateral. Well, China creates money through its public banks to create capital, to create the means of production. So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.

The United States has decided not to gain wealth by actually investing in means of production and producing goods and services, but in financial ways. China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it. And whether you call this, industrial capitalism or a state capitalism or a state socialism or Marxism, it basically follows the same logic of real economics, the real economy, not the financial overhead.  So, you have China operating as a real economy, increasing its production, becoming the workshop of the world as England used to be called and America trying to draw in foreign resources, live off of foreign resources, live by trying to make money by investing in the Chinese stock market or now, moving investment banks into China and making loans to China not actual industrial capitalism ways.

“China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it.”

So, you could say that America has gone beyond industrial capitalism, and they call it the post-industrial society, but you could call it the neo-feudal society. You could call it the neo-rentier society, or you could call it debt peonage but it’s not industrial capitalism.

And in that sense, there’s no rivalry between China and America. These are different systems going their own way and I better let Pepe pick it up from there.

Pepe Escobar: Okay. Thank you, Michael, this is brilliant. And you did it in less than 15 minutes. You told the whole story in 15 minutes. Well, my journalistic instinct is immediately to start questions to Michael. So, this is exactly what I’m gonna do now. I think it is much better to basically illustrate some points of what Michael just said, comparing the American system, which is finance capitalism essentially, with industrial capitalism that is in effect in China. Let me try to start with a very concrete and straight to the point question, Michael.

Okay. let’s says that more or less, if we want to summarize it, basically they try to tax the nonproductive rentier class. So, this would be the Chinese way to distribute wealth, right? Sifting through the Chinese economic literature, there is a very interesting concept, which is relatively new (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) in China, which they call stable investment. So stable investment, according to the Chinese would be to issue special bonds as extra capital in fact, to be invested in infrastructure building all across China, and they choose these projects in what they call weak areas and weak links. So probably in some of the inner provinces, or probably in some parts of Tibet or Xinjiang for instance. So, this is a way to invest in the real economy and in real government investment projects.

Right? So, my question in fact, is does this system create extra local debt, coming directly from this financing from Beijing? Is this a good recipe for sustainable development, the Chinese way and the recipe that they could expand to other parts of the Global South?

Michael: Well, this is a big problem that they’re discussing right now. The localities, especially rural China, (and China is still largely rural) only cover about half of their working budget from taxation. So, they have a problem. How are they going to get the balance of the money? Well, there is no official revenue sharing between the federal government and its state banks and the localities.

So, the localities can’t simply go to central government and say, give us more money. The government lets the localities be very independent. And it is sort of the “let a hundred flowers bloom” concept. And so, they’ve let each locality just go the long way, but the localities have run a big deficit.

What do they do?  Well in the United States they would issue bonds on which New York is about to default. But in China, the easiest way for the localities to make money, is unfortunately they will do something like Chicago did. They will sell their tax rights for the next 75 years for current money now.

So, a real estate developer will come in and say; look we will give you the next 75 years of tax on this land, because we want to build projects on this (a set of buildings). So, what this means is that now the cities have given away all their source of rent.

Let me show you the problem by what Indiana and Chicago did. Chicago also was very much like China’s countryside cities. So, it sold parking meters and its sidewalks to a whole series of Wall Street investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund for seventy-five years. And that meant that for 75 years, this Wall Street consortium got to control the parking meters.

So, they put up the parking meters all over Chicago, raised the price of parking, raised the cost of driving to Chicago. And if Chicago would have a parade and interrupt parking, then Chicago has to pay the Abu Dhabi fund and Wall Street company what it would have made anyway. And this became such an awful disaster that finally Wall Street had to reverse the deal and undo it because it was giving privatization a bad name here.  The same thing happened in Indiana.
Indiana was running a deficit and it decided to sell its roads to a Wall Street investment firm to make a toll road. The toll on the Indiana turnpike was so high that drivers began to take over the side roads. That’s the problem if you sell future tax revenues in advance.
Now what China and the localities there are discussing is that we’ve already given the real estate tax at very low estimates to the commercial developers, so what do we do? Well, I’ve given them my advice. I’m a professor of economics at the Peking University, School of Marxist studies and I’ve had discussions with the Central Committee. I also have an official position at Wuhan University. There, we’re discussing how China can put an added tax for all of the valuable land, that’s gone up. How can it be done to let the cities collect this tax? Our claim is that the cities, in selling these tax rights for 75 years, have sold what in Britain would be called ground rent (i.e. what’s paid to the landed aristocracy).
Over and above that there’s the market rent. So, China should pass a market-rent tax over and above the ground rent tax to reflect the current value. And there they’re thinking of, well, do we say that this is a capital gain on the land? Well, it’s not really a capital gain until you sell the land, but it’s value. It’s the valuation of the capital. And they’re looking at whether they should just say this is the market rent tax over and above the flat tax that has been paid in advance, or it’s a land tax on the capital gain for land.
Now, all of this requires that there be a land map of the whole country. And they are just beginning to create such a land map as a basis for how you calculate how much the rent there is.
What I found in China is something very strange. A few years ago, in Beijing, they had the first, International Marxist conference where I was the main speaker and I was talking about Marx’s discussion of the history of rent theory in Volume II and Volume III of Capital where Marx discusses all of the classical economics that led up to his view; Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Marx’s theory of surplus value was really the first history of economic thought that was written, although it wasn’t published until after he died. Well, you could see that there was a little bit of discomfort with some of the Marxists at the conference. And so, they invited for the next time my colleague David Harvey to come and talk about Marxism in the West.

Well, David gave both the leading and the closing speech of the conference and said, you’ve got to go beyond volume I of Capital. Volume I was what Marx wrote as his addition to classical economics, saying that there was exploitation in industrial employment of labor as well as rent seeking and then he said, now that I’ve done my introduction here, let me talk about how capitalism works in Volumes II and III. Volumes II and III are all about rent and finance and David Harvey has published a book on Volume III of Capital and his message to Peking University and the second Marxist conference was – you’ve got to read Volume II, and III.

Well, you can see that, there’s a discussion now over what is Marxism and a friend and colleague at PKU said Marxism is a Chinese word; It’s the Chinese word for politics. That made everything clear to me. Now I get it!  I’ve been asked by the Academy of Social Sciences in China to create a syllabus of the history of rent theory and value theory. And essentially in order to have an idea of how you calculate rent, how do you make a national income analysis where you show rent, you have to have a theory of value and price and rent is the excess of price over the actual cost value. Well, for that you need a concept of cost of production and that’s what classical economics is all about. Post-classical economics denied all of this. The whole idea of classical economics is that not all income is earned.
Landlords don’t earn their income for making rent in their sleep as John Stuart Mill said. Banks don’t earn their income by just sitting there and letting debts accrue and interest compounding and doubling. The classical economists separated actual unearned income from the production and consumption economy.
Well, around the late 19th century in America, you had economists fighting against not only Marx, but also even against Henry George, who at that time, was urging a land tax in New York. And so, at Columbia University, John Bates Clark developed a whole theory that everybody earns whatever they can get. That there was no such thing as unearned income and that has become the basis for American national income statistics and thought ever since. So, if you look at today’s GDP figures for the United States, they have a figure for 8 percent of the GDP for the homeowners’ rent. But homeowners wouldn’t pay themselves if they had to rent the apartment to themselves, then you’ll have interest at about 12 percent of GDP.
And I thought, well how can interest be so steady? What happens to all of the late fees; that 29 percent that credit card companies charge? I called up the national income people in Washington, when I was there. And they said well, late fees and penalties are considered financial services.
And so, this is what you call a service economy. Well, there’s no service in charging a late fee, but they add all of the late fees. When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP. When housing becomes more expensive and prices American labor out of the market, that’s called an increase in GDP.

This is not how a country that wants to develop is going to create a national income account. So, there’s a long discussion in China about, just to answer your question, how do you create an account to distinguish between what’s the necessary cost to production and what’s an unnecessary production cost and how do we avoid doing what the United States did. So again, no rivalry. The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns everything and there’s no exploitation, no unearned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and there’s no 1 percent. Well, that’s what’s really at issue and why the whole world is splitting apart as you and I are discussing in what we’re writing.

“When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP.”

Pepe: Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. So just to sum it all up, can we say that Beijing’s strategy is to save especially provincial areas from leasing their land, their infrastructure for 60 years or 75 years?  As you just mentioned, can we say that the fulcrum of their national strategy is what you define as the market rent tax? Is this the No. 1 mechanism that they are developing?

Michael: Ideally, they want to keep rents as low as possible because rent is a cost of living and a cost of doing business. They don’t have banks that are lending to inflate the real estate market.

However, in almost every Western country — the U.S., Germany England — the value of stocks and bonds and the value of real estate is just about exactly the same. But for China, the value of real estate is way, way larger than the value of stocks.

And the reason is not because the Chinese Central bank, the Bank of China lends for real estate; it’s because they lend to intermediaries and the intermediaries have financed a lot of housing purchases in China. And, this is really the problem for if they levy a land tax, then you’re going to make a lot of these financial intermediaries go bust.

That’s what I’m advocating, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. These financial intermediaries shouldn’t exist, and this same issue came up in 2009 in the United States. You had the leading American bank being the most crooked and internally corrupt bank in the country, Citibank making junk mortgage, and it was broke.

 

Its entire net worth was wiped out as a result of its fraudulent junk mortgages. Well, Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) wanted to close it down and take it over. Essentially that would have made it into a public bank and that would be a wonderful thing. She said, look Citibank shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing. And she wrote all this up in an autobiography. And, she was overruled by President Obama and Tim Geithner saying, but wait a minute, those are our campaign contributors. So, they were loyal to the campaign contributors, but not the voters; and they didn’t close Citibank down.

And the result is that the Federal Reserve ended up creating about $7 trillion of quantitative easing to bail out the banks. The homeowners weren’t bailed out.  Ten million American families lost their homes as a result of junk mortgages in excess of what the property was actually worth.

All of this was left on the books, foreclosed and sold to private capital companies like Blackstone. And the result is that home ownership in America declined from 68 percent of the population down to about 61 percent. Well, right where the Obama administration left off, you’re about to have the Biden administration begin in January with an estimated 5 million Americans losing their homes. They’re going to be evicted because they’ve been unemployed during the pandemic. They’ve been working in restaurants or gyms or other industries that have been shut down because of the pandemic. They’re going to be evicted and many homeowners, low-income homeowners have been unable to pay their mortgages.

There’s going to be a wave of foreclosures. The question is, who’s going to bear the cost? Should it be 15 million American families who lose their homes just so the banks won’t lose money? Or should we let the banks that have made all of the growth since 2008? Ninety five percent of American GDP of the population has seen its wealth go down. All the wealth has been accumulating for the 5 percent in statistics. Now the question is should this 5 percent that’s got all the wealth lose or should the 95 percent lose?
The Biden administration says the 95 percent should lose basically. And you’re going to see a wave of closures so that the question in China should be that, these intermediate banks (they’re not really banks they are sort of like payday loan lenders), should they come in and, bear the loss or should Chinese localities and the people bear the loss?  Somebody has to lose when you’re charging, you’re collecting the land’s rent that was paid to the creditors, and either the creditors have to lose or, the tax collector loses and that’s the conflict that exists in every society of the world today.   And, in the West, the idea is the tax collectors should lose and whatever the tax collector relinquishes should be free for the banks to collect. In China obviously, they don’t want that to happen and they don’t want to see a financial class developing along US lines.

Pepe: Michael, there’s a quick question in all this, which is the official position by Beijing in terms of helping the localities. Their official position is that there won’t be any bailouts of local debt. How do they plan to do that?

Michael: What they’re discussing, how are you not going to do it? They think they sort of let localities go their own way. And they think, well you know which ones are going to succeed, and which ones aren’t, they didn’t want to have a one-size-fits all central planning. They wanted to have flexibility. Well, now they have flexibility. And when you have many different “let a hundred flowers bloom,” not all the flowers are going to bloom at the same rate.

And the question is, if they don’t bail out the cities, how are the cities going to operate? Certainly, China has never let markets steer the economy, the government steers the markets. That’s what socialism is as opposed to finance capitalism. So, the question is, you can let localities go broke and yet you’re not going to destroy any of the physical assets of the localities, and all of this is going to be in place. The question is how are you going to arrange the flow of income to all of these roads and buildings and land that’s in place? How do you create a system?  Essentially, they’re saying well, if we’re industrial engineers, how do we just plan things? Forget credit, forget property claims, forget the rentier claims. How are we just going to design an economy that operates most efficiently? And that’s what they’re working on now to resolve this situation because it’s gotten fairly critical.

Pepe: Yes, especially in the countryside. Well, I think, a very good metaphor in terms of comparing both systems are investment in infrastructure. You travel to China a lot so, you’ve seen. You’ll travel through high-speed rail. You’ll see those fantastic airports, in Pudong or the new airport in Beijing. And then you’ll take the Acela to go from Washington to New York City, which is something that I used to do years ago. And the comparison is striking. Isn’t it?

Or if you go to France, for instance, when France started development of the TGV, which in terms of a national infrastructure network, is one of the best networks on the planet. And the French started doing this 30 years ago, even more. Is there…it’s not in terms of way out, but if we analyze the minutia, it’s obvious that following the American finance utilization system, we could never have something remotely similar happening in United States in terms of building infrastructure.
So, do you see any realistic bypass mechanism in terms of improving American infrastructure, especially in the big cities?

Michael: No, and there are two reasons for that. No. 1, let’s take a look at the long-term railroads. The railroads go through the center of town or even in the countryside, all along the railroads, the railroads brought business and all the businesses had been located as close to the railroad tracks as they could.

Factories with sightings off the railroad, hotels and especially right through the middle of town where you have the railway gates going up and down. In order to make a high-speed rail as in China, you need a dedicated roadway without trucks and cars, imagine a car going through a railway gate at 350 miles an hour.

So, when I would go from Beijing to Tianjin, here’s the high-speed rail, there’s one highway on one side, one highway on the other side. There’ll be underpasses. But there it goes straight now. How can you suppose you would have a straight Acela line from Washington up to Boston when all along the line, there’s all this real estate right along the line that has been built up? There’s no way you can get a dedicated roadway without having to tear down all of this real estate that’s on either side and the cost of making the current owners whole would be prohibitive. And anywhere you would go, that’s not in the center of the city, you would also have to have the problem that there’s already private property there.

And there’s no legal, constitutional way for such a physical investment to be made. China was able to make this investment because it was still largely rural. It wasn’t as built up along the railways. It didn’t have any particular area that was built up right where the railroad already was.

So certainly, any high-speed rail could not go where the current railways would be, and they’d have to go on somebody’s land. And, there’s also, what do you do if you want to get to New York and Long Island from New Jersey?

Sixty years ago, when I went into Wall Street, the cost of getting and transporting goods from California to Newark, New Jersey, was as large as from Newark right across the Hudson River to New York, not only because of the mafia and control of the local labor unions, but because of the tunnels. Right now, the tunnels from New Jersey to New York are broke, they are leaking, the subways in New York City, which continually break down because there was a hurricane a few years ago and the switches were made in the 1940s. The switches are 80 years old. They had water damage and the trains have to go at a crawl. But the city and state, because it is not collecting the real estate tax and other taxes and because ridership fell on the subways to about 20 percent, the city’s broke. They’re talking about 70 percent of city services being cut back. They’re talking about cutting back the subways to 40 percent capacity, meaning everybody will have to get in — when there’s still a virus and not many people are wearing masks, and there was no means of enforcing masks here.

 

So, there’s no way that you can rebuild the infrastructure because, for one thing the banking system here has subsidized for a hundred years junk economics saying you have to balance the budget. If the government creates credit it’s inflationary as if when banks create credit, it’s not inflationary. Well, the monetary effect is the same, no matter who creates the money. And so, Biden has already said that President Trump ran a big deficit, we’re going to run a bunch of surpluses or a budget balance. And he was advocating that all along. Essentially Biden is saying we have to increase unemployment by 20 percent, lower wages by 20 percent, shrink the economy by about 10 percent in order to, in order for the banks not to lose money.

“You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism.”

And, we’re going to privatize but we are going to do it by selling the hospitals, the schools, the parks, the transportation to finance, to Wall Street finance capital groups. And so, you can imagine what’s going to happen if the Wall Street groups buy the infrastructure. They’ll do what happened to Chicago when it sold all the parking meters, they’ll say, OK, instead of 25 cents an hour, it’s now charged $3 an hour. Instead of a $2 for the subway, let’s make it $8.

You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism. Well, it’s not socialism. It’s industrial capitalism. It’s industrialization, that’s basic economics. The idea of what, and how an economy works is so twisted academically that it’s the antithesis of what Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill and Marx all talked about. For them a free- market economy was an economy free of rentiers. Free of rent, it didn’t have any rent seeking. But now for the Americans, a free-market economy is free for the rentiers, free for the landlord, free for the banks to make a killing. And that is basically the class war back in business with a vengeance. That blocks and is preventing any kind infrastructure recovery. I don’t see how it can possibly take place.

Pepe: Well, based on what you just described, there is a process of turning the United States into a giant Brazil. In fact, this is what the Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a Pinochetista, as you know Michael, has been doing with the Brazilian economy for the past two years, privatizing everything and selling everything to big Brazilian interests and with lots of Wall Street interests involved as well. So, this is a recipe that goes all across the Global South as well. And it’s fully copied all across the Global South with no way out now.

 Michael: Yes, and this is promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And when I was brought down to Brazil to meet with the council of economic advisers under Lula, [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil], they said, well the whole problem is that Lula’s been obliged to let the banks do the planning.

So, basically free markets and libertarianism is adopting central planning, but with central planning by the banks. America is a much more centrally planned economy than China. China is letting a hundred flowers bloom; America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be. Now the irony is that China’s sending its students to America to study economics. And, most of the Chinese I had talked to say, well we went to America to take economics courses because that gives us a prestige here in China.

I’m working now, with Chinese groups trying to develop a “reality economics” to be taught in China as different from American economics.

“America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be.”

 

Pepe: Exactly, because of what they study at Beijing University, Renmin or Tsinghua is not exactly what they would study in big American universities. Probably what they study in the U.S. is what not to do in China. When they go back to China, what they won’t be doing. It’s an object lesson for what to avoid.

Michael, I’d like to go back to what the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] had been discussing in the 2000s when Lula was still president of Brazil and many of his ideas deeply impressed, especially Hu Jintao at the time, which is bypassing the U.S. dollar. Well, at the moment obviously we’re still at 87 percent of international transactions still in U.S. dollars. So, we are very far away from it, but if you have a truly sovereign economy, which is the case of China, which we can say is the case of Russia to a certain extent and obviously in a completely different framework, Iran. Iran is a completely sovereign, independent economy from the West. The only way to try to develop different mechanisms to not fall into the rentier mind space would be to bypass the U.S. dollar.

Michael: Yes, for many reasons. For one thing the United States can simply print the dollars and lend to other countries and then say, now you have to pay us interest. Well, Russia doesn’t need American dollars. It can print its own rubles to provide labor. There’s no need for a foreign currency at all for domestic spending, the only reason you would have to borrow a foreign currency is to balance your exchange rate, or to finance a trade deficit. But China doesn’t have a trade deficit. And in fact, if China were to work to accept more dollars, Americans would love to buy into the Chinese market and make a profit there, but that would push up China’s exchange rate and that would make it more difficult for her to make its exports because the exchange rate would come up not because it’s exporting more but because it’s letting American dollars come in and push it up.

Well, fortunately, President Trump as if he works for the Chinese National Committee, said, look, we don’t want to really hurt China by pushing up its currency and we want to keep it competitive. So, I’m going to prevent American companies from lending money to China, I’m going to isolate it and so he’s helping them protect their economy. And in Russia he said, look Russia really needs to feed itself. And, there’s a real danger that when the Democrats come in, there are a lot of anti-Russians in the Biden administration. They may go to war. They may do to Russia what they tried to do to China in the ‘50s. Stop exporting food and grain. And only Canada was able to break the embargo. So, we’re going to impose sanctions on Russia. So immediately, what happened is Russia very quickly became the largest grain exporter in the world. And instead of importing cheese from the Baltics, it created its own cheese industry. So, Trump said look, I know that Russians followed the American idea of not having protective tariffs, they need protective tariffs. They’re not doing it. We’re going to help them out by just not importing from them and really helping them.

Pepe: Yeah. Michael, what do you think Black Rock wants from the Chinese? You know that they are making a few inroads at the highest levels? Of course, I’m sure you’re aware of that. And also, JP Morgan, Citibank, etc. What do they really want?

Michael: They’d like to be able to create dollars to begin to buy and make loans to real estate; let companies grow, let the real estate market grow and make capital gains.

The way people get wealthy today isn’t by making an income, it’s been by making a capital gain. Total returns are current income plus the capital gains. As for capital gains each year; the land value gains alone are larger than the whole GDP growth from year to year. So that’s where the money is, that’s where the wealth is. So, they are after speculative capital gains, they would like to push money into the Chinese stock market and real estate market. See the prices go up and then inflate the prices by buying in and then sell out at the high price. Pull the money out, get a capital gain and let the economy crash, I mean that’s the business plan.

Pepe: Exactly. But Beijing will never allow that.

Michael: Well, here’s the problem right now, they know that Biden is pushing militarily aggressive people in his cabinet. There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy. They’re very worried about the military and they say, how do we deter the Biden administration from actually trying a military adventure in the South China Sea or elsewhere? They said well, fortunately America is multi-layered. They don’t think of America as a group. They realize there’s a layer and they say, who’s going to represent our interests?

“There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy.”

Well, Blackstone and Wall Street are going to represent their interests. Then I think one of the Chinese officials last week gave a big speech on this very thing, saying look, our best hope in stopping America’s military adventurism in China is to have Wall Street acting as our support because after all, Wall Street is the main campaign contributor and the president works for the campaign contributors.

The politician works for the campaign contributors. They’re in it for the money! So fortunately, we have Wall Street on our side, we’ve got control of the political system and they’re not there to go to war so that helps explain why a month ago they let wholly-owned U.S. banks and bankers in. On the one hand, they don’t like the idea of somebody outside the government creating credit for reasons that the economy doesn’t need. If they needed it, the Bank of China would do it. They have no need for foreign currency to come in to make loans in domestic currency, out of China.

The only reason that they could do it is No. 1, it helps meet the World Trade Organization’s principles and, No. 2, especially during this formative few months of the Biden administration, it helps to have Wall Street saying; we can make a fortune in China, go easy on them and that essentially counters the military hawks in Washington.

Pepe: So, do you foresee a scenario when Black Rock starts wreaking havoc in the Shanghai stock exchange for instance?

Michael: It would love to do that. It would love to move things up and down. The money’s made by companies with the stock market going up and down; the zigzag. So of course, it wants to do a predatory zigzag. The question is whether China will impose a tax to stop this, all sorts of financial transactions. That’s what’s under discussion now. They know exactly what Black Rock wants to do because they have some very savvy billionaire Chinese advisers that are quite good. I can tell you stories, but I better not.

Pepe: Okay. If it’s not okay to tell it all, tell us part of the story then.

Michael: The American banks have been cultivating leading Chinese people by providing them enough money to make money here, that they think that, okay they will now try to make money in the same way in China and we can join in. It’s a conflict of systems again, between the finance capital system and industrial socialism. You don’t get any of this discussion in the U.S. press, which is why I read what you write because in the U.S. press, the neocons talk about the fake idea of Greek history and fake idea of the Thucydides’ problem of a country jealous of another country’s development.

There’s no jealousy between America and China. They’re different, they have their own way. We are going to destroy them. And if you look at the analogy that the Americans draw —and this is how the Pentagon thinks — with the war between Athens and Sparta. It’s hard to tell, which is which. Here you have Athens, a democracy backing other democracies and having the military support of the democracies and the military in these democracies all had to pay Athens protection money for the military support and that’s the money that Athens got to ostensibly support its navy and protection that built up all of the Athenian public buildings and everything else. So, that’s a democracy exploiting its allies, to enrich itself via the military. Then you have Sparta, which was funding all of the oligarchies, and it was helping the oligarchies overthrow democracies. Well, that was America too. So, America is both sides of the Thucydides war if the democracy is exploiting the fellow democracies and is the supporter of oligarchies in Brazil, Latin America, Africa and everyone else.

So, you could say the Thucydides problem was between two sides, two aspects of America and has nothing to do with China at all except, for the fact that the whole war was a war between economic systems. They’re acting as if somehow if only China did not export to us, we could be re-industrialized and somehow export to Europe and the Third World.

And as you and I have described, it’s over. We painted ourselves into such a debt corner that without writing down the debts, we’re in the same position that the Eurozone is in. There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth. And, since 1980 as you know, real wages in America have been stable. All the growth has been in property owners and predators and the FIRE sector, the rest of the economy is in stagnation. And now the coronavirus has simply acted as a catalyst to make it very clear that the game is over; it’s time to move away from the homeowner economy to rentier economy, time for Blackstone to be the landlord. America wants to recreate the British landlord class and essentially what we’re seeing now is like the Norman invasion of England taking over the land and the infrastructure. That’s what Blackstone would love to do in China.
“There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth.”
Pepe: Wow. I’m afraid that they may have a lot of leeway by some members of the Beijing leadership now, because as you know very well, it’s not a consensus in the political arena.
Michael: We’re talking about Volume II and III of Capital.
Pepe: Exactly. But you know, you were talking about debt. Coming back to that, in fact I just checked this morning, apparently global debt as it stands today is $277 trillion, which is something like 365 percent of global GDP. What does that mean in practice?
Michael: Yeah, well fortunately this is discussed in the 19th century and there was a word for that — fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this. You could say the question now, and The Financial Times just had an article a few days ago that China’s claims on Third World countries on the Belt and Road Initiative is fictitious capital, because how can it collect?

Well, China’s already thought of that. It doesn’t want money. It wants the raw materials. It wants to be paid in real things. But a debt that can’t be paid, can only be paid either by foreclosing on the debtors or by writing down the debts and obviously a debt that can’t be paid won’t be paid.

“Fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this.”

 

And so, you have not only Marx using the word fictitious capital. At the other end of the spectrum, you had Henry George talking about fictive capital. In other words, these are property claims that have no real capital behind them. There’s no capital that makes profit. That’s just a property claim for payment or a rentier claim for payment.

So, the question is, can you make money somehow without having any production at all, without having wages, without having profits, without any capital? Can you just have asset grabbing and buying-and-selling assets? And as long as you have the Federal Reserve in America, come in, Trump’s $10 trillion Covid program gave $2 trillion to the population at large with these $1,200 checks, that my wife and I got, and $8 trillion all just to buy stocks and bonds. None of this was to build infrastructure. None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory. None of this 8 trillion was to employ a single worker. It was all just to support the prices of stocks and bonds, and to keep the illusion that the economy had not stopped growing. Well, it’s growing for the 5 percent. So, it’s all become fictitious. And if you look at the GDP as I said, it’s fictitious.

Pepe: And the most extraordinary thing is none of that is discussed in American media. There’s not a single word about what you would have been describing.

Michael: It’s not even discussed in academia. Our graduates at the university of Missouri at Kansas City, we’re all trained in Modern Monetary Theory. And as hired professors they have to be able to publish in the refereed journals and the refereed journals are all essentially controlled by the Chicago School. So, you have a censorship of the kind of ideas that we’re talking about. You can’t get it into the economic journals, so you can’t get it into the economics curriculum. So, where on earth are you going to get it? If you didn’t have the internet you wouldn’t be discussing at all. Most of my books sell mainly in China, more than in all the other countries put together so I can discuss these things there. I stopped publishing in orthodox journals so many years ago because it’s talking to the deaf.

“None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory, employee, a single worker.” 

 

Pepe: Absolutely. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Russia, Michael? There is a raging debate in Russia for many years now between let’s say the Eurasianists and the Atlanticists. It involves of course, economic policy under Putin, industrial capitalism Russian style. The Eurasianists basically say that the central problem with Russia is how the Russian central bank is basically affiliated with all the mechanisms that you know so well, that it is an Atlanticist Trojan Horse inside the Russian economy. How do you see it?

Michael: Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. First of all, the IMF announced in advance that there was a big meeting in Houston with the IMF and the World Bank. And the IMF published all of its reports saying, first you don’t want inflation in Russia so let’s wipe out all of the Russian savings with hyperinflation, which they did. They then said, well now to cure the hyperinflation the Russian central bank needs a stable currency and you need a backup for the currency. You will need to back it with U.S. dollars.

“Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.”

So, from the early 1990s, as you know, labor was going unpaid. The Russian central bank could have created the rubles to pay the domestic labor and to keep the factories in place. But, the IMF advisers from Harvard said, no you’ll have to borrow U.S. dollars. I met with people from the Hermitage Fund and the Renaissance Fund and others. We had meetings and I met with the investors. Russia was paying 100 percent interest for years to leading American financial institutions for money that it didn’t need and could have created itself. Russia was so dispirited with Stalinism that, essentially, it thought the opposite of Stalinism must be what they have in America.

“…to destroy a country, you don’t need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American economics.”

They thought that America was going to tell it how America got rich, but America didn’t want to tell Russia how it got rich, but instead wanted to make money off Russia. They didn’t get it. They trusted the Americans. They really didn’t understand that, industrial capitalism that Marx described had metamorphosized into finance capitalism and was completely different.

And that’s because Russia didn’t charge rent, it didn’t charge interest. I gave three speeches before the Duma, urging it to impose a land tax. Some of the people I noticed, Ed Dodson was there with us and we were all trying to convince Russia, don’t let this land be privatized. If you let it be privatized, then you’re going to have such high rents and housing costs in Russia that you’re not going to be able to essentially compete for an industrial growth. Well, the politician who brought us there, Viatcheslav Zolensky was sort of maneuvered out of the election by the American advisers.

The Americans put billions of dollars into essentially financing American propagandists to destroy Russia, mainly from the Harvard Institute of International Development. And essentially, they were a bunch of gangsters and the prosecutors in Boston were about to prosecute them.

The attorney general of Boston was going to bring a big case for Harvard against the looting of Russia and the corruption of Russia. And I was asked to organize and to bring a number of Russian politicians and industrialists over to say how this destroyed everything. Well, Harvard settled out of court and essentially that made the perpetrators the leading university people up there. (I’m associated with Harvard Anthropology Department, not the Economics Department.)
So, we never had a chance to bring my witnesses, and have our report on what happened, but I published for the Russian Academy of Sciences a long study of how all of this destruction of Russia was laid out in advance at the Houston meetings by the IMF. America went to the leading bureaucrats and said; look, we can make you rich why don’t you register the factories in your own name, and if you’re registered in your own name, you know, then you’ll own it. And then you can cash out. You can essentially sell, but obviously you can’t sell to the Russians because the IMF has just wiped out all of their savings.
You can only cash out by selling to the West. And so, the Russian stock market became the leading stock market in the world from 1994 with the Norilsk Nickel and the seven bankers in the bank loans for shares deal through 1997. And, I had worked for a firm Scutter Stevens and, the head adviser, a former student of mine didn’t want to invest in Russia because she said, this is just a rip off, it’s going to crash. She was fired for not investing. They said look, we know that’s going to crash. That’s the whole idea, it’s going to crash. We can make a mint off it before the crash. And then when it crashes, we can make another mint by selling short and then all over again. Well, the problem is that the system that was put in with the privatization that’s occurred, how do you have Russia’s wealth used to develop its own industry and its own economy like China was doing. Well, China has rules for all of this, but Russia doesn’t have rules, it’s really all centralized, it’s President Putin that keeps it this way.
Well, this was the great fear of the West. When you had Mikhail Gorbachev beginning to plan to do pretty much what is done today, to restrain private capital, the IMF said hold off. We’re not going to make any loans to stabilize the Russian currency until you remove Mr. Primakov.
The U.S. said we won’t deal with Russia until you remove him. So, he was pushed out and he was probably the smartest guy at the time there. So, they thought [President Vladimir] Putin was going to be sort of the patsy. And he almost single-handedly, holding the oligarchs in and saying, look, you can keep your money as long as you do exactly what the government would do. You can keep the gains as long as you’re serving the public interest.
But none of this resulted into a legal system, a tax system, and a system where the government actually does get most of the benefits. Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people instead of giving Norilsk Nickel and the oil companies to Yukos. It could have given everybody their own house and their own apartment, the same thing in the Baltics. And instead it didn’t give the land out to the people. And Russians were paying 3 percent of their income for housing in 1990. And rent is the largest element in every household’s budget.
“Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people.”
So, Russia could have had low-price labor. It could have financed all of its capital investment for the government by taxing, collecting the rising rental value. Instead, Russian real estate was privatized on credit and it was even worse in the Baltics.
In Latvia, where I was research director for the Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia borrowed primarily from Swedish banks. And so, in order to buy a house, you had to borrow from Swedish banks. And they said, well, we’re not going to lend in the Latvian currency because it can go down. So, you have a choice; Swiss Francs or German Marks or U.S. Dollars. And so, all of this rent was paid in foreign currency. There came an outflow that essentially drained all the Baltic economies. Latvia lost 20 percent of its population. Estonia and Lithuania followed suit.
And of course, the worst hit by neo-liberalism was Russia. As you know, President Putin said that neo-liberalism cost Russia more of its population than World War II. And you know that to destroy a country, you don’t need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American economics.
Pepe: Yes, I remember well, I arrived in Russia in the winter of 91 coming from China. So, I transited from the Chinese miracle. In fact, a few days after Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern tour when he went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen.  And that was the kick for the 1990s boom, in fact a few years before the handover, and then I took the Trans-Siberian and I arrived in Moscow a few days after the end, in fact, a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union.

But yeah, I remember the Americans arrived almost at the exact minute, wasn’t it, Michael? I think they already were there in the spring of 1992. If I’m not mistaken.

Michael:  The Houston meeting was in 1990.  But all before that already in, 1988 and 1989, there was a huge outflow of embezzlement money via Latvia. The assistant dean of the university who ended up creating Nordex, essentially the money was all flying out because Ventspils in Latvia, was where Russian oil was exported and it was all fake invoicing. So, the Russian kleptocrats basically made their money off false export invoicing, ostensibly selling it for one price and having the rest paid abroad and, this was all organized through Latvia and the man who did it later moved to Israel and finally gave a billion dollars back to Russia so that he went on to live safely for the rest of his life in Israel.
Pepe: Well, the crash of the ruble in 1998 was what, roughly one year after the crash of the baht and the whole Asian financial crisis, no? It was interlinked of course, but let me see if I have a question for you, in fact, I’m just thinking out loud now. If the economies of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, the case of South Korea and Russia, were more integrated at the time as they are trying to integrate now, do you think that the Asian financial crisis would have been preventable in 1997?
Michael: Well, look at what happened in Malaysia with Mohammad Mahathir. Malaysia avoided it. So of course, it was preventable, and they had the capital controls. All you would have needed was to do what Malaysia did. But you needed an economic theory for that.
And essentially the current mode of warfare is to conquer the brains of a country to shape how people think and how they perceive the economy. And if you can twist their view into an unreality economics, where they think that you’re there to help them not to take money out of them, then you’ve got them hooked. That was what happened in Asia. Asia thought it was getting rich off the dollars inflows and then the IMF and all the creditors pulled the plug, crash the industry. And now that all of a sudden you had a crash, they bought up Korean industry and other South Asian industries at giveaway prices.
That’s what you do. You lend the money; you pull the plug. You then let them go under and you pick up the pieces. That’s what Blackstone did after the Obama depression began, when Obama saved the banks, not the constituency, the mortgage borrowers. Essentially that’s Blackstone’s modus operandi to pick up distressed prices at a bankruptcy sale, but you need to lend money and then crash it in order to make that work.

Pepe: Michael, I think we have only five minutes left. So, I would expect you to go on a relatively long answer and I’m really dying for it. It’s about debt, it about the debt trap. And it’s about the New Silk Roads, the Belt and Road Initiative, because I think rounding up our discussion and coming back to the theme of debt and global debt.

The No. 1 criticism apart from the demonization of China that you hear from American media and a few American academics as well against the Belt and Road is that it’s creating a debt trap for Southeast Asian nations, Central Asian nations and nations in Africa, etc…. Obviously, I expect you to debunk that, but the framework is there is no other global development project as extensive and as complex as Belt and Road, which as you know very well was initially dreamed up by the Ministry of Commerce. Then they sold it more or less to Xi Jinping who got the geopolitical stamp on it, announcing it, simultaneously, (which was a stroke of genius) in Central Asia in Astana and then in Southeast Asia in Jakarta. So, he was announcing the overland corridors through the heartland and the Maritime Silk Road at the same time.

At the time people didn’t see the reach and depth of all that. And now of course, finally the Trump administration woke up and saw what was in play, not only across Eurasia but reaching Africa and even selected parts of Latin America as well. And obviously the only sort of criticism, and it’s not even a fact-based criticism, that I’ve seen about the Belt and Road is it’s creating a debt trap because as you know Laos is indebted, Sri Lanka is indebted, Kyrgyzstan is indebted etc. So, how do you view Belt and Road within the larger framework of the West and China, East Asia and Eurasia relations? And how would you debunk misconceptions created, especially in the U S that this is a debt trap.

Six proposed corridors of Belt and Road Initiative, showing Italy inside circle, on maritime blue route. (Lommes, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Michael: There are two points to answer there.  The first is how the Belt and Road began. And as you pointed out, the Belt and Road began, when China said, what is it we need to grow and how do we grow within our neighboring countries so we don’t have to depend upon the West, and we don’t have to depend on sea trade that can be shut down? How do we get to roads instead of seas in a way that we can integrate our economy with the neighboring economies so that there can be mutual growth?
So, this was done pretty much on industrial engineering grounds. Here’s where you need the roads and the railroads. And then how do we finance it? Well, The Financial Times article, last week, said didn’t the Chinese know that [with past] railroad development, they’ve all gone broke? The Panama Canal went broke, you know, the first few times there were European railway investment in Latin America in the 19th century, that all went broke.

Well, what they don’t get is China’s aim was not to make a profit off the railroads.

The railroads were built to be part of the economy. They don’t want to make profit. It was to make the real economy grow, not to make profits for the owners of the railroad stocks. The Western press can’t imagine that you’re building a railroad without trying to make money out of it.

Then you get to the debt issue.
Countries only have a debt crisis if their debt is in a foreign currency. The first way that the United States gained power was to fight against its allies. The great enemy of America was England and it made the British block their currency in the 1940s. And so, India and other countries, that had all these currencies holdings in sterling, were able to convert it all into dollars.
The whole move of the U.S. was to denominate world debt in dollars. So that No. 1, U.S. banks would end up with the interest in financing the debt. And No. 2, the United States could, by using the debt leverage, control domestic politics.
Well, as you’re seeing right now in Argentina, for instance, Argentina is broke because it owes foreign-dollar debt. When I started the first Third World bond fund in 1990 at Scutter Stevens, Brazil and China and Argentina were paying 45 percent interest per year, 45 percent per year in dollars debt. Yet we tried to sell them in America. No American would buy. We went to Europe, no European buy this debt. And so, we worked with Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch was able to make an offshore fund in the Dutch West Indies and all of the debt was sold to the Brazilian ruling class in the central bank and the Argentinian bankers in the ruling class, we thought oh, that’s wonderful.
We know that they’re going to pay the foreign Yankee Dollars debt because the Yankee Dollars debt is owed to themselves. They’re the Yankees! They’re the client oligarchy. And you know, from Brazil client oligarchy is, you know, they’re cosmopolitan, that’s the word. So, the problem is that on the Belt and Road, how did these other countries pay the debt to China?
Well, the key there again is the de-dollarization, and one way to solve it is since we’re trying to get finance out of the picture, we’re doing something very much like, Japan did with Canada in the 1960s. It made loans to develop Canadian copper mines taking its payment, not in Canadian dollars, that would have pushed up the yen’s exchange rate, but in copper.
So, China says, you know you don’t have to pay currency for this debt. We didn’t build a railroad to make a profit and you want, we can print all the currency we want. We don’t need to make a profit. We made the Belt and Road because it’s part of our geopolitical attempt to create what we need to be prosperous and have a prosperous region. So, these are self-reinforcing mutual gain. Well, so that’s what the West doesn’t get — mutual gain?  Are we talking anthropology? What do you mean mutual? This is capitalism! So, the West doesn’t understand what the original aim of the Belt and Road was, and it wasn’t to make a profitable railroad to enable people to buy and sell railway stocks. And it wasn’t to make toll roads to sell off to Goldman Sachs, you know. We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.
“We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.”
Pepe:  Belt and Road loans are long-term and at very low interest and they are renegotiable. They are renegotiating with the Pakistanis all the time for instance.
Michael: China’s intention is not to repeat an Asia crisis of 1997. It doesn’t gain anything by forcing a crisis because it’s not trying to come in and buy property at a discount at a distressed sale. It has no desire to create a distressed sale. So obviously, the idea is the capacity to pay. Now, this whole argument occurred in the 1920s, between [John Maynard] Keynes and his opponents that wanted to collect German reparations and, Keynes made it very clear. What is the capacity to pay? It’s the ability to export and the ability to obtain foreign currency. Well, China’s not looking for foreign currency. It is looking for economic returns but the return is to the whole society, the return isn’t from a railroad. The return is for the entire economy because it’s looking at the economy as a system.
The way that neoliberalism works, it divides the economy in parts, and it makes every part trying to make a gain, and if you do that, then you don’t have any infrastructure that’s lowering the cost for the other parts. You have every part fighting for itself. You don’t look at in terms of a system the way China’s looking at it. That’s the great advantage of Marxism, you’ll look at the system, not just the parts.
Pepe:  Exactly and this is at the heart of the Chinese concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, which is the approximate translation from Mandarin. So, we compare community with a shared future for mankind, which is, let’s say the driving force between the idea of Belt and Road, expanded across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America as well with our good old friends’, “greed is good” concept from the eighties, which is still ruling America apparently.
Michael: And the corollary is that non-greed is bad.
Pepe: Exactly and non-greed is evil.
Michael: I see. I think we ran out of time. I do. I don’t know if Alanna wants to step in to wrap it up.
Michael: There may be somebody who has a question.
Pepe: Somebody has a question? That’ll be fantastic.
Alanna: There is a question from Ed Dodson. He wanted to know why there are these ghost cities in China? And who’s financing all this real estate that’s developed, but nobody’s living there? We’ve all been hearing about that. So, what is happening with that?
Michael: Okay. China had most of its population living in the countryside and it made many deals with Chinese landholders who have land rights, and they said, if you will give up your land right to the community, we will give you free apartment in the city that you could rent out.
So, China has been building apartments in cities and trading these basically in exchange to support what used to be called a rural exodus. China doesn’t need as many farmers on the land as it now has, and the question is how are you going to get them into cities? So, China began building these cities and many of these apartments are owned by people who’ve got them in exchange for trading their land rights. The deals are part of the rural reconstruction program.
Alanna: Do you think it was a good deal? Vacant apartments everywhere.
Pepe: You don’t have ghost cities in Xinjiang for instance, Xinjiang is under-populated, it’s mostly desert. And it’s extremely sensitive to relocate people to Xinjiang. So basically, they concentrated on expanding Urumqi. When you arrive in Urumqi it is like almost like arriving in, Guangzhou. It’s enormous. It’s a huge generic city in the middle of the desert. And it’s also a high-tech Mecca, which is something that very few people in the West know. And is the direct link between the eastern seaboard via Belt and Road to Central Asia.

 

Last year I was on an amazing trip. I went to the three borders, the Tajik-Xinjiang border, Kyrgiz-Xinjiang border and the Kazakh-Xinjiang border, which is three borders in one. It’s a fascinating area to explore and specially to talk to the local populations, the Kyrgiz, the Kazakhs and the Tajiks.

How do they see the Belt and Road directly affecting their lives from now on?

So, you don’t see something spectacular for instance, in the Xinjiang – Kazakh boarder, there is one border for the trucks, lots of them like in Europe, crossing from all points, from Central Asia to China and bringing Chinese merchandise to Central Asia.

There’s the train border, which is a very simple two tracks and the pedestrian border, which is very funny because you have people arriving in buses from all parts of Central Asia. They stop on the Kazakh border. They take a shuttle, they clear customs for one day, they go to a series of shopping malls on the Chinese side of the border. They buy like crazy, shop till it drops, I don’t know for 12 hours? And then they cross back the same day because the visa is for one day. They step on their buses and they go back.

So, for the moment it’s sort of a pedestrian form of Belt and Road, but in the future, we’re going to have high-speed rail. We’re going to have, well the pipelines are already there as Michael knows, but it’s fascinating to see on the spot. You see the closer integration; you see for instance Uyghurs traveling back and forth. You know, Uyghurs that have families in Kyrgizstan for instance, I met some Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan who do the back-and-forth all the time. And they said, there’s no problem. They are seen as businessmen so there’s no interference. There are no concentration camps involved, you know, but you have to go to these places to see how it works on the ground and with Covid, that’s the problem for us journalists who travel, because for one year we cannot go anywhere and Xinjiang was on my travel list this year, Afghanistan as well, Mongolia.

These are all parts of Belt and Road or future parts of Belt and Road, like Afghanistan. The Chinese and the Russians as well; they want to bring Afghanistan in a peace process organized by Asians themselves without the United States, within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, because they want Afghanistan to be part of the intersection of Belt and Road and Eurasian Economic Union. This is something Michael knows very well. You don’t see this kind of discussions in the American media for instance, integration of Eurasia on the ground, how it’s actually happening.

Michael: That’s called cognitive dissonance.

Alanna: To try to understand it gets you cognitive dissonance.

Pepe: Oh yeah, of course. And obviously you are a Chinese agent, a Russian agent. And so, I hear that all the time. Well, in our jobs we hear that all the time. Especially, unfortunately from our American friends.

Alanna: Okay. I know you have other things to do. This has been fabulous. I want to thank you so much, both of you, uh, with so easy to get attendance for this webinar. There were 20 people in five minutes enrolled and in two days we were at capacity. So, I know there are many more people who would love to hear you talk another time, whenever you two are so willing. And I think you both got much out of your first conversation in person. Everybody listening knows these two wonderful gentlemen, they have written more than 10 books, and they have traveled all over the world. They are on the top of geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis, and they are caring, loving people. So, you can see that these are the people we need to be listening to and understanding all around the world.
This was part ONE.
Now for the follow up; part TWO…

INDISPENSABLE READS: In Quest of a Multi-Polar World

Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar resume their conversation about a global monetary system that appears headed for divorce. 

“Free market meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. And you call that a free market…”

Read Part One of this conversation.

Pepe Escobar in conversation with Michael Hudson 
At The Henry George School of Social Science

Michael Hudson: Fifty ago, I wrote Super Imperialism about basically how America dominates the world financially and gets a free ride.

I wrote it right after America went off gold in 1971, when the Vietnam War, which was responsible for the entire balance of payments deficit, forced the country to go off gold. And everybody at that time worried the dollar was going to go down. There’d be hyperinflation. And what happened was something entirely different.

Once there was no gold, America strong-armed its allies to invest in U.S. Treasury bonds because their central banks don’t buy companies. They don’t buy raw materials. All they could buy is other central bank’s treasury bonds. So, all of a sudden, the only thing that other people could buy with all the dollars coming in were U.S. Treasury securities.

And the securities they bought essentially were to finance yet more war making and the balance of payments deficit from war and the 800 military bases America has around the world. And the largest customer, I think we discussed it before, are the Defense Department and the CIA that looked at it [Super Imperialism] as a how-to-do it book. Well, that was 50 years ago.

And what I’ve done is not only re-edit the book and add more information that’s come out, but I’ve picked up the last 50 years and how it’s absolutely transformed the whole world. And it’s a new kind of imperialism.

There was still a view 50 years ago that imperialism was [essentially] economic. And this is the view that there’s still a rivalry for instance, between America and China or America and Europe and other countries.

But I think the whole world has changed so much in the last 50 years that what we have now is not really so much a conflict between America and China or America and Russia, but between a financial system economy run by finance and an economy run by governments — democratic or less democratic, but certainly a mixed economy.

Well, everything that made industrial capitalism rich, everything that made America so strong in the 19th century, through its protective tariffs, through its public infrastructure investment all the way down through World War II and the aftermath. We had a mixed economy in America, and that was very balanced. Europe had a mixed economy. Every economy since Babylon and Rome has been a mixed economy, but in America you’ve had since 1980 something entirely different. That was not foreseen by anybody because it seemed to be so disruptive.

And what that was, was the financial sector saying we need liberty and by liberty, meaning we have to take planning and subsidy and economic policy and tax policy out of the hands of government. And put it in the hands of Wall Street.

And so, libertarianism and free market is a centralized economy that is centralized in the hands of the financial centers, Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse. And what you’re having today is the attempt of the financial sector to take the role that the landlord class had in Europe, from feudal times through the 19th century.  It’s a kind of resurgence.

If you look at the whole last 200 years of economic theory — from Adam Smith and, Henry George and Marx, onward — the whole idea was that everybody expected a mixed economy to become more and more productive and to free itself from the landlords, to free itself from banking to make land a public utility.

That was the tax base to make finance basically something public, and government would decide who gets the funding and thus, the idea of finance in the public sector was going to be pretty much what it is in China. You create bank credit in order to finance capital investment in factories. It means the production of machinery, agricultural modernization, of transport, infrastructure of high-speed trains of ports and all of that.

But in the United States and England, you have finance becoming something completely different.  Banks don’t lend money to factories. They don’t want money to make means of production. They make money to take over other assets. Eighty percent of bank loans are mortgage loans to transfer the ownership of real estate. And of course that’s what created a middle class in the United States.

The middle class was able to buy its own housing, it didn’t have to pay rent to landlords or absentee owners or warlords and their descendants in England and Europe. They could buy their own. What nobody realized is that if you borrowed the money to take a mortgage, there’s still an economic rental value that is not paid to the landlords. It’s paid to the banks. And so, in the Western civilizations in America and Europe, the banks have played the role that the landlords played a hundred years ago.

And just as the landlord is trying to do everything they could through the House of Lords in England and the upper houses of government in Europe, they’re trying to block any kind of democratic government. And the fight really is against government that would do anything that is not controlled by the 1 percent, by the banks. Essentially the merger between finance insurance and real estate; the FIRE sector. So, you have almost a relapse of capitalism in the West back into feudalism, but feudalism with a financialized twist much more than it was in medieval times.

The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia.  America would love for there to be a [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin figure in China to say, just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, the wealth, all the factories to individuals. And let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially.

And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.

Pepe Escobar: Well, as an introduction, Michael that was perfect because now we have the overall framework — geo-economic and historically — at least for the past 70 years.

I have a series of questions for you. I was saving one of these for the end, but I think I should start really the Metallica way. Let’s go heavy metal for a start, right?

So considering  what you describe as a new kind of imperialism and the fact that this sort of extended free lunch cannot apply anymore because sovereigns around the world, especially Russia and China, I tried to formulate the idea that there are only three real sovereign powers on the planet, apart from the hegemon; Russia, China, and Iran, these three, which happen to be the main hub and the main focus of not only of the New Silk Roads but of the Eurasia integration process, they are actively working for some sort of change of the rules that predominated for the past 70 years.

So my first question to you would be, do you see any realistic possibility of a, sort of a Bretton Woods 2.0, which would imply the end of the dollar hegemony as we know it, and petrodollar recycling on and on and on, with the very important presence of that oily hacienda in the lands of Arabia. And do you think this is possible considering that President [Vladimir] Putin himself only a few days ago reiterated once again that the U.S. is no longer agreement- capable?  So that destroys already the possibility of the emergence of the new rules of the game. But do you think this is still realistically possible?

Michael: I certainly do not see any repetition of a Bretton Woods because as I described in Super Imperialism, the whole of Bretton Woods was designed to make American control over Britain, over Europe total. Bretton Woods was a U.S.-centered system to prevent England from maintaining its empire. That’s okay. To prevent France from maintaining its empire and for America to take over the sterling area and, essentially with the World Bank, to prevent other countries from becoming independent and feeding themselves, to make sure that they supported plantation agriculture, not land reform. The one single fight of the World Bank was to prevent land reform and to make sure that America, and foreign investors, would take over the agriculture of these countries.

And very often people think of capitalism, certainly in the sense that Marx described in Volume One, capitalism is the exploitation of wage labor by employers. But capitalism also is an appropriation of the land rent, the agricultural rent, the natural resource rent, the oil and the mineral rent. And the idea of Bretton Woods was to make sure that other countries could not impose capital controls to prevent American finance coming in and appropriating their resources, of making the loans to foreign governments so that governments would not create their own money to promote their own social development but would have to borrow from the World Bank and the IMF, which essentially meant from the Pentagon and the State Department, in U.S. dollars.

And they would dollarize their economies and the economies would all be sucked. The economic rents from oil, agriculture, mining would all be sucked into the United States. That kind of Bretton Woods cannot be done again. And since Bretton Woods was an idea of centralizing the world’s economic surplus in a single country, the United States, no, that can never be done again.

What is happening? You mentioned the world of free, free lunch, and that’s what was a theme of Super Imperialism, when America issues dollars, for these all end up in central banks and they hold the dollars as a surplus. That means what can they do? All they can do is really lend them to the United States. America got a free lunch. It could spend and spend on its military, on bumping up corporate takeovers of other countries. The dollars have come in and foreign countries couldn’t cash them in for gold. They had nothing to cash them into. And all they could do is finance the U.S. budget deficit by buying Treasury bills.

That’s the irony now, what has happened in the last few years in the fight against Russia and China is America has killed the free lunch because it said, okay, now we’re going to have sanctions against Russia and China. We’re going to all of a sudden grab whatever money you have in foreign banks like we grabbed Venezuela’s money. Let’s go, we’re going to excommunicate you from the bank clearing system. So, you can’t use banking. We’re going to put sanctions against banks that deal with you.

So obviously Russia and China said, okay, we can’t deal with the dollar anymore, because the United States just crammed them. And if we do have dollars, we’re just going to hold everything in reserves and lending to the United States, the dollars that it’s going to spend building more military bases around us to make us waste our money on monetary spending. And so, America itself by the way, in fighting against China and Russia, has ended the free lunch.

“In America you’ve had since 1980 something entirely different. That was not foreseen by anybody because it seemed to be so disruptive.”

And now, Russia and China as you pointed out, are de-dollarizing, they’re trading in each other’s currency. They’re being the exact opposite of everything that Bretton Woods tried to create. They’re trying to create independence from the United States.

If Bretton Woods is this dependence on the United States, a centralized system dependent ultimately on Wall Street financial planners then, what China and Russia are trying to create is an economy that’s not run by the financial sector, but it is run by, let’s say, industrial and economic engineering and saying, what kind of an economy do we need in order to raise living standards and wages and self-sufficiency and preserve the environment, what is needed for the ideal world that we want?

Well, in order to do that, you’re going to have to have a lot of infrastructure. And in America, infrastructure is all privatized. You have to make a profit. And once you have infrastructure, a railroad or electric utility, like you see in Texas recently, it’s a monopoly. Infrastructure, for 5,000 years, Europe, the near East, Asia was always kept in the public domain that goes, if you’ll give it to private owners, they’ll charge a monopoly rent.

Well, the idea that China has is, “OK, we’re going to provide the educational system freely and let everybody try to get an education.” In America if you have an education, you have to go into debt for the banks for between $50,000 and $200,000. And whatever you make you’re going to end up paying the bank while in China, if you give free education, the money that they earned from the education will be spent into the economy, buying the goods and services that they produce, and the economy will be expanding, not shrinking, not having it all sucked out into the financial banks that are financing the education, same thing with the railroads, same things with the healthcare.

If you provide healthcare freely then the employers do not have to pay for the healthcare because that’s provided freely. In the United States, if the  corporation and the employees have to pay for healthcare, that means that the employees have to be paid a much higher wage in order to afford the healthcare, in order to afford the transportation that gets him to work, in order to afford the auto loans, in order to drive to work, all of this is free, or subsidized in other countries, who create their own credit.

In the United States and Europe, governments feel that they have to borrow from the wealthy people in a bond and pay interest. In China they say, “we don’t have to borrow from a wealthy class. We can simply print the money.” That’s Modern Monetary Theory. As Donald Trump has explained in the United States, we can print whatever we want. Dick Cheney said, deficits don’t matter. We can just print it.  And of course, Stephanie Kelton and my colleagues in MMT at Kansas City for many years have been saying.

“The economy has been saturated and Reaganized and the result is a fight of economic systems against China and Russia.”

The banks fear this because they say, “Wait a minute, Modern Monetary Theory means it’s not feudal monetary theory. We want feudal monetary theory. We want the rich people to be able to have a choke point on the economy that you can’t survive unless you borrow from us and pay us interest. We want the choke points.” That’s called economic rent.

And so, you have the West turning into a rent-extractive economy, a rent-seeking economy. And you’ll have the whole ideal of Russia, China, and other countries being the ideal of not only Marx, but Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ricardo. The whole of classical economics was to free economies from economic rent. And the American economy is all about extracting rent through the real estate sector, the financial sector, the health insurance sector, the monopolies and infrastructure sector.

The economy has been saturated and Reaganized and the result is a fight of economic systems against China and Russia. So, it’s not simply that, there’s a fight between who makes the best computer chips and the best iPhones. It’s: are we going to have a fallback of civilization back into feudalism, back into control by a narrow class at the top of the economy, that 1 percent? Or are we going to have the ideal of democratic industrialization that used to be called socialism but it was also called capitalism. Industrial capitalism was socialism; it was socialized medicine, it was socialized infrastructure, it was socialized schooling. And so, the fight against socialism is a fight against industrial capitalism, a fight against democracy, a fight against prosperity.

[See previous coverage:  The Consequences of Moving from Industrial to Financial Capitalism]

That’s why what you’re seeing now is a fight for what direction civilization will go into. And you can’t have a Bretton Woods for a single kind of organization because the United States would never join that civilization. The United States calls a country trying to make its labor force prosperous, educated and healthy instead of sick with shorter lifespans, they call it communism or socialism.

Well, it can call it whatever it wants, but that’s the dynamic we are talking about.

Pepe:  Well, you put it very, I would say starkly. The opposition between two completely different systems, what the Chinese are proposing, including, from productive capitalism to trade and investment all across Eurasia and beyond, including Africa, parts of Latin America as well. And the rentier obsession of the 0.01 percent that controls the U.S. financial system. In terms of facts on the ground, are we going slowly but surely and ominously towards an absolute divorce by a system based on rentier, ultra-financialization, which is the American system, not productive capitalism at all.

I was going through a small list of what the U.S. exports, it’s not much as you know, better than I do. Agricultural products but always privileging U.S. farmers.  Hollywood, we are all hostages of Hollywood all over the world. Pop culture? That’s not the pop culture that used to be absolutely impregnable and omniscient during the ‘60s, the 70s, during the Madonna, Michael Jackson era in the ‘80s, right? Infotech. And that’s where a big bet comes in. And this is maybe the most important American export at the moment because American Big Tech controls social networks all over the planet. Big Pharma. Now we see the power of Big Pharma with the whole Covid operations, right?  But Boeing prefers to invest in financial engineering instead of building decent products. Right?

So, in terms of a major superpower, the hyperpower, that’s not much, and obviously buyers all over the world already noticed that. So, China is proposing the New Silk Roads, which is a foreign-policy strategy, and a trade, investment and sustainable development strategy. [It’s] applied not only to the whole of Eurasia, but Eurasia and beyond to grow a great deal of the Global South and that’s why we have Global South partners to the New Silk Roads — 130-and-counting as we speak.

So, the dichotomy could not be clearer. What will the 0.001 percent do? Because they don’t have anything seductive to sell. To all those nations in the Global South to start with; the new version of the Non-Aligned Movement, NAM, the countries that are already part of New Silk Road projects, not even to Europe and this, we could see by the end of last year when the China-European Union agreement was more or less sealed. It’s probably going to be sealed in 2021 for good.

And at the same time, we had the Regional Economic Comprehensive Partnership, RCEP, with the ASEAN 10, my neighbors here, the Association of South East Asian Nations, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. So, when you have the China-EU deal, and when you have RCEP, you have China as the number one trade partner on the planet, no competition whatsoever.

And obviously every one of these players wants to do business with China. And they’re privileging doing business with China to doing business with the U.S., especially with a country that once again, according to President Putin, is non-agreement capable. So, Michael, what is your key geo-economic view of the next steps? Are we going towards the divorce of the American financialization system and the Eurasia-and-beyond integration system?

Michael: Well, you you’ve made the whole point clear. There is incompatibility between a rentier society controlled by the finance and real estate interests and military interests and an industrial democracy.

Industry in England and Europe in the 19th century — the whole fight for democratic reform to increase the role of the House of Commons against the House of Lords in England and the lower house in Europe — was a fight to get labor on the side of industry [and] to get rid of the landlord class. And it was expected that … capitalism [would then be] free of the landlord class, free of something that wasn’t really capitalism at all, it was a carry-over from feudalism. Once you free capitalism, you wouldn’t have this overhead of the idle 1 percent, only consuming resources and going to war, anymore.

And then World War I changed all of that . … Already, in the late 19th century, the landlords and the banks fought back, and they fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalist and they called it freedom. They call it free markets. Free market meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. And you call that a free market.

The free world was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance together. So, it’s Orwellian, and the dynamic of this world is shrinking because it’s polarizing and you’ve seen with the Covid pandemic in the United States, the economy has polarized much more sharply than ever before between the 1 percent, the 10 percent and the rest of the economy.

Well, as opposed to that here, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, that do not have a banking class and the landlord class controlling the economy, but a partnership. The kind of thing you had in Germany in the late 19th century, government industry and labor, all working together to design how we provide the financing for industry so that it can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding for us to build infrastructure and uplift the population.

What China is doing is what made America rich in the 19th century, what made Germany rich. It’s exactly the same logical engineering plan. Now, this plan because it’s based on economic expansion, and environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.

“What China is doing is what made America rich in the 19th century, what made Germany rich.”

Europe had a choice; either it could shrink, and be American, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously, we don’t want to grow. We want to be constant. We want our banks to take over just like in America. That’s a free market because Americans have found out, and I’m told by American officials we just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable. That’s why when president Putin says, America and Europe are not agreement capable, it means they’re just in it for the money. There is no ideology there. There is no idea of the overall social benefit. The system is “how can I get rich, and you can get rich by being bribed?” That’s why you go into politics. As you can tell in America with the Supreme Court law saying politics can be personally financed.

So, you’re having two incompatible systems and, they’re on different trajectories and if you have a system that is shrinking like the West and growing in the East, you have resentment.  People who obtain their wealth in crooked ways, or without working — by inheritance, by crime, by exploitation — they will fight like anything to keep that. Whereas people who actually create wealth, labor, capital, they, they’re not willing to fight, they just want to be creative. So you have a destructive military force, in the West. And, basically a productive, economic growth force. And in Eurasia, the clash now is occurring largely in Ukraine. You’re having the United States back the neo-Nazis.

Pepe: The old Nazi movement!

Michael: It’s the same swastika-carrying group that threatened Russia in World War II. And this is like waving a red flag before a bull. Putin continues to remind the Russians. We know what happened with the 22 million Russians that died, in World War II with Europe coming in. We’re not going to let it happen again.

And you can be certain Russia is not going to be sucked into invading the Ukraine. The United States has its military advisers in the Ukraine. Now, the Vineyard of the Saker has a very good report on that. America’s trying to needle Russia into fighting back against the terrorist groups and Russia has no desire at all to. There’s nothing that Russia has to gain by taking it over. It’s essentially a bankrupt country.

The United States is trying to provoke a response so it can say Russia is attacking the West.  The result will probably be that Russia will very simply provide arms to the Eastern Ukrainians to fight back the invasion. And you’re going to have a wasteland in Western Ukraine and Poland. And this wasteland will be the new buffer state with Europe. Already you have, maybe 10 percent of the Ukrainians having moved to Russia and the east. [Another] 10 percent are now plumbers in England and Europe, working. They’re beginning to look like Latvia and other neo-liberalized countries. Neo-liberalized countries? If you want to see the future, look at Latvia, Estonia. Look at Greece. That’s the American plan. Essentially, an emigration of skilled labor, a sharp reduction of living standards, a 20 percent decline in population. And although it may appear to have more income, all of this income and GDP is, essentially, interest collection and rents to the FIRE sector.

All the American GDP growth is essentially payment to the bank, to the landlords and the monopolist, it’s not, the population, the employees are not sharing in the GDP. It’s all concentrated at the top. They make a desert, and they call it growth.

It hasn’t changed.  Rome was a predatory economy held by military force that ultimately collapsed and America is on the same trajectory as Rome. And it knows this, I have spoken to American policymakers and they say, “you know, we we’re going to be dead by then. It doesn’t matter if the West loses. I’m going to get rich. I’m going to buy a farm in New Zealand and make a big bomb shelter there and live underground, you know, like a cave dweller.”

 

The financial time frame and the predatory rentier time frame is short term. The Eurasian time frame is long-term. So, you’ve got to have the short-term burning what wealth it has as opposed to the longer-term building up.

[Consider the Biden Covid relief measure.] They call it a stimulus bill, but if you’re starving, if you haven’t been able to pay your rent, if you’re six months behind in your rent and you get enough money to pay the landlord, at least one month back rent, that’s not a stimulus, that’s a survival.  And it’s a one-time payment. This kind of stimulus checks that America’s sending out are sent out every month in Germany and parts of Europe.

“All the American GDP growth is essentially payment to the bank, to the landlords and the monopolist.”

The whole idea in Europe is: OK, you have a pandemic, you have business interrupted. What we’re going to do is we’re going to have a pause. You don’t pay the rent, but the landlords are not going to pay the banks. And the banks are not going to be in arrears. We’re just going to have a pause so that when it’s all over people will go back to normal. Well, China and Russia are already pretty much there and where you are [in Asia], and especially in Thailand, are already back to normal.

But in America anybody who’s renting or who’s bought a house on mortgage credit or who has credit card debt or personal debt or automobile debt they’re way behind. And all of these stimulus checks are just being used to pay the banks and the landlords not to not to buy more goods and services.

All they’re trying to do is, is get out of the hole that they’ve been dug into in the last 12 months. That’s not a stimulus that’s a partial, desperation payment. This problem never existed in other civilizations. You have the whole tradition of Greece, Babylonia that’s what my book Forgiving the Debt is all about. The whole idea is when there is an economic interruption, you have an interruption, you don’t have people into debt. You wipe out all of the arrears that have mounted up. You wipe out the tax arrears, the rent arrears, the debt of payment arrears. So once the crisis is over, you can start from a normal position again.

There’s no normalization in America, there’s no normal position to start. You’re starting from a position, even more behind the financial problems than you were when you went in. The foreign economies of China and Russia don’t have that kind of problem, they don’t have any kind of deficit. So, the West is beginning with 99 percent of the population deeper and deeper into debt to the 1 percent.

Where is that whole polarization between the 1 percent and the 99 percent? It doesn’t exist certainly in China and in Russia, Putin is trying to minimize it, given the legacy of the kleptocracy that the neo-liberals put in he’s still trying to deal with that, but you really have that. It’s a difference in economic systems and the direction in which these systems are moving in.

Pepe: I’m really glad that you brought up Ukraine, Michael, because this, let’s say U.S. foreign policy, even, before Trump and now with the new Biden-Harris administration, basically more or less what it boils down to is sanction sanctions, sanctions, as we know, and provocations, which is what they’re doing certainly in Syria with that recent bombing.

And, in the case of Ukraine and Donbass, it’s absolutely crazy because NATO so-called strategists, when you talk to them in Brussels, they know very, very well about each state or whatever they weaponize and financialize to profit Kiev to mount some sort of offensive against the Donbass and even if they would have like 300,000 soldiers against like 30,000 in Donbass.

If the Russians see that this is going to get really heavy if they intervene in directly, with their bombing, with their super missiles, they can finish this story in one day. And if they want it, they could finish the whole story, including invading Ukraine in three days, like they did in 2008 with Georgia and still they keep the provocations, loosely acted on by  people from inside the Pentagon.

And so, we have sanctions, we have nonstop provocations, and we have also a sort of introducing a Fifth Column — elements inside or at the top of government — which brings me to, and I would love to have your personal analysis on the role of Mario (Goldman Sachs) Draghi now in Italy, which is something I had been discussing with my Italian friends. And there’s more or less a consensus, among very well informed, independent Italian analysts that Draghi may be the perfect Trojan horse to accelerate the destruction of the Italian state, which will accelerate the globalist project of the European Union, which is absolutely non-state centric.

Let’s put it this way, which is also part of the Great Reset so if you could briefly talk to us about the role of Super Mario at the moment.

Michael: Well, Italy is a very good example to look at. It had strings for a long time. When you have a country that needs infrastructure, that needs public, social democratic spending, you need a government to create the credit. But when Americans and specifically the University of Chicago free market lobbyists created the European, the Eurozone financial system, their premise was that governments cannot create money. Only banks can create money. Only banks owned by the bond holders can create money for the benefit of their owners and bond holders. So, no European government, first of all, can run a budget deficit sufficient to cope with the coronavirus or with the problems that have been plaguing Italy for a decade. They can’t create their money to revive employment, to revive infrastructure, to revive the economy. The European Central Bank only lends to other central banks.

It’s created trillions of euros just to buy stocks and bonds, not to spend into the economy, not to hire labor, not to build infrastructure, but just for the holders of the stocks and bonds. The 1 percent or 5 percent of the population gets richer. The function of the European Central Bank is to create money, to save the wealthiest 5 percent from losing a single penny on their stocks and bonds.

And the cost is to impoverish the economy and to basically make the economy end up looking like Greece, which was sort of the dress rehearsal for how the Eurozone was going to just essentially reduce Europe to debt dependency, just like in feudalism everybody had to have access to the land by becoming a serf.

Well now you’re in debt peonage. It’s the modern, finance capital’s version of serfdom. And so, in Italy we’re going to need government spending. We’re going to need to do in our way what China’s doing in its way and what Russia is doing in its way. We’re going to have some kind of government program. And we can’t have the economy being impoverished just because the University of Chicago has designed a plan for Europe to prevent the euro ever from being a rival to the U.S. dollar. If there’s no European central bank to borrow, to pump euros into the world economy, then, only dollars will be left for central bank reserves. The United States doesn’t ever want a rival. It wants satellites and so that’s what it’s basically turned Europe into. And I don’t see any response outside of Italy for an attempt to say we can’t be a part of this system. Let’s withdraw from the euro.

I know that the Greeks, when I was in Greece years ago, we all thought can’t we join with Italy and Portugal and Ireland and say look, the system isn’t working. Everybody else no, no, the Americans will just simply get us out of office one way or another. And in Italy, of course, if you look at what happened after World War II, the great threat was Italian communism.  You had the Americans essentially say well, we know the answer to communism, it’s fascism and, you saw where they put the money. They essentially did every dirty trick in the book in order to fight any left- wing group in Italy, just as they did in Yugoslavia, just as they did in Greece, wiping out the partisans, all the leading anti-Nazi groups from Greece to Italy to elsewhere. All of a sudden they were all either assassinated or moved out of office and replaced by the very people that America had been fighting against during World War II.

Well, now Italy is finally coming to terms with this and trying to fight back and you’re having what’s happening there, between Northern Italy and Southern Italy. You’re having the same splits occur in other countries.

Pepe: Yeah. Well, I’m going to bring up, perhaps an even more extreme case now Michael, which is the case of Brazil, which at the moment is in the middle of an absolutely out of this world mix of telenovela and Kabuki theater that even for most Brazilians is absolutely incomprehensible. It’s like a fragmentation bomb exploding over and over again, a Groundhog Day of fragmentation bombs.

In fact, it’s completely crazy. Lula [former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] is back in the picture as well. We still don’t know under which terms, we still don’t know how the guys who run the show, which are the Brazilian military, are going to deal with him or instrumentalize him, et cetera.

In 2007, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) and his wife Marisa Letícia review troops during the Independence Day military parade. (Ricardo Stuckert, Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons)

I bring up this case because … essentially it has convulsed Brazil completely and large parts of Latin America. It is a telenovela with one cliffhanger after another, sometimes in a matter of minutes, but it encompasses all the basic themes of what really interests the 0.01 percent, which we can identify for instance as a class war against labor which is what the system in Brazil, since the coup against Dilma [Former President Dilma Vana Rousseff] has been waging. A war against mixed economies, economic sovereignty, which is something that the Masters of the Universe of the 0.01 percent cannot wage against Russia and China. But that was very successfully waged against Brazil and implemented in Brazil. In fact, in a matter of two years, they completely devastated the country in every possible sense, industrially, sociologically, you name it…

And of course, because the main objective is something that you keep stressing over and over again, unipolar rentier dominance, in fact.

Brazil, I would say is the extreme case in the world not only in the Global South, but in planetary terms of let’s say the last frontier of the rentier economy, when you manage to capture a country that was slowly emerging as a leader in the Global South, as an economic leader. Don’t forget that a few years ago, Brazil was the sixth-largest economy in the world and on the way to become the fifth. Now it’s the 12th and falling down nonstop and controlled by a mafia that includes not by accident, a Chicago Boy Pinochetista, Minister Paulo Guedes, who is implementing, in the 21st century, something that was implemented in Chile in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And they were successful. Apparently, at least so far.

Brazil is so disorganized as a nation, so shattered, so fragmented and atomized as a nation that basically it depends on the re-emergence of a single political leader, in this case, Lula to try to rebuild the nation from scratch. And even in a position where he cannot control the game he can interfere in the game, which is what happened, like you know, … when he gave a larger-than-life press conference, mixed with a re-presentation of himself as a statesman and  said, “Look  the whole thing is shattered, but there is some light at the end of the tunnel.”

But still he cannot confront the real Masters of the Universe that have allowed this to happen in the first place. So just to give an example to many of you who are not familiar with some details of the Brazilian case, and it involves directly the Obama-Biden scheme or the Obama-Biden larger operation.  When Biden was vice president in 2013, in May 2013, he visited Brazil for three days and he met with President Dilma.

They discussed very touchy subjects, including the most important one, the absolutely enormous, pre-salt oil reserves, which obviously, the Americans wanted to be part of the whole thing, not by accident. You know what happened one week later? The start of the Brazilian color revolution, in fact, and this thing kept rolling and rolling and rolling.

We got the coup against Dilma in 2016, we got to the Car Wash operation landing Lula in jail. And we got to the election of [President Jair] Bolsanaro. And now we are in a place where even if the military controls this whole process, even if Bolsanaro is becoming bad for business will he become bad for the rentier class business, for the 0.01 percent in the U.S. that has all the connections in their new, large neo-colony in the tropics, which has enormous strategic value, not to mention, unforeseen resources, wealth resources, right? So, this is an extreme case and I know that you follow Brazil relatively closely. So, your geo-economic and geopolitical input on the running telenovela I think would be priceless for all of us.

Michael: Well, this problem goes back 60 years. In 1965, the former president of Brazil came to New York and we met. He explained to me how the United States essentially got rid of him because he wasn’t representing the banking class. And he said that they built Brasilia because it’s apart from the big industrial cities, they wanted to prevent industry and democracy and the population from controlling the government.

So, they built Brasilia. He said maybe they’ll use it as an atom bomb site. It certainly doesn’t have an economic thing. Well, fast forward, in 1980, after Mexico defaulted on its foreign debt in 1972, nobody would invest in Latin America. And by 1990, Brazil was paying 45 percent interest per year to borrow the dollars to be able to finance its deficit, which is mainly flight capital by the wealthy. Well, I think I’d mentioned before here, I was hired by Scudder, Stevens and Clark for the Third World bond fund. Forty five percent: I mean, just imagine that. That’s a fortune every year. No American would buy it, no European would buy it. Who bought it? The Brazilians and the Argentineans bought, and I get it, they’re the government, they’re the central bankers. They’re the president’s family. They’re the 1 percent, they’re the only people that are holding Brazil’s dollar debt.

So when Brazil pays its foreign dollar debt, it’s paying to its own 1 percent who are holding, who are saying well, we’re holding it off shore in the Dutch West Indies where the fund was located for tax-exempt purposes and pretending to be American imperialists, but actually being local imperialists.

Well then, just towards the end of Lula’s reign, the Council of Economic Advisors brought Jamie Galbraith and Randy Wray and me down for a discussion. How do we, you know, we’re, we’re really worried because, Lula in order to get elected, had to meet with the banks and agree to give them what they wanted.

They said, look, we can see that, you know, you have the power to be elected. We don’t want to have to fight you in dirty ways, but will let you be elected, but you’re going to have to do the policies and certainly the financial policies that we want and Lula made a kind of a devil’s agreement with them because he didn’t want to be killed and he wanted to do some good things.

So, he was sort of like a Bernie Sanders-type character. Okay, you have to go along with a really bad system in order to get something good done, because Brazil really needs something good done. Well, the fact is that even the little bit he did the finance couldn’t take because one of the characteristics of financial wealth is it’s addictive. It’s not like diminishing marginal utility. If you give more food to an employee or to a worker you know, at the end of the meal, you’re satiated, you don’t want much more. If you give enough money you know, OK, they buy a few luxuries and then, OK, they save it. But if you give more money to a billionaire they want even more and they grow even more desperate. It’s like a cocaine-addicted person and the Brazilian ruling class wanted it so desperately that they framed up and controlled the utterly corrupt judiciary.  The judiciary in Brazil is almost as corrupt as it is in New York City.

Pepe: More, even more.

Michael: They framed them up and they want totalitarian control. And that sort of is what free market is. Totalitarian control by the financial class. That’s freedom for the financial class, if the freedom to do what they want to do to the rest of the economy, that’s libertarianism, it’s a free market, it’s Austrian economics.

It’s the right wing’s fight against government, it’s a fight against any governments for long enough who resist the financial and real estate interests. That’s what the free market is. And Brazil is merely the most devastating example of this because it takes such a racial term there. Not only does Brazil want to make a fortune, tearing down the Amazon, cutting up the Amazon, selling the lumber to China, turning the Amazon into soy production to sell to China. But for that, you have to exterminate the domestic population, the indigenous population that wants to use the land to feed itself. So you see the kind of race war and ethnic war that you have, not to mention the war against the blacks in the Brazilian slums that Lula tried so much to overcome.

So you have a resumption of the ethnic war there, and on Wall Street, I had discussions with money managers back in 1990. Well I wonder whether that’s going to be a model for what’s happening in the United States with the ethnic war here.

Essentially, it’s a tragedy what’s happening in Brazil, but it’s pretty much what happened in Chile under Pinochet which is why they have the Pinochetistas and the Chicago boys that you mentioned.

Pepe: Absolutely. Coming back to China, Michael, and the [recent] approval of the Five-Year Plan, which is not actually the five-year plan. It’s actually three five-year plans in one because they are already planning 2035, which is something absolutely unimaginable anywhere in the West. Right?

So, it’s a different strategy of productive investment, of expansion of social welfare and solidifying social welfare, technological improvements.  I would say by 2025 China would be very close to the same infotech level of the U.S., which is part of “Made in China 2025,” which is fantastic. They stopped talking about it, but they are still implementing it, the technological drive in all those standard areas that they had codified a few years ago. And of course, this notion, which I found particularly fascinating because it is in one sense socialism with some Confucianist elements, but it’s also very Taoist: The dual development strategy, which is inversions and expansion of domestic investment and consumption and balancing all the time with projects across Eurasia, not only affiliated with the Belt and Road, with the New Silk Road, but all other projects as well. So, when you have a leadership that is capable of planning with this scope, amplitude breadth and reach, and when we compare it to the money managers in the West, which basically their planning goes, not even quarterly in many cases, it’s 24 hours.

So our dichotomy between rentier capitalism, financialization, or whatever we want to define it, and state planning with the view of social benefit is even starker in fact, and I’m not saying that the Chinese system can be exported to the rest of the world, but I’m sure that, all across the Global South, when people look at Chinese policies, long-term, how they are planning, how they are developed and how they are always fine tuning what they developed and discuss…. As you said in the beginning, this is a frontal shock of two systems and sooner or later we’re going to have the bulk of the Global South including nations which nowadays are still American vassals or satrapies or puppets or poodles, et cetera.

They’re going to see which way the wind is blowing. Right?

Michael: Why can’t the Chinese system be exported to the West? That’s a good question…. How would you make American industry able to follow the same productive path that China did? Well for one thing the biggest element in workers’ budget today is housing, 40 percent. There was one way to get rid of it, get rid of the high housing prices that essentially, or whatever a bank would lend. And the banks lend essentially the economic rent. There’s a very simple way to keep housing prices down. You tax the land rent, you use your tax system, not on taxing labor, that increases the cost of labor, not increasing capital, that leaves less, industrial capital, but your tax of the land and the real estate and the banks.

Well, suppose you were to lower the price of housing in America from 40 percent to 10 percent like China has, and this is the big element in the cost structure difference. Well, if all of a sudden people only had to pay 10 percent of their income for housing, then all the banks would go under because 80 percent of the bank loans are mortgage loans.

The whole idea is that the purpose of housing is to force how many buyers and renters go into debt to the banks so that the banks end up with all of the lend rent that the landlord class used to get. This is what’s preventing America from being like China. What if America would try to develop a high-speed railroad like China?

Well, then you need the right of way. You’d need to have the railroads go in a straight line. … They need a right of way and it doesn’t have a right of way because that conflicts with private property and most of the right of way is a very expensive real estate.

So, you can’t have high-speed rail in the United States, like in China.  Suppose you would have a low-cost education. Well then, you get rid of the whole means of siphoning off labor’s income to pay for education loans. You could go, suppose you had private healthcare and prevent Americans from getting sick like they do in China and Thailand, where you are.

One of China’s many super-speed electric trains. They are generations ahead of America’s rail system. (Wikicommons)

Well, then the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be able to make their rent. So you could not have America adopt a China type industrial program without what would be really a revolution against the legacy of the monopoly of private banking, of finance and all of the fortunes that have been built up financially really in the last 40 years since 1980.

Pepe: So, what’s going to happen in the, let’s say, short to mid-term in the U.S.? Michael, we are seeing the corrosion of the whole system, not only externally in terms of foreign policy and the end of the free lunch, but internally with those 70-million-plus “deplorables” being literally canceled from public debate, the impoverishment of the middle classes, with over 50 million people in America who are practically becoming literally poor. And obviously the American dream ended a few decades ago, maybe, but now there’s not even a glimpse of it, that there could be a renewal of the  American dream. So we have a larval civil war situation, degrading on a daily basis.  What’s the end game in fact? And what exactly does Wall Street, the American ruling class —the guys who have those lunches at the Harvard club — what do they ultimately want?

Michael: Well, what you call a disaster for the economy, isn’t it a bonanza for the 1 percent?  This is a victory of finance. You look at it as a collapse of industrial capitalism. I look at it as the victory of rentier finance capitalism.  You’re having probably 10 million Americans that are going to be thrown out of their apartments and their homes in June when the moratorium on rents and mortgages ends. You’re going to have a vast increase in the homeless population. That will probably represent an increase in people who use the subways. Where else are they going to live? And all of this, there’s an immense amount of private capital firms that have all been created in the last year of just wealth accumulations and they’re saying there are going to be such great opportunities to pick up real estate at bargain prices, all of this for the commercial real estate, that’s broken, all the buildings and the restaurants that have to be sold because they can’t meet their mortgage payments and their rents, all the houses that are going to be under, private capital can come in and do what was done after the Obama evictions.

We can do what Blackstone did. We can buy them all out for pennies on the dollar. So, for them, they’re looking at their own 20-year plan. And their 20-year plan is to grab everything!

…

A Long read, eh?

Yeah. I know it was a long read. Maybe you all should have gotten a beer and some pizza before you started to read it, maybe.

Delicious Beer and pizza.

.

Keep in mind that any disruption will be uneven. It will be in patches. Avoid the high-risk areas if you can, and be part of a group.

A Comment that generated this post…

The question;

Your website is by far THE MOST IMPORTANT resource for westerners right now. I have a lot to learn from site, and I also have some questions. The most important question I have at this moment is –

1) How do you advise Americans/Europeans who understand what is happening, the future that is approaching to prepare, survive AND maintain their sanity in these trying times. Especially those who can’t move outside USA/EU?

Your help and answer will be much appreciated. The feeling of doom and dread while your compatriots run towards jumping off a cliff (and forcibly drag you along) is not a fun feeling.

Note: I am in EU but I am using a VPN for my safety. My IP address will indicate an Asian country close to China but I am living in EU. Please approve my comment, it’s not a spam.

The Answer:

Thank you for this. This question has been asked of me my many people, and I have answered it. Long time MM readers can answer this for you, but I will take a quick stab at it yet again. 

Essentially, the social system that humans established way back around 5000 years ago is faulted. The moment that banking interest obtained the same value as gold or physical exertion, the system was doomed. It just took 7000 years to manifest. 

Now the USA is in debt for nearly 30 trillion dollars. All the gold on the planet earth wouldn’t be able to pay this debt. Yet this debt is jut an artificial creation. It’s just money out of thin air. Value from nothing.

For the last 75 years, the United States used this artificial value to control the world. The wealthy became like Gods. The poor became like slaves. 

And as a result the world became a very difficult place to live. Are you enjoying life right now? If not, why? 

Everything can be traced down to people who make nothing, who produce nothing, becoming Gods over those that do. And these “Gods” have their own group of toadies who service them. Creating wars, strife, and elements of control. It’s all ungainly and unraveling.

China, Russia and Iran are unifying. 

They are not allowing this artificial wealth creation mechanism to become the monster that it is in the West, and this is a major threat to the “American way of life”, “democracy” and what little is left of “freedom”.

The world is resetting.

Now, America and the West (the five eyes) is like a big old enraged old elephant on a jet aircraft. It is thrashing about, banging into the side of the aircraft and is roaring and howling and tearing up the floor. The pilot and his crew are deciding whether or not it is in the best interests to just open up the rear cargo door and throw him out the plane with no parachute. This is where we are today.

You have no control on whether or not the elephant will get ejected. For you are just a tiny, tiny flea on the back of this enraged elephant. Your choices are quite limited, but they are clear. Do you [1] jump off now and land on the sterile clean floor of the aircraft, while the elephant stomps about, [2] ride the elephant as you have been and hope that the elephant calms down and the plane lands safely, [3] fight with the other fleas on the back of the elephant and try to build a little nest of elephant hair, and float gently to the side of the plane intact.

And who is this elephant? Why it is the United States; an Oligarchy-ruled Military-Empire.

I have advised everyone who could, to take option [1] and flee. 

Those that could not, like yourself, I suggest option [3]. What ever you do, do not take option [2]. That is the herd option and it will be lethal.

And I will repeat my advice. Here is the advice for option [3]...

[1] Do not be a “lone wolf”. That is going to get you killed. Be part of a local community. Know who you can trust and who you cannot. Identify friends and foes. Again, I will repeat, do not try to be alone. You need to be part of a community to survive. This is your MOST IMPORTANT task.

[2] Learn a skill. Take an online class in paramedic technology, know some basic repair skills. You need to be useful when things go really crazy. have a skill. Have abilities. be able to work as a "team player". Be reasonable, balanced, and provide something of worth.

[3] Stock up on food supplies. Make sure that you have an enormous larder of dry goods. 

[4] Guns and weapons. Having a firearm is beneficial only if you know how to use it well. Otherwise, count on the avoidance strategy of survival, but be absolutely ready to kill with your bare hands if necessary. If you are not at this point, then you need to get to that point. Its basic survival 101. 

[5] Basics of location. If you are going to "hunker down", then be ready. Make sure that you have a hidden room in your basement or a place to go where you can hide if need be. Know where to get water, potable water easily, if you need to. Know how to recharge a batter with solar power or a generator from a bicycle. 

[6] Do not trust the “news”.  The "news" do not report anything, they actually provide deceptive reporting. 

[5] Lie low, be low key. Do not get on any public or private arguments. Be as neutral as possible. Do not be a target. Use the avoidance strategy at every point.

[6] Do not have “burned bridges”. Go ahead “mend your fences”. Your future depends on your ability to work as a team.

[7] Barter goods. When times are rough, and money is worthless, humans resort to bartering. Women will provide sexual favors. Men can provide items, or services. Top rated items are small bottles of cheap whiskey, vodka, or spirits. Also good are tobacco, cigarettes and pipe tobacco. A box of 100 disposable lighters is very cheap and you would be surprised how valuable they can become. Be able to reload ammo even if you don't have a gun. Antibiotics will be worth YOUR weight in gold. Whether for animals, or humans or next best herbal alternatives, having a supply is important. Same goes with condoms. You do not want to have a nasty STD when you are in a SHTF situation.

[8] Avoid crowds. Stay out of the cities. Do not isolate in the country.

[9] Do not trust anyone. We are all entering a time where betrayal and lies have become normal. Don't believe anyone. Don't trust anyone.

In America today is a world of hurt because everyone demands their “freedom” and “independence”. Contrast that to here in China where people work together to the greater good of everyone. Sure there might be a star basketball player, but he is shit when he comes across a well trained and organized team.

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Making course corrections on a prayer and affirmation campaign and how to minimize any grievous errors that you might have made in the past

Here is another prayer and affirmation campaign post.

In this post we look at making “course corrections” in a prayer and affirmation campaign. This is pretty important. Because as your life progresses you grow, and as you grow your opinions, attitudes and ideas about life change. What might have been important to you as a “piss and vinegar” young person in their twenties, is not the same as you in your mid-thirties with a family, children and a rough job situation. You grow and you need to conduct prayer affirmation campaigns that either build upon previous ones, or that erases previous efforts and allow you to plow ahead free of encumbrances.

So let’s look at this.

First item of clarity

The very first item of clarity is the understanding that there is no such thing as time. And thus every single speech, talk, writing, or prayer all are happening and continues to happen today. Even though you have moved on with your life and the prayers happened decades ago, they still have equal validity as if you are making them right now. Yikes!

Which means that all of those thoughts, prayers, talks, and writings has set your consciousness on a vector path that you are now following.

And when you make a new prayer affirmation campaign, it is in effect, making “nudges” or pushes to the existing vector path that you have already laid out.

It is not a brand new vector direction. Rather it is a modification of a vector direction that you are currently on and engaged upon.

So what you REALLY want to do is have new affirmation prayer campaigns that establish brand new directions (instead of building upon old ones), if that is your desire. Here we are going to discuss ways and means to manage this. I like to call this “making course corrections”.

Making Course Corrections

Consider this image below…

The path vector that a person is on when he / she travels the MWI is the combined result of thoughts, actions, behaviors, talks, writings and experiences. And while you might have a very robust and determined affirmation prayer campaign, you still need to deal with the accumulated combination of all your prior efforts and thoughts.

The best and easiest way to “reset” these actions is to make a “course correction”.

In the image above, a “course correction” on the MWI enables a completely new prayer affirmation campaign to redirect and reset the direction vector that your consciousness has embarked upon. As you can see, the new revised course is on red. it is an easier and less frightening course. Not so precarious.

As the old path has the vector direction on the side of “mountains” on the topographical map. Meaning that it would be very easy to “slide off the cliff side” and end up further away from your goal.

The new and revised map is much better with only the final stages of the vector directed path being contentious and potentially problematic.

But how to do it?

How do you make a “course correction”?

Well, there are various techniques and methods.

      1. Don’t do anything.
      2. Selectively erase the past affirmations.
      3. Scrub and clean the template map

[1] Don’t do anything.

This strategy is quite simple. You run the affirmation prayer campaign as all of us do and don’t make any allowances otherwise. You pretty much acknowledge that you have done and said things in the past that may or may not influence your current affirmation prayer campaign, but you don’t worry about the influence of it.

This is fine when you are pretty much a loner, never prayed before, never had an affirmation campaign before, and pretty much lived a low-key lifestyle. The chances are that your previous influences were not all that serious and were unable to result in strange meaningful opposition to what every prayer campaign that you are now involved in.

As illustrated in this picture below…

You really don’t need to do anything at all about your previous affirmations or statements.

[2] Erase the past selectively

Let’s suppose that you have made mistakes in prior statements, and affirmations and prayers. You don’t want them to continue to haunt your contemporaneous prayer and affirmation campaign, what do you do?

Well, you can add statements within your campaign that selectively erases the mistakes that you have made in the past. Such as some of these suggestions…

  • Any previous actions, statements or affirmations that I have made in my past, that will have a contrary effect on my current affirmation prayer campaign, are ignored and does not influence my current affirmation campaign.

Which is a pretty good affirmation if you don’t want to completely erase prior efforts.

Of course, you could also “nuke” all past efforts, mistake completely and force a “clean, white paper” to begin your latest affirmation campaign upon. Such as this example…

  • My current affirmation prayer campaign is free from any detours, delays, complications or modifiers as a result of prior campaigns, actions or thoughts.

[3] You can refresh the template

Your verbal prayer affirmations are all very powerful. You will be amazed at what they are capable of. Here in this technique, you actually end up refreshing the template. Or, in other words, removing the soiled linen tablecloth and replacing it with a clean and new one.

The technique involves a slide.

You “slide” off the old template map (whether a pre-birth world-line template or something else) and on to an absolute duplicate one that now possess the characteristics that you specify.

There are many ways to accomplish this. Let me offer the easiest technique. It’s where you simply specify sliding to a “refreshed” world-line template.

  • I authorize a slide to a cleaned up version of my current world-line topographic map. This new map is functionally identical to the map that I am using right now with the exception that any obstacles, debris, confusion, and detours that are a direct result of prior affirmation campaigns, spells, mistakes, or problems are removed from it.

Then you can rest assured that you can continue on your life journey with the understanding that past mistakes (in regards to prayer affirmations) will not haunt your efforts.

On the MM scene

Well, I am starting a new affirmation campaign this April. And I want to de-clutter. I do this from time to time. Not often enough, I am afraid. But you know that for us to grow our previous expectations and life changes. Everyone should be experiencing a new appreciation of life and their families after the horrible 2020 that we all endured. Right?

Well I am no exception.

I have been conducting affirmation prayer campaigns for the last four decades, or at least ever since I went through my calibration at China Lake NWC. This was something that became easy and necessary for me to do and engage in. I had no choice. I really needed to do it. You know, to keep my sanity.

And after many decades of campaigns, false starts, dead ends, road blocks, adjustments and all of that, my MWI topographical map tends to look like a messy battlefield. Which I suppose is workable, but not optional.

So every now and again I need to clean things up. Because, as I have explained earlier, there is no such thing as time. My desire to have a Miami Vice style home in a Florida like environment has been supplanted by a more reasonable desire to have a beautiful home overlooking the ocean full of plants, wine, great food and pretty girls. Not to forget friends and family. You know, something like from the movie “A Walk in the clouds“.

A Walk in the Clouds

.

Now, of course, if I don’t clean up my terrain, it won’t be a problem. As I will have both the aspects of my Miami Vice lifestyle along with the wine and lifestyle that I desire. But maybe I don’t want to have that relic of the past. Maybe I just want exactly the new lifestyle, and nothing associated with the dreams that I had as a young man. Maybe…

I no longer want ANY association with the dreams and desires of a young man…

Miami Vice

.

And that is life, don’t you know, you grow. You change. You age. Your desires mature and advance. You have other priorities in your life and you find that things that used to be of interest to you no longer hold that grasp on your soul.

It’s called maturing.

It’s what happens when life hits your hard on the head and you experience those things that you longed for. And when you discover that they really weren’t all what they were cracked up to be. Yeah.

Right now, to me, a life in Grady, Hooterville, or Mayberry RFD seems to be the kind of environment that I want my children to grow up in. A Chinese versions (of course) and near the ocean and beaches, of course. But this reality differs considerably from the image of a beach house in Vero Beach, Sana Barbara, or Fort Lauderdale. Don’t you know.

Hooterville. From the television show “Green Acres”.

.

Yeah. I know. It’s all Hollywood. And there are aspects of the back woods, small town life that I do not like. But the fundamental aspects of knowing everyone, being a member within society, and having a more relaxed and easy-going pace is something that appeals to me. It differs substantially from that of the fast-pace, all-excitement image portrayed within Miami Vice.

Grady, from the movie Doc Hollywood.

.

And that is what life is all about. Growth. And you can establish the life that you want to live. You simply navigate the map and the template that you were given. You are careful on mow you interpret the map and you make sure that you are cautious and observant.

No.

I do not want the erasure of my past to begin a totally different life.

I want the addition of new aspects, and a clarification of certain specific aspects to what I already possess. This takes thought. This takes planning. This takes concern. This takes action.

Mayberry RFD

.

So what do you do when you have a great life, but there are elements within it that your old life your enjoy, but now as a much older person are not all that important to you. What do you do?

Well you dust off the old template, and you make sure that the older desires, wishes, prayers and affirmations no longer have a new bearing on your direction and you current desires. You cleanse the template.

Conclusion

Right now, I must say, lovely Zhuhai is sort of like America in the 1950’s. Only very high-tech. If that makes any sense. And I want to keep it this way. I do not want any of this to change. I think that it is a lovely area to raise a family, live a life, work and cavort with friends.

And since I am doing fine right now, the idea of cleaning the template must be considered most carefully, and (of course) selectively. You need to identify the things that you might no longer want and place a softer, easier way to excise them form your plan and map.

Of course other issues come into play. I most certainly don’t want Shenzhen and Hong Kong to be obliterated in a fireball by an American ICBM. I don’t want to get ill, have some kinds of “old man” health issues, and I really don’t want the kinds of surprises that many Americans tend to deal with on a daily basis.

As long as I hold an American passport, these concerns will continue to be stabled to my soul.

Yet, you and I know that we can control our reality by thought. And so we do. The use of a method to clean out the underbrush is always something to keep in mind when you are running an affirmation prayer campaign, and this is exactly how you do it.

May all your dreams, wishes and desires come true for you. Best Regards.

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How the US Government uses Military Special Forces to control civilian populations

America has been conducting warfare with military forces dressed in civilian attire for decades now. These forces use military tactics, training, and utilize military support structures to accomplish their objectives. They do everything that a normal and regular military does, except that  they are not easily identified as combat forces. As they operate in secret and disguise.

Most well known of these assault troops are NGO’s.

What Is an NGO?

A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a non-profit group that functions independently of any government.

Meaning that it operates as a separate entity where there are no obvious direct connections between the NGO and the parent government.

NGOs, sometimes called civil societies, are organized on community, national and international levels to serve a social or political goal such as humanitarian causes or the environment.

The largest and best funded NGO’s out of the United States are dedicated to “spreading democracy”, “advocating liberty”, and “promoting American values”.

But all NGOs are different and some are met with intense criticism for lack of transparency in budgeting or effectual action. When donating money or looking for work in the NGO world, it is always important to do your research about how much of the group’s budget goes to administrative costs and how much goes directly to the cause you care about. The website Charity Navigator is a useful resource for this.

Another important critique of NGOs is that all too often organizations staffed with Americans and Europeans come into developing nations with action plans that don’t fit the local context and end up adversely affecting their target populations. This, however, is not an inherent flaw of NGOs but rather a symptom of failing to acknowledge the importance of local expertise within the NGO framework.

Because NGO funding commonly comes from developed nations, a particularly effective model for NGOs includes using local in-country staff to plan and implement programs on the ground while working with an international board focused on fundraising, outreach, and strategic group planning.

It would be untrue to claim that NGOs are immune to political influence simply because they are not directly connected to governments; NGOs’ funding and even daily operations are subject to political approval.

For example, NGOs working to bring amnesty to political refugees will often face intense political adversity, and even violence during their in-country work. But unlike government organizations, NGOs typically have more flexibility to defy a political status quo to pursue what they believe to be important social change.

– Shelly Grimaldi

Key Takeaways

  • NGOs, is an abbreviation for Non-Governmental Organizations.
  • NGO’s tend play a major role in international development, aid and philanthropy.
  • NGOs are non-profit by definition, but may run budgets of millions or up to billions of dollars each year. They are classified this way for tax reduction strategies.
  • NGOs rely on a variety of funding sources. This varies from private donations and membership dues to direct government contribution and training.
  • Many NGO’s, especially American ones, are almost entirely funded directly by the United States government. Either directly or though proxy in a “pass through” arrangement.

About NGOs

While “NGO” has various interpretations, the term is generally accepted to include non-profit, private organizations that operate outside of government control. Some NGOs rely primarily on volunteers, while others support a paid staff. The World Bank identifies two broad groups of NGOs:

  • Operational NGOs, which focus on the design and implementation of development projects.
  • Advocacy NGOs, which defend or promote a specific cause and seek to influence public policy.

Some NGOs may fall under both categories simultaneously. Examples of NGOs include those that support human rights, advocate for improved health or encourage political participation. The ones funded though by the United States all are involved in political participation at some level or the other.

How NGOs are Funded

As non-profits, NGOs rely on a variety of sources for funding, including:

  • Membership dues
  • Private donations
  • The sale of goods and services
  • Grants
  • Direct government grants
  • Hidden government funding though “pass through” arrangements

Despite their supposed independence from governments, many NGOs rely heavily on government funding. Large NGOs may have budgets in the millions or billions of dollars.

Types of NGOs

A number of variations of the NGO acronym exist, including:

  • INGO: An international NGO. For example, the Conference of INGOs of the Council of Europe is comprised of more than 300 participating INGOs.
  • GONGO: This means government-organized NGO, often derogatory. Foreign Policy describes GONGOs as a government-backed NGOs set up to advocate on the behalf of a repressive regime in the international arena.
  • QUANGO: Chiefly a British term, often derogatory. A quango is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization that relies on public funding. Its senior officials are appointed by the government. A Financial Times opinion piece writes that quangos are seen as useless and are often staffed by quangocrats.
  • ENGO: An environmental NGO, for example, Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund. Both groups operate internationally in addition to advocating for the environment. They are often simply referred to as NGOs.

NGO’s in China

The United States government uses NGO’s as the primary method to inject military personnel inside enemy nations. This injection of assault troops and CIA associated military forces for point-of-force disruption of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet primarily come from one singular NGO’s. Which is the NED.

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,600 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.

https://www.ned.org

The CIA under a different name

American military publications

Here is a very interesting work. It’s a complete book, reproduced here in in PDF format. It is titled “SOF Civil Affairs in Great Power Competition” and comes from the United States military; specifically the “Joint Special Operations University and the Department of Strategic Studies”.

The work describes how the United States uses military personnel to control civilian populations for military objectives. It discusses NGO’s and how to foment revolutions and turmoil, as well as how to control unruly populations such as within America.

It discusses among other things…

  • How the United States military is engaged in harming and causing turmoil within China. All without wearing military uniforms, or firing guns and automatic weapons.
Journalist, NGO, or CIA operative?

As well as the very interesting segment(s) on…

  • How the United States military is engaged in controlling the American population to prevent uprisings, armed resurrection and “torches and pitchfork” moments.

It’s an interesting read, though many of us within MM know about much of the techniques used. We watched them in “real time” as all of Hong Kong is on video camera, wired and recorded.

It is useful to keep in mind that these techniques are being employed inside of America against Americans today. Which pretty much explains the idea why the sheeple haven’t risen up against the oligarchy class yet…

…yet.

Rather than reproduce the work in HTML, it is reproduced in the PDF format. Just click on the link below and download it and read at your convenience.

The China section is profoundly interesting.

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A 2021 comparison of the Fourth Turning predictions and the actual events leading up to now

Things are maturing and advancing steadily on plan. And like I have repeatedly stated, the events will not be reported. Or, if they are, they will not be well reported, or reported in context. Well, here at MM you are going to get a real situation report, a “Sit Rep”. No need to panic. Just be aware.

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. 

Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. 

Political and economic trust will implode. 

Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. 

The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. 

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” 

– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning 

The Fourth Turning

I read The Fourth Turning a while ago. I was astounded in their uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life.

Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.

Strauss & Howe identified the core elements of this Crisis as debt, civic decay, and global disorder. No one can argue the severe distress engulfing the nation and the world traces its origins to these core elements, with the catalyst for this Crisis being the 2008 central banker manufactured financial collapse.

Nothing has been normal since 2008.

And 2008’s epic implosion was driven by the disastrous financial, political and military decisions implemented by the puppets of the Deep State from 2000 onward, with the Federal Reserve obligingly creating bubble after bubble as the “solution” to the previous bubble.

And now we are here again, in the midst of the greatest bubble in the history of mankind.

A bubble of willful ignorance.

The obliviousness of most Americans to the danger awaiting them is akin to the day before Fort Sumpter was bombed…

… the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked…

… or the dinosaurs unaware of a giant meteor rushing towards the planet and about to transform their future in a challenging way.

Real hardship has beset the land.

With the notable exception of the 0.1% who rule…

…or Deep State lackeys and toadies who are being rewarded for propagating mistruths, outright lies, fear, and propaganda on behalf of their oligarch benefactors.

These apparatchiks mainly consist of corrupt politicians, central bank lackeys, mainstream media hacks, neocon warmongers, surveillance state traitors, and big pharma captured health “experts”.

All of whom are driving the world towards the “great reset”.

The severe distress does involve class, race, nation and empire, but most of the distress has been artificially created by those pulling the strings – Bernays’ invisible government manipulating the masses.

The four years of the Trump administration set the stage for the rumblings that we hear today.

All over the world, the death shudders of a dying empire can be heard.

It advances towards us, like that of a deadly avalanche crashing down a mountainside towards an unsuspecting village below.

America is in deep trouble

Harvard professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been a lone voice telling the truth about the true level of unfunded promises hidden in the CBO numbers.

The unfunded social welfare liabilities in excess of $200 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are nothing but a massive future tax increase on younger and unborn generations. Kotlikoff explains what would be required to pay these obligations:

“To honor these obligations we could (a) raise all federal taxes, immediately and permanently, by 57%, (b) cut all federal spending, apart from interest on the debt, by 37%, immediately and permanently, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b).”

Zero spending on health and social services?

Zero spending on the military?

It’s simply not going to happen.

The level of taxation and/or Federal Reserve created inflation necessary to honor these politician promises is too large to be considered feasible.

Therefore, these promises, made to get corrupt political hacks elected to public office, will be defaulted upon.

It’s all not going to happen.

Every legitimate valuation method used to assess stock market valuations for the last 100 years confirm the stock market being at least 100% overvalued.

There could not be a worse time for margin debt to also reach all-time highs.

The previous peaks in 2000 and 2007 preceded 50% collapses in stocks.

Consumer credit outstanding, despite the false media story-line of austerity,  stands at $14.27 trillion in Q2 of 2020.1. I don’t know what it is today, one year later and after three “stimulus packages”, but it’s just got to be awful.

Feb 05, 2021 · Average consumer debt per capita is approximately $12,596 (total consumer debt as of September 2020/total US population as of September 30, 2020). 

-2021 ConsumerDebtStatistics | LexingtonLaw

Indeed, it’s at an all-time high, as the Federal government took monopoly control of the student loan market in 2009.

(And proceeded to issue $600 billion of subprime loans to University of Phoenix wannabe graduates seeking degrees in Gender Studies.)

The Feds also used their five year control of Ally Financial (after their taxpayer bailout) to rejuvenate the subprime auto loan market…

…by doling out $35,000 seven year car loans to unemployed SNAP recipients.

After all everyone deserves to drive a brand new Cadillac Escalade.

The $250 billion increase in auto loan debt since 2009 has “created” the auto recovery. Loan delinquencies approaching 2009 levels will surely not cause a problem.

Right?

The level of local and state pension and healthcare unfunded liabilities to government workers exceeds $4 trillion.

State and local politicians would have to double real estate, sales, and income taxes in order to fund the gold plated benefits for state and local workers.

As government workers in Stockton, San Bernardino, Jefferson County and Detroit have experienced, these promises will be not be honored.

(Sigh.)

It’s all going down the drain

If you don’t feel the very survival of the nation hangs in the balance, then you are either delusional, willfully ignorant, or unwilling to recognize your own cognitive dissonance.

The next five to ten years will alter the course of history in a profound way.

Whether or not the outcome will be positive for average American citizens is very much in doubt.

At all levels, domestic and international, America is flailing about and it’s tremors, spasms and vomiting are noticed by all but the intentionally and willful blind.

I wish it were not so, but most human beings seem incapable of critical thought regarding how history follows a cyclical path due to human nature retaining its flaws, weaknesses, vulnerabilities and fortes throughout history.

We believe we have advanced because our inventions, discoveries, and technology, but the desire for wealth, power and control over others still consumes a sociopathic portion of mankind who tend to rise to the top through any means necessary.

As Huxley lamented in the 1950’s, technological progress has actually propelled mankind backwards in terms of its humanity and relationship with nature and other human beings.

The very technology we glorify as an example of our advancement is now being used by the totalitarians to imprison us Americans.

We're just victims of the telephone. 

-Tin Lead Hat lyrics

And if that’s not bad enough…

…they demand the rest of the world to accept the chains and shackles that they have enslaved Americans with.

Accept or die!

This is unacceptable to the rest of the world

A "rule based" agreement is one that no longer follows the UN, and recognizes independence of nations with inherent sovereignty. No. Instead it demands that the United States is the leader of the world and that all other regions must bow to it in subservience.

It has happened slowly and methodically over decades as generation after generation have entered the government indoctrination centers (public schools) to be taught ignorance and obedience to the state.

This indoctrination has been reinforced by ceaseless propaganda injected into their brains by media conglomerates doing the bidding of the state.

The dystopian use of disinformation, false narratives, blatant lies and propaganda by the totalitarians constituting the Deep State, has aggravated the crisis situation that America finds itself in today.

An honest truth-seeking press with unbiased journalists would have uncovered this conspiracy and revealed the truthful facts to a concerned public.

Instead, a completely captured corporate media has turned a blind eye to the truth as they have acted as accomplices of the coup culprits.

Just as evil is the suppression of truth through censorship and keeping silent regarding the truth.

Huxley understood how totalitarian propagandists operated decades before the current batch of Silicon Valley authoritarians initiated their national truth repression scheme.

I’m amazed by the extreme level of ignorance exhibited by a vast swath of our population, as they glory in believing comforting mistruths which confirm their preordained belief structure.

They don’t know because they don’t want to know.

They are intoxicated by the endless stream of idiocy emanating from their iGadgets, as they willfully choose [1] ignorance over awareness, [2] servitude over freedom, and [3] captivity over liberty.

As Huxley predicted, the controlling oligarchy has used technology to convince people to love their servitude.

Meanwhile, the sheeple unthinkingly believe what they are told by their government and media mouthpieces.

  • 5G causes cancer.
  • China is evil.
  • GMO’s are good.
  • The SPA killer was not a racist.
  • Trump is going to build a wall.
  • Hillary is going to jail.
  • Jeff Sessions is playing 54D chess.
  • Elections are not rigged.
  • Taxes are good for the economy.
  • Peeing in a cup to get a job is modern and useful.
  • Everyone must pay taxes, and American taxes are the lowest in the world.

Meanwhile, the sheeple blind to their manipulation , go on doing the bidding of the government and oligarchs who control the government.

The goal of the ruling class is to keep people from thinking,.

And therefore most Americans willingly oblige because thinking is hard and the uncomfortable truths are too much to bear for the satiated masses.

But there is a minority who want the truth and are willing and able to deal with the consequences. They realize facts don’t cease to exist because we ignore them. Facts don’t care about your beliefs or feelings.

Facts lead you to the truth.

And the immense coverup of facts boggles the mind of every critical thinking person on the planet.

So let’s look at the “facts” and the truths regarding the Fourth Turning.

“The Grey Champion”

Based on the Fourth Turning generational theory, there is no doubt Donald Trump was the prophet-generation Grey-Champion.

The term Grey Champion does not mean they are a great, noble, humane person. Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not nice guys. They did whatever they thought necessary to achieve their means during our previous three Fourth Turnings. Millions of Americans hated Lincoln and Roosevelt, just as tens of millions hate Trump.

The Grey Champion’s appearance marks the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” as the violent turmoil climax of the Fourth Turning approaches.

Trump and Pence are from the Prophet (Boomer) Generation, while Biden is from the Silent Generation and Harris is Generation X.

Trump is the lightning rod for a clash that must take place to sweep away the existing corrupted social order and replace it with something new.

And he was swept away…

Every four years we hear the same pablum about this being the most important election of our lifetime. It didn’t matter who won the election, the Deep State, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve, Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Media, Silicon Valley Titans, and Billionaires like Soros, Bloomberg and Gates are still running the show.

One man has extraordinarily little chance of confronting these wealthy power-hungry sociopaths and winning.

And thus we see Biden and his cronies follow Trump and his cronies road-map for America.

Sorry to say.

The PTB has successfully convinced a willfully ignorant populace to love their servitude and acquiesce to allowing them unfettered control over their lives.

However, the tyrannical lockdowns, martial law like mandates from bureaucrats, compulsory masking as a requirement to be accepted in society, and the dehumanizing of our daily lives has created a Resistance, peaceful thus far, who are enraged by what is happening.

Domestic turmoil and dangerous International actions

If you read the Alt-Right or the Alt-Left there is little mention about the international chaos that America has created. It’s mostly a regurgitation of the anti-China, or anti-Russia, or anti-Iran narratives.

It’s not a balanced and accurate appraisal of the shit-storm that America has created.

Here’s a typical example from an Alt-Right website. Obviously the author has never visited China. Because his statements are simple regurgitation of the PTB narratives about China and so outlandish that real Chinese expats do more than shake our heads in disbelief, we actually laugh at him!

Check out this nonsense…

China, which has been the driving world economic force for the last decade, is in a precarious position. 

They have been the slave labor manufacturer to the world as the worldwide debt fueled consumption orgy reached its 2008 climax. 

Their level of Keynesian mal-investment since 2008 makes Obama, Bernanke, and Yellen look like pikers. 

The level of corruption, deception, wealth inequality, pollution, censorship and phony economic data has been done on a majestic scale. 

It is now unraveling in a slow motion crash as the global recession has crushed their industrial output and is rapidly deflating their real estate bubble. The 52 million unoccupied housing units in China may not turn out to be great investments after all. 

The absurdity of Chinese economic reports makes the BLS look highly accurate and upstanding. 

Their reported GDP of 7.4% was their slowest in 24 years, but the real figure is closer to 4%. 

The proof of the dramatic slowing in Chinese growth is the collapse in oil prices, copper prices, iron ore prices, and the Baltic Dry Index. 

The index measures world trade and has crashed to its lowest level ever. The potential for social unrest when their mal-investment debt bubbles implode will be great.

-Conspiracy Analysist

Like I said, it’s a regurgitation of the American PTB narrative.

And all FALSE.

And all LIES.

And sheeple believe it, because it makes their pathetic lives seem better.

They aren’t.

And you know Americans believe this, and since they believe everything the PTB tells them to believe, they will also go along with this John Bolton statement…

“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion;

Sure…

We can just tell how successful that interference has been right? How many Americans believe that China is doing better than the United States, eh?

Or check out this line that sheeple can repeat in their sleep…

"...and genocide against Uyghurs"

Gosh, the Chinese must be so fucking incompetent. After all the Uyghur population has grown by a factor of ten times plus over the last few years. Pretty hard to have a genocide where the population increases…

All the Chinese just can’t do anything right!

</sarcasm>

Just sheeple repeating what they have read. Not what they have experienced first hand. Just what they have read about fourth-hand.

Remember boys and girls, the definition of what a sheeple is. 

Sheeple is a person who is very emotional about something they read about, not by something that they have personally experienced first-hand, up front, and personal.

Yuppur. Any day now… China is going to collapse. It’s just like the USA only far, far worse…

Sure….

I read all about it on FOX, Rush Limbaugh, the NYPost, CNN, and Alex Jones. So it must be the truth!

Look at China crumble before our very eyes!

Just Look!

Picture taken inside of China in 2020. People are happy, the life is calm and pleasant, and everyone really admires and respects the Chinese leadership.
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.

Sure…

It’s falling apart. People are starving, and they are rising up demanding “democracy” and Pepe the frog! And singing the Star Bangled Banner and American flags. They so desperately yearn for the American way of life!

Look at them!

Picture taken inside of China in 2020. People are happy, the life is calm and pleasant, and everyone really admires and respects the Chinese leadership.
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.

Sure…

Look at all those impoverished and miserable people!

Picture taken inside of China in 2020. People are happy, the life is calm and pleasant, and everyone really admires and respects the Chinese leadership.
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.

Sure…

China is terribly polluted, dirty, grimy, full of disease and germs. Terrible, terrible germs! Only a moron would want to live in that shit-hole!

Picture taken inside of China in 2020. People are happy, the life is calm and pleasant, and everyone really admires and respects the Chinese leadership.
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.

Sure…

America needs to put some “boots on the ground” and liberate the poor misguided and brainwashed Chinese. The government must be destroyed because after all, America loves the Chinese, it’s the government that it hates!

Right?

Picture taken inside of China in 2020. People are happy, the life is calm and pleasant, and everyone really admires and respects the Chinese leadership.
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.

Sure…

</sarcasm>

Ugh!

This is true in what ever form that the PTB controlled government is pushing at the moment. Whether it is COVID, or 5G, or Huawei, or Tiktok, it’s all a echo of what the government wants the sheeple to repeat.

And the sheeple does repeat it, with the worst offenders being those who read the alt-right outlets.

But it doesn’t really matter.

What we do know is Fourth Turnings always accelerate and intensify towards a bloody finale, with clear winners and losers.

    • There will be clear winners.
    • There will be clear losers.

Unconditional surrender will be demanded by those maintaining the upper hand. As was clearly articulated in the March 2021 Alaska meeting between the USA and China.

Whether this coming conflict remains domestic or spreads internationally, the “advancements” in the technology of destruction will endanger every human being on the planet.

You cannot escape the impact of Fourth Turnings, only survive and/or do your part in helping achieve a positive outcome.

There is no predetermined ending.

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. 

If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. 

Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” 

– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

When pondering the possible outcomes of this Fourth Turning, we tend to be drawn towards the negative, because a positive outcome seems so unlikely given the current animosity roiling the country.

If you step back and realize all the hate and conflict is being engineered and coordinated by a ruling class of powerful rich men, then average Americans could organize a new paradigm that honors the original intent of the U.S. Constitution, allowing citizens the liberty and freedom to create voluntary associations based upon common interests at a local level.

The ruling oligarchs find this unacceptable, so this freedom must be wrested away from them by any means necessary.

There is a civil war already underway, but only one side is fighting…

… the billionaire class who not only don’t want to relinquish some power, but want total control over every aspect of our lives. It appears that this action will turn this one-sided silent war into a hot war on both the domestic and international fronts.

The Enemy.

Everyone is fighting

The American Empire is clearly in rapid decline and may not survive the trials and tribulations over the coming decade.

The Fourth Turning is not a prophecy, but should be taken as a warning and call to action. Sitting this out and hoping for the best will not help achieve a positive outcome.

Tragedy or triumph – the choices we make will matter.

The climax of this Fourth Turning may be a few years off, but the battle for the soul of America has already engaged.

“History offers no guarantees. 

Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. 

We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. 

Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. 

It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” 

– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Internationally speaking…

We have yet to see how long it will be before the Biden administration realizes its few victories will be unaffordably Pyrrhic.

Indeed, as simple as merely not responding to American provocation the Chinese/Russian partnership will emerge as the victors.

America is truly fucked.

Halford Mackinder’s century-old vision of a Eurasian superstate, based between the Volga and the Yangtse, is becoming reality.

Deal with it.

Embrace it.

Commentators usually fail to understand why; it is not due to military superiority, but down to simple economics.

While the US economy suffers a post-lockdown inflationary outcome and an existential crisis for the dollar, China’s economy will boom on the back of increasing domestic consumption.

This is an official Chinese government objective.

Meanwhile it is increasing exports, the consequence of America’s stimulation of consumer demand and a soaring budget deficit.

For America, it’s a lose – lose.

The Chinese-Russian partnership already dominates or controls Mackinder’s World Island, defined as Eurasia and all Africa.

South-east Asian nations notionally in the US’s sphere of influence are firmly tied to the partnership’s economy.

And the overland and sea silk roads similarly bind the EU and the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans’ states respectively.

Combined, it amounts to over half the world’s population no longer sharing the economic and currency interests of 328 million Americans.

Imagine that!

We are now equipped to ask an important question: the US status quo, with its dollar hegemony is seen by the new Biden administration as an unchallengeable right, and its position as the world’s hegemon is vital for… .

…what?

What it is “vital” for?

The benefit of the world, or the benefit of the US at the world’s expense?

Hum?

To answer this, we must consider it from the point of view of the US military and intelligence complex.

The problem facing us is that the Pentagon became fully institutionalised in managing America’s external security following the second world war.

When the Soviets extended their sphere of influence into the three great undeveloped continents, Asia, Africa and South America, there was a case for defending capitalism and freedom — or at least freedom in an American sense by keeping minor nations on side.

This was done by fair means and often foul for expediency’s sake.

But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Mao Zedong made the American military and intelligence functions largely superfluous, other than matters more directly related to national defense.

But it is in the nature of government departments and their private sector contractors to do everything in their power to retain both influence and budgets, and the argument that new threats will arise is always hard for politicians to resist….

…especially for a military empire.

And what do the statists in a government department do when they have secured their survival?

Their retention of power without real purpose descends into alternative military objectives. And from the first Bush president, they were all firmly on-message.

As we see today with the American military empire.

President Trump was the first president for some time not to start military engagements abroad. His attempts to wind down foreign operations were strongly resisted by defense and intelligence services.

And his efforts to obtain a détente with North Korea were met with disdain — even horror at Langley.

But war-monger he did.

And he left a legacy of the most comprehensive non-hot-war attacks in history.

From the hybrid-wars, to carpet bombing livestock to produce famines inside of China, he was relentless.

And while no one WANTS to talk about the sorry truth, COVID-19 is an American bio-weapons attack upon China.

No.

Not the “inoculation strain” COVID-19A that all the “news” is hyping about. But the strain that was unleashed on China, Iran, North Korea and Russia; the lethal strain, the COVID-19B.

Whatever the truth in these matters, it is highly unlikely that the power conferred by the ability to initiate unchallengeable cover-ups, information management, subversion of foreign states and secret intelligence operations is not abused.

They are.

That’s a fact jack.

And we can see this through the proliferation and traction of “conspiracy theories”. Now, mostly and falsely attributed in their origin to Russian cyber-attacks and disinformation.

It’s all a consequence of one’s own government continually bending the truth to the point where large sections of the population begin to believe it is its own government’s propaganda.

We call them “sheeple.”

And no one is immune. Event the most vehement Alt-Right or alt-left media, who believes that they are independent thinkers, regurgitate the narratives pumped out for them to consume.

This brings us to the change in administration.

As a senator, Biden had interests in foreign affairs dating back to the late 1970s and was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1997 and subsequently became its chairman.

As such a long-standing politician in this field it is almost certain that the Pentagon establishment regards Biden as a safe pair of hands; in other words, a president who is likely to support Langley’s role in setting geopolitical and defence priorities.

Surely, for them this is a welcome change from the off-message President Trump.

Policies to contain the Russian threat

Despite the Navalny affair, Putin is still unchallengeable as Russian leader, having emerged from the post-Soviet turmoil where chaos and organized crime were the order of the day.

No western leader has had such a tough political background and Putin is a survivor, a strongman firmly in control.

Vladimir Putin

This matters for America and NATO with respect to policies in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Syria, Iran and Turkey.

Any attempt by America to complete unfinished business in Ukraine (a triparty scrap involving Russia, Germany/EU and the US over the Nord Stream pipelines depriving Ukraine of transition revenues is already brewing) is likely to lead to confrontations with Russia on the ground.

And Russia signed a military cooperation pact with Iran in 2015.

Like a cat with a mouse, Putin is playing with Turkey, interested in laying pipelines to southern Europe, and getting it to drift out of NATO. Russia’s interest in Syria is to keep it out of America’s sphere of influence, which with Turkey’s help it has managed to do.

For some time, military analysts have been telling us that we are now in a cyber war with Russia, accusing it of interfering in elections and promoting conspiracy theories …

… with the US presidential election last November being the most recent assertion.

As with all these allegations there is no proof offered, just statements from government sources which have a track record of being economical with the truth.

Erp. They lie.

Whatever the truth may be, cyber wars are closely intertwined with propaganda.

Attacks on Russia since the millennium have been by disrupting dollar payments, and less importantly, by sanctioning individuals close to Putin.

The monetary threat was originally justified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, leading to the collapse of the rouble and a hike in interest rates.

The new cold war had taken a financial turn. Russia’s response was to reduce the economy’s dependence on dollars as much as possible, with the central bank selling dollar reserves and adding gold in their place.

It also set up a new payments system to reduce its dependence on the SWIFT interbank payments system.

Russia has survived all financial attacks and is now better insulated against them for the future.

One-zero for the Russians.

But the cost has been hidden, with western investment restricted to being mainly from the EU (particularly directed at the oil and gas industries).

For these and other reasons being pushed by the United States, Russia has turned to China as both a partner and an economic protector. In return, Russia is resource-rich, an energy provider, and therefore of great value to China.

Not to mention militarily, as the demands made by the United States in Alaska clearly pointed to.

The Russian and Chinese geopolitical partnership

One of the first persons to identify the geopolitical importance of Russia’s resources was Halford Mackinder in a paper for the Royal Geographical Society in 1904. He later developed it into his Heartland theory.

Mackinder argued that control of the Heartland, which stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze, would control the “World-Island”, which was his term for all Europe, Asia and Africa. Over a century later, Mackinder’s theory resonates with the two leading nations behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation, the creation of which was announced on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai (China) by the Republic of Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan, and the Republic of Uzbekistan.

-About SCO | SCO

The underlying point is that North and South America, Britain, Japan and Australasia in the final analysis are peripheral and less important than Mackinder’s World-Island.

And he was correct.

There was a time when British and then American primacy outweighed its importance, but this may no longer be true.

If Mackinder’s vision is valid about the overriding importance of undeveloped resources, Russia is positioned to become with China the most powerful national partnership on earth.

It has happened.

And the BRI is facilitating this.

Which is why there is such a stink about the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. Which is the gateway to the Belt and Road Initiative.

The SCO is the greatest challenge yet mounted to American economic power and technological supremacy.

And Russia and China are clearly determined to ditch the dollar. We don’t yet know what will replace it – officially. Though, the e-yuan has been implemented throughout China, and is taking over Asia as we speak.

However, the fact that the Russian central bank and nearly all the other central banks and governments in the SCO have been increasing their gold reserves for some time could be an important clue as to how the representatives of three billion Euro-Asians — almost half the world’s population — see the future of trans-Asian money.

In terms of GDP per capita the United States is a long way ahead of the field.

But…

GDP is an artificial measure of national wealth. When there becomes a stratification of society, and the riches 0.001% of the population have a stratospheric control of the finances, they skew the measurement beyond useful utility.

As well as the United States is also the most indebted at the national level.

The difference with the SCO is at the purchasing power parity level, making market prices of secondary importance.

While prices regionally vary considerably the costs of goods in the SCO are as an average considerably less than in the US and EU, so that on a PPP basis the SCO’s GDP is significantly greater than that of the US or the EU.

The inclusion of the EU is a post-Brexit nod to the fact that the EU can no longer be automatically regarded as being within the US sphere of influence.And certainly the United States leadership does not like this one bit.

The commercial ties to the SCO, with both energy reliance from Russia and silk road (BRI) rail terminals in various EU states are clearly the trade future for the EU.

The EU is advanced in its plans to bring national forces under its combined flag, which by giving them an EU identity can only loosen NATO ties with America.

While not an active threat to America’s power, one can envisage the EU sitting on the fence in an intensifying cold war.

The SCO started life in 2001 as a security partnership between Russia and China, incorporating the ‘stans to the east of the Caspian Sea. Born out an earlier organization, the Shanghai Five Group, it was set up to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism.

It is still a platform for joint military exercises, but none have taken place since 2007 and it has morphed into a loose economic partnership instead.

Since the founding Shanghai Five, the SCO now includes India and Pakistan.

Observer status includes Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia. These nations can attend SCO conferences, but their participation is very limited.

Dialogue partners include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey. These nations can participate actively in SCO conferences, and this status is seen as a preliminary to full membership.

Egypt and Syria have applied for observer status and Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have applied to be dialog partners.

Apart from South East Asian nations, which are dominated by a Chinese diaspora anyway, SCO members and their influence covers almost all of Halford Mackinder’s World Island, with the exception of the European Union.

This is the reality that faces American hegemony; there are twenty-one nations across Asia in a non-American alliance, or on the cusp of joining it.

All the other European and Asian nations are within the SCO’s sphere of influence through trade, even if not politically affiliated.

It is getting more difficult to define the nations definitely in the US pocket, other than its five-eyes partners (Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand). This simple fact places severe limitations on US action against China, and to a lesser extent Russia.

…

Bet you didn’t know that.

It is an exaggeration to suggest that an attack on one member state is an attack on them all. Their cooperation is fundamentally economic rather than military; except…

… as stated above, the SCO’s original function remains to eliminate terrorism, separatism and extremism.

Indeed, India and Pakistan are at loggerheads over Kashmir, and China and India have border disputes in the Himalayas.

But attempts, by, say, the US to prize India away from the SCO is bound to generate wider issues, and perhaps a response, from the other members.

Who do you go with?

Other Nations around the world have a choice.

Broadly, it is to go with America, to go with China/Russia, or sit on the fence.

We have already concluded that the EU’s economic interests in the wake of Brexit are turning it into being a fence-sitter instead of continuing to be in the US sphere of influence. American cannot count on the WU to join in any partnership that opposes the unified Russian-Chinese-Iranian nexus.

Other nations all seem to have a seemingly insatiable demand for commodities and energy and infrastructure building. America is unable to provide this. Which means that local politicians have been bought through local prosperity and will stay bought. But if America offers more money in bales like in the past, these nations’ politicians will undoubtedly take it. As they have always done in the past.

But that is unlikely to lead to their political allegiance changing from being with China.

This form of American diplomacy was at its height in the fifties and sixties, and the US was able to outgun the Soviets and Chinese in providing “aid”, much of which was trousered by politicians.

This was particularly true of the oil money recycled by American banks into loans to South American governments in the late seventies.

The Chinese are not so careless with money: when they build a bridge on a Caribbean island, they are firmly hands-on providing money, management and some of the labor and local politicians are only rewarded with electoral kudos.

There are, therefore, fundamental differences between attempts to keep a country within a particular sphere of influence sixty years ago and today.

And there can be no doubt that the Chinese are winning the game.

America has no skills, no resources, and no abilities any longer. All America has are buckets of paper money that is rapidly losing value, and an enormous military war machine. It’s guns and money. Guns and money. Guns and money.

Guns and money.

Overland, across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the silk roads and associated projects are having a substantial impact on emerging nations in a way not seen before.

China has advanced Mackinder’s World Island concept by embracing most of Africa into its sphere of influence.

As well as the SCO’s control over Asia from Vladivostok to the Mediterranean, as the largest oil consumer China’s influence over the Middle East — which supplies little or no oil to the US — binds nations in that region into the SCO.

The contrast with America’s foreign policy under Trump could not have been greater.

America became autarkic, determined to repatriate production from abroad.

Autarky
Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states and their economic systems. 

Autarky as an ideal or method has been embraced by a wide range of political ideologies and movements, especially left-wing ideologies like African socialism, mutualism, war communism, council communism, Communalism, Swadeshi, syndicalism and leftist populism, generally in an effort to build alternative economic structures or to control resources against structures a particular movement views as hostile. 

Conservative, centrist and nationalist movements have also adopted autarky in an attempt to preserve part of an existing social order or to develop a particular industry. 

Some fascist and far-right movements occasionally espoused autarky as a goal.

-Wikipedia

It lacked a strategy to counter China’s rapidly growing spheres of influence.

Even the EU integrated major elements of its economy with China and Russia, and now that the US’s only five-eyes representative in the EU has left it, we can expect this integration to increase more rapidly.

Instead, Trump concentrated on attacking China, its technology and Hong Kong.

China faced tariffs, prompting her to respond partly in kind.

Meng Wanzhou, finance officer for Huawei, was detained in Vancouver on a US extradition request, on the pretext of payments involving Iran.

Her arrest was the start of a US campaign to exclude Huawei from G5 mobile contracts in the west, pressure that eventually led the UK to downgrade Huawei’s contracts.

It ended up uniting the five-eyes security partnership against China’s technology on a reds-under-the-bed argument: “Chinese technology embedded in western communications systems gives them the ability to spy on us.”

The UK’s GCHQ changed its position from there being no evidence of embedded spyware in Huawei equipment to it being vulnerable to being used for spying by the Chinese government.

Hong Kong

The build-up of riots against Hong Kong’s proposed extradition treaty with the Mainland started in 2019, supported and driven by anti-Chinese propaganda.

America finally emerged as China’s adversary, no longer just a trading partner worried by the trade imbalances.

And Hong Kong was the pressure point.

This had happened before, in 2014.

The Chinese leadership was certain the riots in Hong Kong at that time reflected the work of American intelligence agencies.

The following is an extract translated from a speech by Major-General Qiao Liang, a leading strategist for the Peoples’ Liberation Army, addressing the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in 2015:

“Since the Diaoyu Islands conflict and the Huang-yan Island conflict, incidents have kept popping up around China, including the confrontation over China’s 981 oil rigs with Vietnam and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” event. 

"Can they still be viewed as simply accidental?

“I accompanied General Liu Yazhou, the Political Commissar of the National Defence University, to visit Hong Kong in May 2014. At that time, we heard that the “Occupy Central” movement was being planned and could take place by end of the month. However, it didn’t happen in May, June, July, or August.

“What happened? What were they waiting for?

“Let’s look at another timetable: the U.S. Federal Reserve’s exit from the Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. The U.S. said it would stop QE at the beginning of 2014. But it stayed with the QE policy in April, May, June, July, and August. As long as it was in QE, it kept overprinting dollars, and the dollar‘s price couldn’t go up. Thus, Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” should not happen either.

“At the end of September, the Federal Reserve announced the U.S. would exit from QE. The dollar started going up. Then Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” broke out in early October.

“Actually, the Diaoyu Islands, Huang-yan Island, the 981 rigs, and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” movement were all bombs. The successful explosion of any one of them would lead to a regional crisis or a worsened investment environment around China. That would force the withdrawal of a large amount of investment from this region, which would then return to the U.S.”

That America organized discontent anew in Hong Kong is still China’s view today.

It’s hard to dispute, as all of Hong Kong is wired with 5G and video. And the videos of American diplomats, and UK NGOS’ training the rioters, and supervising the destruction, and making agreements with the key leaders have been well publicized throughout Asia.

Not in America.

Of course.

Clearly, the Chinese believe America covertly managed “Occupy Central” and therefore were at it again.

Apart from what their spies told them, the protests were too well organized and planned to be spontaneous. This time, the attack appeared to have a better chance of success. The plan was coordinated with American pressure on Hong Kong’s dollar peg in an attempt to destabilize it, principally through the threat to extend tariffs against China to Hong Kong.

This second attempt to collapse Hong Kong was therefore more serious.

Hong Kong is critical, because it is the channel for foreign investment portfolio flows into China.

This was important to the Americans, because the US Treasury could not afford to see global portfolio flows attracted into China at a time when they were needed to invest in increasing quantities of US Treasury stock.

Understand that, and you will have grasped a large part of the urgency behind America’s attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.

Qiao Liang makes this point elsewhere in his aforementioned speech, claiming American tactics are the consequence of the ending of Bretton Woods:

“Without the restriction of gold, the US can print dollars at will. 

If they keep a large amount of dollars inside the US, it will certainly create inflation. 

If they export dollars to the world, the whole world is helping the US deal with its inflation. 

That’s why inflation is not high in the US.”

While one can take some minor issues with his simplistic analysis, that is not the point.

What matters is what the Chinese believe.

It was after that second attempt by America to destabilize Hong Kong that the Chinese concluded they must take direct control of the region, isolate and remove the NGO’s and CIA agents involved in this effort, and secure the region to prevent any future disruptions.

China makes mistakes too

China’s strategy in dealing with America has generally been to be slow to respond, and never to provoke. This accords with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on tactical dispositions:

“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”

Generally, China’s strategy has been to refuse to be provoked.

A possible exception has been Hong Kong, where it was decided it was more important to secure the island against further attack, overriding the terms of the treaty with the UK.

But its greatest mistake was in imposing trade tariffs in a tit-for-tat response to US tariffs.

Economic factors

Before the pandemic and with America targeting Chinese exports, China’s leadership introduced policies to encourage domestic consumption.

For this to work required a drop in the savings rate.

In fact, it has been falling since 2010, when according to the World Bank it peaked at 51% of GDP, to just under 44% in 2019.

It was the difference between Chinese and American savings rates which was the driving factor behind their mutual trade imbalance.

China recognizes that it must move on from an export-driven economic model.

But while the American and other welfare-driven economies are running mounting budget deficits, China will continue to have a growing trade surplus.

While this will continue to be a problem for the Americans, without imported goods from China product shortages would simply fuel higher prices on top of unprecedented monetary expansion.

This is the reality behind the cold war for the next few years.

Unfortunately, being highly Keynesian the new Biden administration is unlikely to accept the twin deficits argument and will think that it can still call the shots on trade without cutting its own spending. But the above showed US government debt to GDP is already over $28 trillion and on Biden’s infrastructure and greening plans alone will likely rise significantly further by this fiscal year.

The combination of increasing consumer demand while exports to America boom gives China a window of economic expansion only enjoyed by its Asian neighbors.

The contrast between China’s prospects can hardly be greater than those for America.

The economics alone militate strongly against the US pursuing a geopolitical objective other than quietly backing off.

But senior US personnel are still acting as if the Chinese should kowtow to America, as evidenced in the proceedings in Alaska in March 2021.

The Chinese were robust and will have calculated their position as strong.

Sun Tzu again:

“Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”.

What we are facing

The Biden presidency faces significant challenges in the ongoing cold war and America is unlikely to retain its hegemonic status.

During Trump’s presidency, attempts to curtail China’s trade and technological development did not succeed.

Instead it has brought China, Russia and Iran together, as well as emboldened both China and Russia to stand firm and as much as possible to do without America and its dollar.

The American senior advisors are, or should be, acutely aware of the debt and inflation traps facing the US and also the EU.

Following the Fed’s policies of accelerated monetary expansion announced last March, China increased her purchases of commodities and raw materials, in effect signalling she prefers them to dollar liquidity.

As a policy, it is likely to be extended further, given China’s existing stockpile of dollars and dollar-denominated debt.

Her dilemma is not just the fragile state of the US economy, but that of the EU which on any dispassionate analysis is a state failing economically and politically as well.

China will not want to be blamed for triggering a series of events which will get everyone reaching out for their forgotten copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is a true classic on political philosophy. Anyone keen on this field and in the practice of policy will be remiss to by-pass this magnum opus.

Hayek is characteristically brilliant in his rendition of an Idea: he can easily walk you through the intricacies of logical and theoretical argument for a case yet combine it masterfully with practical examples in economics and history. He is balanced, impartial and frank.

For classical liberals, this is a timeless jewel worthy of Locke, Acton, Tocqueville et al.

Simply a masterpiece. 

-Amazon

As events take their course, the risk of a dollar collapse and a matching crisis in the euro, though for different reasons, increases.

For Mackinder’s heartland theory to be proved and for the Russian and Chinese partnership to be in control of it, a mega-crisis facing the profligate money-printers must happen.

All history and a priori economic theory confirm it will happen.

The SCO’s Plan B will be a continuance of Plan A, hatched out of the Shanghai Five Group, making the World Island a self-contained unit not dependent on the peripherals — principally, the five eyes.

The Five Eyes
The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

-Wikipedia

For money, China, Russia and the rest of Asia must give up western ways with unbacked state currencies.

Between them they have enough state-owned declared and undeclared gold to back the yuan, and the rouble.

Give these two currencies free convertibility into gold, and they will be accepted everywhere, so their old cold war enemies can trade their way back to prosperity.

The US has, or says it has, enough gold to put a failing dollar back on a gold standard, but for it to be credible it must [1] radically cut spending, [2] cut back its geopolitical ambitions, and [3] return its budget into balance.

All highly unlikely.

With luck, that is how the new cold war ends.

But don’t hold your breath.

America, and the rest of the nations that it is dragging along with it, are barrelling down towards a great and grand catastrophe.

Situation Report

The election of 2020 did nothing to change the leadership in Washington DC. They are just puppets for their handlers the oligarchy. While Biden is calmer and has swave, compared to Donald Trump,  he is continuing all the polices that his predecessor implemented.

The election made no functional difference in anything.

You can read what ever you want in this realization, but I read it as exactly what it is. “Democracy” is dead. Voting whether actual, or corrupted, makes absolutely no difference in how the nation is run, governed or managed.

This knowledge, by itself is significant. It is one of those check boxes that you have on a sheet of paper when you get ready for a big event, gala or preparation for disaster.

I could go down the long list of alarm bells, flashing lights, elements of growing discontent all of which every single American is viewing in real time. These clamorous alarms have been banging away for decades, but their loudness has become so commonplace that most Americans just accept them as the “new reality”, and assume that things will just worsen in a gradual series of stages…

…not a big thunderous crash.

I beg to differ.

For there are things that most Americans have zero understanding of. And is the state of affairs outside the shores of the Untied States. And what passes for “American news” is anything but actual intel. Americans haven’t a clue as to what is going on “outside”.

Things are building up.

America, the large thrashing out of control elephant, is rampaging about and the rest of the world has armed themselves with tranquilizer guns, large nets, and heavy cages.

Russia, China and Iran are one solid block. They are now a close national entity. Surrounding these nations are allied nations. All working in their best interests, but will align with their large neighbors the sino-block.

Europe wants to sit on the fence, but the USA (through the five eyes) wants them to be pulled into the “us vs. them” USA against the world “rules based order”. They are not budging. Just trying to be as neutral as possible.

What is apparently happening is the isolation of the United States from the rest of the globe internationally.

USA/Canada plus the islands of UK, Australia, and NZ.

What we are watching (on the international scene) is the Asian block… the Sino-block … are holding off as long as possible in putting the thrashing elephant down. But they realize that doing so is a last resort. They do not want to do so, as there will be a backlash on the world.

America, the thrashing elephant has no idea how little it knows, is capable of, and what danger it is in. It is delusional.

…

I could get into the specific details like the strange blockage of all shipping in the Suez Canal, the Beirut explosion, the propaganda narratives, the Coronavirus, etc, etc…

These are just elements of a large game of chess that America is playing…

The timeline that they set up is still in play, though the attacks on China (that were planned) did not happen.

  • No starvation via bio-weapon carpet bombing of livestock.
  • No suppression of trade via propaganda and sanctions.
  • No incited revolutions in Hong Kong.
  • No unrest in Tibet, Xingjiang.
  • No “incident” in the South China Sea

None of that happened, and the attempt at war in the 2019 – 2020 time frame failed.

But we knew that that was would would happen.

Firstly, because China is not what the American (and Western media) thinks it is, and secondly because the date fro the crisis event has not yet hit.

If you can believe this; we are just building up to the event. There is still a couple of years to go yet.

The danger period is approaching; 2023 through 2026, centered around 2025.

Hold on to your britches boys and girls. Dicy times are a coming.

Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that they predicted a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020.

If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the  climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. 

What will  America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no  guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the  possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues,  from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume  that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible  tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary  hardship, but debasement and total ruin. 

Since Vietnam, many Americans  suppose they know what it means to lose a war. 

Losing in the next Fourth  Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could  mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even  our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own  ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of  societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or  beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.

Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.

In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.

That is three years later.

What does Mr. Howe say?

Below is a brief essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe discussing the typical progression of each “Turning”. It remains more relevant than ever amidst our current zeitgeist. It was written nearly a year before 2020 showed it’s ugly, ugly face.

NH: We live in a tumultuous time in American history.

 The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst  that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a  generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its  course over the next decade or so. This is the generational theory I  laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.

 The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like  President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak  picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like  tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and  children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”

 Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as  leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard  anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the  Netherlands.

 Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill  the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.

 In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of  things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.

 At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.

 The First Turning is called a High.
 This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the  conformity.

 America’s most recent First Turning was the post-World War II  American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a key lifecycle marker for today’s older Americans.

 The Second Turningis an Awakening.
 This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal  and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Young activists and spiritualists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural poverty.

 America’s most recent Awakening was the “Consciousness Revolution,”  which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid 1960s to  the tax revolts of the early ‘80s.

 The Third Turning is an Unravelling.
 The mood of this era is in many ways the opposite of a High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and  flourishing. Highs follow Crises, which teach the lesson that society  must coalesce and build. Unravelings follow Awakenings, which teach the  lesson that society must atomize and enjoy.

 America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars,  beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps.

 And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.

 This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression  finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.

 In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new  “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the  national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global  Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030. 

If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as  we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by  the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.

 Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture  and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics,  economy and empire).

 To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take  comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us  a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four  seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.

 Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring. 

Exerpts from the book The Fourth Turning

In 1860-1861 southern states took the Lincoln victory as a de-facto proof that the North would increasingly seek to impose its will upon the south (they were right, but losing the war actually made it happen faster and more completely). 

What people generally forget is that all states had large militias that were beholden ONLY to the states, and people had much more belief and legal adherence to the individual states, than now. 

Terrorist actions do not start a war, because you cannot really go to war conventionally against terrorism. What happened in the 1860's is that state governments formed a new nation in rebellion. 

Personally I don't think the Left or the Right, as a whole, have the balls to do this today. But I guess we'll see. Eventually the threats become real enough that it's hard to ignore them and just hope everything goes back to normal.

-Aerindel, SoJ_51 and Observer

This is straight from the book …

“Something happened to America at that time,” recalled U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye on V-J Day in 1995, the last of the 50-year commemoratives of World War II.  “I’m not wise enough to know what it was.  But it was the strange, strange power that our founding fathers experienced in those early, uncertain days.  Let’s call it the spirit of America, a spirit that united and galvanized our people.”  Inouye went on to reflect wistfully on an era when the nation considered no obstacle too big, no challenge too great, no goal too distant, no sacrifice too deep.  A half-century later, that old spirit had long since dissipated, and nobody under age 70 remembered what it felt like.  When Joe Dawson reenacted his D-Day parachute drop over Normandy, he said he did it “to show our country that there was a time when our nation moved forward as one unit.”

The Eternal Return

On the earthen floors of their rounded hogans, Navajo artists sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time.  Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries.  They draw these sand circles in a counter-clockwise progression, one quadrant at a time, with decorative icons for the challenges of each age and season.  When they near the end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a small gap just to the right of its top.  This signifies the moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenics called ekpyrosis.  By Navajo custom, this moment can be provided (and the circle closed) only by God, never by mortal man.  All the artist can do is rub out the painting, in reverse seasonal order, after which a new circle can be begun.  Thus, in the Navajo tradition, does seasonal time stage its eternal return.

Like most traditional peoples, the Navaho accept not just the circularity of life, but also its perpetuity.  Each generation knows its ancestors have drawn similar circles in the sand—and each expects its heirs to keep drawing them.  The Navaho ritually reenact the past while anticipating the future.  Thus do they transcend time.

Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes.  Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward.  The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms.  Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking.  Yet we cannot avoid history’s last quadrant.  We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis.  Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis.  Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum.  The epoch that began with V.J.-Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.

An end of what?

The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man.  It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing.  If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly.  But this end, while possible, is not likely.  Human life is not so easily extinguishable.  One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species.  Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that.  For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck.  Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.

The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity.  The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus.  The seventh modern saeculum would be the last.  This too could come from total war, terrible but not final.  There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society.  The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw.  A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins.  The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress.  As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet.  But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.

The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.  It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify.  This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one.  Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival.  Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle.  In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history.  In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed.  In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.

Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum.  Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere.  Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum.  America would be reborn.  But, reborn, it would not be the same.

The new saeculum could find America a worse place.  As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.”  Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals.  Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring.  Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear.  Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place.  Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are.  All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.

Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place.  Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization.  Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired.  Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction.  People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment.  America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community.  Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting.  All this is achievable as well.

Conclusion

2020 was not the Climax; the Crisis of the Forth Turning in America. That still lies ahead of us.

I hope it never comes to this. In lieu, I can see the Balkinization of the country take place, sides would move to designated areas and set up permanent camp. There may be 2, 3 or more countries within the US before the dust settles.

-Survivalist Boards

A climax is a major event. It is typically marked by full-scale discord and absolute totality of full-scale war. That did not occur in 2020. That is not occurring now. 2020 was marked by a “pandemic”. Most Americans (through their media) believe that either [1] it is a hoax, or [2] it is a new strain of flu that is sweeping the globe. It is neither. It is a bio-weapon attack on China by the neocon Trump administration gone terribly wrong.

Xi Peng and Putin do not get their intel from Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and CNN. They get it from their Intel divisions. And both nations have a full picture of what is going on, has gone on and will go on further.

Both nations (China and Russia) filed a formal complaint against the United States for launching this bio-weapon (and all the others that it launched in late 2020). And while Americans ignored this complaint, pretending that it is meaningless, it did do something. It marked the start of Russia and China teaming up militarily against the United States.

…

United States. (With the UK, Canada, Israel, and Australia.) Today there is isolated America. Confused. Arrogant. Thrashing and moaning. Demanding all sorts of things.

The Rest of the World. And the rest of the world, lead by Russia, and China, that are very carefully and very precisely planning to stop all this nonsense once and for all.

Adjusting the dates

“It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central  bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of  millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the  rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites  in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the  intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the  ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that  issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt,  government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda,  government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can  stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic  system.”

-The Burning Platform

Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…

There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…

  • “Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
  • Climax in 2023.
  • Resolution in 2029.

.

Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.

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Law 7 of The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene; Get others to do the work for you, you always take the credit (Full Text)

Here is another law from the 48 laws of power by Robert Greene. This is Law 7. Get others to do the work for you. We can see how this law is practiced throughout the United States. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos. Eric Schmidt. Donald Trump. Can you name their “right hand men”? I’ll bet you cannot. For they are the figurehead and they get all the credit for the system that they are part of.

LAW 7

GET OTHERS TO DO THE WORK FOR YOU, BUT ALWAYS TAKE THE CREDIT

JUDGMENT

Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause. Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered. Never do yourself what others can do for you.

TRANSGRESSION AND OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW

In 1883 a young Serbian scientist named Nikola Tesla was working for the European division of the Continental Edison Company. He was a brilliant inventor, and Charles Batchelor, a plant manager and a personal friend of Thomas Edison, persuaded him he should seek his fortune in America, giving him a letter of introduction to Edison himself. So began a life of woe and tribulation that lasted until Tesla’s death.

IIII TORTOISE THE LELP AND THE HIPPOPOI

One day the tortoise met the elephant, who trumpeted, “Out of my way, you weakling—I might step on you!” The tortoise was not afraid and stayed where he was, so the elephant stepped on him, but could not crush him. “Do not boast, Mr. Elephant, I am as strong as you are!” said the tortoise, but the elephant just laughed. So the tortoise asked him to come to his hill the next morning. The next day, before sunrise, the tortoise ran down the hill to the river, where he met the hippopotamus, who was just on his way back into the water after his nocturnal feeding. “Mr Hippo! Shall we have a tug-of-war? I bet I’m as strong as you are!” said the tortoise. The hippopotamus laughed at this ridiculous idea, but agreed. The tortoise produced a long rope and told the hippo to hold it in his mouth until the tortoise shouted “Hey!” Then the tortoise ran back up the hill where he found the elephant, who was getting impatient. He gave the elephant the other end of the rope and said, “When I say ‘Hey!’ pull, and you’ll see which of us is the strongest. ”Then he ran halfway back down the hill, to a place where he couldn’t be seen, and shouted, “Hey!” The elephant and the hippopotamus pulled and pulled, but neither could budge the other-they were of equal strength. They both agreed that the tortoise was as strong as they were. Never do what others can do for you. The tortoise let others do the work for him while he got the credit. 

-ZAIREAN FABLE

When Tesla met Edison in New York, the famous inventor hired him on the spot. Tesla worked eighteen-hour days, finding ways to improve the primitive Edison dynamos. Finally he offered to redesign them completely.

To Edison this seemed a monumental task that could last years without paying off, but he told Tesla, “There’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you— if you can do it.”

Tesla labored day and night on the project and after only a year he produced a greatly improved version of the dynamo, complete with automatic controls. He went to Edison to break the good news and receive his $50,000.

Edison was pleased with the improvement, for which he and his company would take credit, but when it came to the issue of the money he told the young Serb, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor!,” and offered a small raise instead.

Tesla’s obsession was to create an alternating-current system (AC) of electricity. Edison believed in the direct-current system (DC), and not only refused to support Tesla’s research but later did all he could to sabotage him.

Tesla turned to the great Pittsburgh magnate George Westinghouse, who had started his own electricity company.

Westinghouse completely funded Tesla’s research and offered him a generous royalty agreement on future profits. The AC system Tesla developed is still the standard today— but after patents were filed in his name, other scientists came forward to take credit for the invention, claiming that they had laid the groundwork for him. His name was lost in the shuffle, and the public came to associate the invention with Westinghouse himself.

A year later, Westinghouse was caught in a takeover bid from J. Pierpont Morgan, who made him rescind the generous royalty contract he had signed with Tesla.

Westinghouse explained to the scientist that his company would not survive if it had to pay him his full royalties; he persuaded Tesla to accept a buyout of his patents for $216,000—a large sum, no doubt, but far less than the $12 million they were worth at the time.

The financiers had divested Tesla of the riches, the patents, and essentially the credit for the greatest invention of his career.

The name of Guglielmo Marconi is forever linked with the invention of radio. But few know that in producing his invention—he broadcast a signal across the English Channel in 1899—Marconi made use of a patent Tesla had filed in 1897, and that his work depended on Tesla’s research.

Once again Tesla received no money and no credit. Tesla invented an induction motor as well as the AC power system, and he is the real “father of radio.” Yet none of these discoveries bear his name.

As an old man, he lived in poverty.

In 1917, during his later impoverished years, Tesla was told he was to receive the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. He turned the medal down. “You propose,” he said, “to honor me with a medal which I could pin upon my coat and strut for a vain hour before the members of your Institute.

You would decorate my body and continue to let starve, for failure to supply recognition, my mind and its creative products, which have supplied the foundation upon which the major portion of your Institute exists.”

Interpretation

Many harbor the illusion that science, dealing with facts as it does, is beyond the petty rivalries that trouble the rest of the world.

Nikola Tesla was one of those.

He believed science had nothing to do with politics, and claimed not to care for fame and riches. As he grew older, though, this ruined his scientific work. Not associated with any particular discovery, he could attract no investors to his many ideas. While he pondered great inventions for the future, others stole the patents he had already developed and got the glory for themselves.

He wanted to do everything on his own, but merely exhausted and impoverished himself in the process.

Edison was Tesla’s polar opposite.

He wasn’t actually much of a scientific thinker or inventor; he once said that he had no need to be a mathematician because he could always hire one. That was Edison’s main method.

He was really a businessman and publicist, spotting the trends and the opportunities that were out there, then hiring the best in the field to do the work for him. If he had to he would steal from his competitors. Yet his name is much better known than Tesla’s, and is associated with more inventions.

To be sure, if the hunter relies on the security of the carriage, utilizes the legs of the six horses, and makes Wang Liang hold their reins, then he will not tire himself and will find it easy to overtake swift animals. Now supposing he discarded the advantage of the carriage, gave up the useful legs of the horses and the skill of Wang Liang, and alighted to run after the animals, then even though his legs were as quick as Lou Chi’s, he would not be in time to overtake the animals. In fact, if good horses and strong carriages are taken into use, then mere bond-men and bondwomen will be good enough to catch the animals. 

-HAN-FEI-TZU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER, THIRD CENTURY B.C.

The lesson is twofold:

First, the credit for an invention or creation is as important, if not more important, than the invention itself. You must secure the credit for yourself and keep others from stealing it away, or from piggy- backing on your hard work. To accomplish this you must always be vigilant and ruthless, keeping your creation quiet until you can be sure there are no vultures circling overhead.

Second, learn to take advantage of other  people’s work to further your own cause. Time is precious and life is short. If you try to do it all on your own, you run yourself ragged, waste energy, and burn yourself out. It is far better to conserve your forces, pounce on the work others have done, and find a way to make it your own.

Everybody steals in commerce and industry. I’ve stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal. 

-Thomas Edison, 1847-1931

KEYS TO POWER

The world of power has the dynamics of the jungle:

There are those who live by hunting and killing, and there are also vast numbers of creatures (hyenas, vultures) who live off the hunting of others. These latter, less imaginative types are often incapable of doing the work that is essential for the creation of power.

They understand early on, though, that if they wait long enough, they can always find another animal to do the work for them.

Do not be naive: At this very moment, while you are slaving away on some project, there are vultures circling above trying to figure out a way to survive and even thrive off your creativity. It is useless to complain about this, or to wear yourself ragged with bitterness, as Tesla did.

Better to protect yourself and join the game. Once you have established a power base, become a vulture yourself, and save yourself a lot of time and energy.

A hen who had lost her sight, and was accustomed to scratching up the earth in search of food, although blind, still continued to scratch away most diligently. Of what use was it to the industriuus fool? Another sharp-sighted hen who spared her tender feet never moved from her side, and enjoyed, without scratching, the fruit of the other’s labor. For as often as the blind hen scratched up a barley-corn, her watchful companion devoured it. 

-FABLES, GOITCHOLD LESSING, 1729-1781

Of the two poles of this game, one can be illustrated by the example of the explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Balboa had an obsession—the discovery of El Dorado, a legendary city of vast riches.

Early in the sixteenth century, after countless hardships and brushes with death, he found evidence of a great and wealthy empire to the south of Mexico, in present-day Peru.

By conquering this empire, the Incan, and seizing its gold, he would make himself the next Cortés. The problem was that even as he made this discovery, word of it spread among hundreds of other conquistadors. He did not understand that half the game was keeping it quiet, and carefully watching those around him.

A few years after he discovered the location of the Incan empire, a soldier in his own army, Francisco Pizarro, helped to get him beheaded for treason. Pizarro went on to take what Balboa had spent so many years trying to find.

The other pole is that of the artist Peter Paul Rubens, who, late in his career, found himself deluged with requests for paintings.

He created a system: In his large studio he employed dozens of outstanding painters, one specializing in robes, another in backgrounds, and so on. He created a vast production line in which a large number of canvases would be worked on at the same time. When an important client visited the studio, Rubens would shoo his hired painters out for the day. While the client watched from a balcony, Rubens would work at an incredible pace, with unbelievable energy. The client would leave in awe of this prodigious man, who could paint so many masterpieces in so short a time.

This is the essence of the Law: Learn to get others to do the work for you while you take the credit, and you appear to be of godlike strength and power.

If you think it important to do all the work yourself, you will never get far, and you will suffer the fate of the Balboas and Teslas of the world.

Find people with the skills and creativity you lack.

Either hire them, while putting your own name on top of theirs, or find a way to take their work and make it your own. Their creativity thus becomes yours, and you seem a genius to the world.

There is another application of this law that does not require the parasitic use of your contemporaries’ labor: Use the past, a vast storehouse of knowledge and wisdom.

Isaac Newton called this “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

He meant that in making his discoveries he had built on the achievements of others. A great part of his aura of genius, he knew, was attributable to his shrewd ability to make the most of the insights of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance scientists.

Shakespeare borrowed plots, characterizations, and even dialogue from Plutarch, among other writers, for he knew that nobody surpassed Plutarch in the writing of subtle psychology and witty quotes. How many later writers have in their turn borrowed from—plagiarized—Shakespeare ?

We all know how few of today’s politicians write their own speeches.

Their own words would not win them a single vote; their eloquence and wit, whatever there is of it, they owe to a speech writer. Other people do the work, they take the credit. The upside of this is that it is a kind of power that is available to everyone. Learn to use the knowledge of the past and you will look like a genius, even when you are really just a clever borrower.

Writers who have delved into human nature, ancient masters of strategy, historians of human stupidity and folly, kings and queens who have learned the hard way how to handle the burdens of power—their knowledge is gathering dust, waiting for you to come and stand on their shoulders.

Their wit can be your wit, their skill can be your skill, and they will never come around to tell people how unoriginal you really are.

You can slog through life, making endless mistakes, wasting time and energy trying to do things from your own experience. Or you can use the armies of the past. As Bismarck once said, “Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience.”

Image: The Vulture. Of all the creatures in the jungle, he has it the easiest. The hard work of others becomes his work; their failure to survive becomes his nourishment. Keep an eye on the Vulture—while you are hard at work, he is cir cling above. Do not fight him, join him.

Authority: There is much to be known, life is short, and life is not life without knowledge. It is therefore an excellent device to acquire knowledge from everybody. Thus, by the sweat of another’s brow, you win the reputation of being an oracle. (Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

REVERSAL

There are times when taking the credit for work that others have done is not the wise course: If your power is not firmly enough established, you will seem to be pushing people out of the limelight. To be a brilliant ex ploiter of talent your position must be unshakable, or you will be accused of deception.

Be sure you know when letting other people share the credit serves your purpose. It is especially important to not be greedy when you have a master above you. President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic of China was originally his idea, but it might never have come off but for the deft diplomacy of Henry Kissinger. Nor would it have been as successful without Kissinger’s skills. Still, when the time came to take credit, Kissinger adroitly let Nixon take the lion’s share. Knowing that the truth would come out later, he was careful not to jeopardize his standing in the short term by hogging the limelight. Kissinger played the game expertly: He took credit for the work of those below him while graciously giving credit for his own labors to those above. That is the way to play the game.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my 48 Laws of Power Index here…

48 Laws of Power

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Articles & Links

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When prayers counter act each other and cancel out in an affirmation campaign

Prayers can seemingly cancel each other out. Yikes!

This happens, and the larger the number of affirmations you have, the greater the risk you have in having them cancel out each other. It happens, and you have to be aware and careful about your affirmations. Most certainly, the simple and sweet rule applies. Do not get too hung up on elaborate campaigns. Keep things simple.

Let’s talk about this here.

An example

This is a true example that was sent to me.

A MM follower had a problem. (Most of us do, but this has to deal with his affirmations. He felt that he was “spinning his wheels”.) While there were all sorts of things going on in his life, his most important two affirmations had not yet been realized. It had been at least a year maybe longer.

And while I told him that it takes time for the more distant goals to be realized, he argued that he must be doing something wrong.

So, after a few probing questions, he let me see his list of prayer affirmations, and at the top, under the heading “Most important” were two affirmations. They were…

  • Be the CEO of a large and important company.
  • Have a nice calm, happy and peaceful life.

…

Now, of course, it is possible to have both. It is not impossible. For with affirmation prayers, anything is possible. It’s just that some things require more world-lines to traverse to get to.

I suggested to him to do one or the other. Not both simultaneously.

And why you might ask…

Pick the one that he desires first, and then work towards it.

The reason for this, is that the combination of both together is going to be a difficult one to obtain quickly. Now I said “quickly”. I did not say unobtainable. His combination made quick implementation of his desires rather problematic.

How to understand this…

When your objective prayers are not being realized that means that there might be one or more of a number of things going on.

  • Your prayer goal takes a large number of world-lines to traverse. It is farther away than your would like, and you have yet to reach it.
  • Your goal is in conflict with another goal, thus obtaining both goals together sends your ultimate objective further down the time track.
  • Your goal is off your pre-birth world-line template and you have not approved or blessed a slide to get off your fated life.
  • You are being blocked by non-physical issues that you are unaware of.
  • Your prayer is simply not possible within your template.

Regarding this last point…

Anything and everything is possible in our reality. In the movie The Craft (1996),  the three other witches placed curses, hexes and spells on a girl in their coven. Her life turned to shit, and even her parents died. Then, after running a prayer / spell campaign she awoke to a new reality. One where her parents didn’t really die as was reported on television, it was all a bad mistake.

Anything is possible in this reality.

It’s just that there is a measure of your opposition to change that plays a role. And I want to discuss that right now.

Inertia

Our “reality universe” in both the physical reality, and the non-physical reality has this quality, or attribute known as “inertia”. It is measurable, and there have been many studies on it. Essentially, inertia is the resistance to change. We see this everyday.

If you are running and you want to stop suddenly, you end up toppling and going heads over heals. Or if you are trying to push a car that is broken down, its hard to get it moving, but once it starts to roll, it is so much easier. All of this is known as “inertia”.

Inertia 
Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its velocity. This includes changes to the object's speed, or direction of motion. An aspect of this property is the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at a constant speed, when no forces act upon them.
This property affects everything. And it is not just the physical. It is the non-physical as well. And yes, thoughts and ideas also have inertia.
.
So you really cannot expect to start and stop affirmation prayers at will. While you physically might start and stop the actual vocalizations, you cannot stop the non-physical things that you set in motion.
.
It’s due to a non-physical attribute that is similar to inertia.
.

Now, I want the reader to take into account that there is no such thing as “time”, and since there is no such thing…

…that means that the affirmations that you made last year has the same validity or “juiciness” as if you were making them today. And thus all the affirmations and writings that you have ever done is part of the big stew that you have been cooking all your life to get to the point where you are now.

We can refer to this characteristic as the inertial component of an affirmation / prayer campaign.

An Illustration

Let’s look at this example.

We see that the “hills” and valleys” of a topographical world-line map that is representative of the MWI  is a measure of how difficult, stressful, or contentious a person’s life might be RELATIVE to the other world-lines that preceded it.

And here we see that you can accumulate benefit by climbing these “hills”…

And here I make the point that effort, strife, discomfort accumulates a specific type of experience that the consciousness can use.

How it is used depends on many things.

As we go “up the hill” in the MWI topographical map, we can also go “down the hill” upon the topographical map. And the ease of your life would be wholly a function of the release of the “good stuff” or “good karma” that you have accumulated during your travels.

As shown here…

But we can consider the benefits and liabilities of this accumulated effort in dealing with strife to be similar to that of inertia.

You climb the “hills” and you experience discomfort. You do down the “hills” and you experience a relatively easy period of time.

If we consider it to be analogous to “karma” as well as “inertia” then we have a real actual characteristic that is fundamental to our movement within the MWI and when we go from world-line to world-line.

This can be counter intuitive. After all, how can you “gain something” when you expend effort?

And I am here to tell you that no matter what you do in life, everything is inner connected.

So when you make a prayer affirmation campaign a few years back, the impressions that they made still slings to your being. Even though (for instance) you recognize that that you made some grievous errors in judgment when you defined those prayers.

Back to the example

So here, let’s go back to the example of the follower who is upset that he is not achieving the life of comfort and success as he pictured in his affirmation prayer campaign.

His life apparently isn’t going anywhere.

He seems stuck in his current situation.

He is frustrated, and he desperately wants that vision of a new life. You know which one. Something like this…

Boss life.

Ah.

There are many things at play. But I am willing to wager that the primary contributors are that his prayers counter-act each other, and ended up putting his goals in a far-away location on the MWI, as well as residual inertial influence of previous desires, wishes and vocalizations.

Time does not exist.

So the things that he said, and the writings that he made, and the actions that he dreamed of and contemplated upon has created a “tablecloth” upon which his new (and latest) prayer affirmations rest upon.

And while we want to believe that each and every new affirmation prayer campaign is a “new slate” from which to conduct our desires and goals, it is in all actuality a new meal that is placed on a tablecloth already soiled by your previous dining efforts.

In this particular case, I believe that it is a combination of things going on that has set his goals far off “in the distance” (MWI speaking)…

  • Too complex of a goal.
  • Characteristics of that goal that are too specific for immediate implementation.
  • A history of other wishes, desires, actions, or verbalization’s that further remove his goal form easy direct access.

Such as…

“Oh the boss is an idiot. I would never work like he does”

or,

“It’s a hard life. having a calm life is just a dream and wishful thinking”

or,

“Who needs money and the lifestyle of a boss? I’m happy as I am right now”

For him to move forward, he needs to counter act all what he has created over the years and then build upon this new foundation with his affirmations. Then he needs to adjust his affirmation campaign to be simpler. Concentrate on it step by step and don’t but too many big enormous desires without laying a foundation to travel upon.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that everything we do has an accumulated characteristic that color and alters the prayer campaign. I do not believe that it can completely render the campaign inept and non-functional, but rather that they tend to add a few “extra” world-lines between you and your objective. For you to advance forward you need to be of clear mind and purpose, and control any negative and counter active thoughts and actions that might have developed into habitual problems within your life.

If you do, you can be guaranteed of speedier implementation of your desires.

Best Regards.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Intention Prayer Index here…

Intention Campaigns

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Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
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Things are happening, new global alignments, and people are choosing sides prior to World War III

The world is moving ever forward. Such as this notice on MoA. This and these kinds of things are becoming more and more common in the West these days…

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Maintenance mode

Temporary Blog Closure
March 24, 2021 in Uncategorized by craig

In view of our understanding that the High Court has found some articles on this blog to be in contempt of court, and in view of the fact that the Crown Office had sought to censor such a large range of articles, this blog has no choice but to go dark from 15.00 today until some time after tomorrow’s court hearing, when it will be specified to us precisely how much of the truth we have to expunge before we can bring the blog back up.

This is a dark day for the entire team here. We will be looking to appeal this to the Supreme Court and if required (though we very much doubt it will be) to the European Court of Human Rights.

-Posted by: Bluedotterel | Mar 24 2021 16:46 utc | 1

Bang, bang, and then bang. One after another things have started to happen faster and faster. It began in Alaska with a stunning, just stunning insulting display of ignorance and rudeness from the United States. Followed quickly by the military, social, industrial, and cultural realignments between Russia and China. With then Iran getting on board, creating the combined enormous Asian block.

Belt and Road isn’t going away. China is making more rigorous lending decisions while focusing somewhat less on heavy-duty construction and more on digital technology, says a Council on Foreign Relations task force report released on March 23. The 190-page report, titled China’s Belt and Road: Implications for the United States, was written by Jennifer Hillman and David Sacks of the CFR based on the findings of an independent task force chaired by former Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and retired Admiral Gary Roughead.

For the U.S., calibrating an effective response to Belt and Road is tricky. The Obama administration pursued constructive engagement with China. As Belt and Road ramped up and became more of a threat, the Trump administration was more confrontational, but without allies’ support. The Biden administration aims to build more of a united front of nations to counter Chinese influence. Reflecting the difficulty of striking the right balance, the Council on Foreign Relations report says the U.S. response “has been too little, too late,” but also says “its blanket condemnation risks alienating partners.”

The American leviathan has set up the pieces, and is going full bore toward international global conflict. All stops have been pulled. All fail-safes have been removed.  And now, it’s a matter of getting the minions and toadies in line so that the wars can be fought on their national geography instead of inside of America.

Um…

It’s not going to happen that way, but you just cannot reason with idiots.

I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the world.

-Posted by: William Gruff | Mar 24 2021 19:57 utc | 36

The Article

This is a great article. Just great.

As Patrice says…

It's clear from the tone of the author, which mirrors much of independent, assaulted and outraged humanity, that many observers are waiting with bated breath...

...for the emergence of a powerful and invincible countervailing alliance...

...(one that is) capable of finally stopping the reign of brutal violence and disgusting hypocrisy imposed by the US empire. 

And that alliance, perforce, as to be the sinorussian alliance. 

The blood-curdling hypocrisy of the West leaves truly decent and sovereign nations no choice. 

As Pepe Escobar puts it in this remarkable and indispensable dispatch: 

One has to applaud the gall of the “Western partners”. It’s 18 years since Shock and Awe – the start of the bombing, invasion and destruction of Iraq. It’s 10 years since the start of the total destruction of Libya by NATO and its GCC minions, with Obama-Biden “leading from behind”. It’s 10 years since the start of the savage destruction of Syria by proxy – complete with jihadis disguised as “moderate rebels”. Yet now the “Western partners” are so mortified by the plight of Muslims in Western China!

This is a complete reprint of a most excellent article from Pepe, and reproduced from HERE. All credit to the author. Please kindly note that it was reformatted to fit this venue but aside from that left intact in all of it’s glory.

With a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the hegemon, we now have a brand new geopolitical chessboard

It took 18 years after Shock and Awe unleashed on Iraq for the Hegemon to be mercilessly shocked and awed by a virtually simultaneous, diplomatic Russia-China one-two.

March 2021: The FMs of the two greatest powers defying Washington meet for close strategic consultation.

How this is a real game-changing moment cannot be emphasized enough; 21st century geopolitics will never be the same again.

Yet it was the Hegemon who first crossed the diplomatic Rubicon. The handlers behind hologram Joe “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” Biden had whispered in his earpiece to brand Russian President Vladimir Putin as a soulless “killer” in the middle of a softball interview. [Conducted by ABC News maggot, George Stephanopoulos, although media stenographers and propagandists in the Western bloc are all fully interchangeable. —Ed]

Not even at the height of the Cold War the superpowers resorted to ad hominem attacks. The result of such an astonishing blunder was to regiment virtually the whole Russian population behind Putin – because that was perceived as an attack against the Russian state.

Then came Putin’s cool, calm, collected – and quite diplomatic – response, which needs to be carefully pondered. These sharp as a dagger words are arguably the most devastatingly powerful five minutes in the history of post-truth international relations.

In For Leviathan, it’s so cold in Alaska, we forecasted what could take place in the US-China 2+2 summit at a shabby hotel in Anchorage, with cheap bowls of instant noodles thrown in as extra bonus.

China’s millennial diplomatic protocol establishes that discussions start around common ground – which are then extolled as being more important than disagreements between negotiating parties. That’s at the heart of the concept of “no loss of face”. Only afterwards the parties discuss their differences.

Yet it was totally predictable that a bunch of amateurish, tactless and clueless Americans would smash those basic diplomatic rules to show “strength” to their home crowd, distilling the proverbial litany on Taiwan, Hong Kong, South China Sea, “genocide” of Uighurs.

Oh dear. There was not a single State Dept. hack with minimal knowledge of East Asia to warn the amateurs you don’t mess with the formidable head of the Foreign Affairs Commission at the CCP’s Central Committee, Yang Jiechi, with impunity.

Visibly startled, but controlling his exasperation, Yang Jiechi struck back. And the rhetorical shots were heard around the whole Global South.

They had to include a basic lesson in manners: “If you want to deal with us properly, let’s have some mutual respect and do things the right way”. But what stood out was a stinging, concise diagnostic blending history and politics:

The United States is not qualified to talk to China in a condescending manner. The Chinese people will not accept that. It must be based on mutual respect to deal with China, and history will prove that those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end.

And all that translated in real time by young, attractive and ultra-skilled Zhang Jing – who inevitably became an overnight superstar in China, reaping an astonishing 400 million plus hits on Weibo.

The incompetence of the “diplomatic” arm of the Biden-Harris administration beggars belief. Using a basic Sun Tzu maneuver, Yang Jiechi turned the tables and voiced the predominant sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the planet. Stuff your unilateral “rules-based order”. We, the nations of the world, privilege the UN charter and the primacy of international law.

So this is what the Russia-China one-two achieved almost instantaneously: from now on, the Hegemon should be treated, all across the Global South with, at best, disdain.

An inevitable historical process

Pre-Alaska, the Americans went on a charming offensive in Japan and South Korea for “consultations”. That’s irrelevant. What matters is post-Alaska, and the crucial Sergey Lavrov-Wang Yi meeting of Foreign Ministers in Guilin.

Lavrov, always unflappable, clarified in an interview with Chinese media how the Russia-China strategic partnership sees the current US diplomatic train wreck:

As a matter of fact, they have largely lost the skill of classical diplomacy. Diplomacy is about relations between people, the ability to listen to each other, to hear one another and to strike a balance between competing interests. These are exactly the values ​​that Russia and China are promoting in diplomacy.

The inevitable consequence is that Russia-China must “consolidate our independence: “The United States has declared limiting the advance of technology in Russia and China as its goal. So, we must reduce our exposure to sanctions by strengthening our technological independence and switching to settlements in national and international currencies other than the dollar. We need to move away from using Western-controlled international payment systems.”

Russia-China have clearly identified, as Lavrov pointed out, how the “Western partners” are “promoting their ideology-driven agenda aimed at preserving their dominance by holding back progress in other countries. Their policies run counter to the objective international developments and, as they used to say at some point, are on the wrong side of history. The historical process will come into its own, no matter what happens.”

As a stark presentation of an inevitable “historical process”, it doesn’t get more crystal clear than that. And predictably, it didn’t take time for the “Western partners” to fall back into – what else – their same old sanction bag of tricks.

Here we go again: a US, UK, EU, Canada “alliance” sanctioning selected Chinese officials because, in Blinken’s words, “the PRC [People’s Republic of China] continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.” [sic]

The EU, UK, and Canada didn’t have the guts to sanction a key player: Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo, who’s a Politburo member. The Chinese response would have been – economically – devastating.

Still, Beijing counterpunched with its own sanctions – targeting, crucially, the German far-right evangelical nut posing as “scholar” who produced the bulk of the completely debunked “proof” of a million Uighurs held in concentration camps.

Once again, the “Western partners” are impermeable to logic. Adding to the already appalling state of EU-Russia relations, Brussels chooses to also antagonize China based on a single fake dossier, playing right into the Hegemon’s not exactly secret Divide and Rule agenda.

Mission (nearly) accomplished: Brussels diplomats tell me the EU Parliament is all but set to refuse to ratify the China-EU trade deal painstakingly negotiated by Merkel and Macron. The consequences will be immense.

So Blinken will have reasons to be cheerful when he meets assorted eurocrats and NATO bureaucrats this week, ahead of the NATO summit.

European Parliament cancels CAI meeting, threatens deal signing delay
It's funny: the more the EU tries to act like an independent power, the more it acts like an American province. It almost looks like European politicians constantly lie...

One has to applaud the gall of the “Western partners”. It’s 18 years since Shock and Awe – the start of the bombing, invasion and destruction of Iraq. It’s 10 years since the start of the total destruction of Libya by NATO and its GCC minions, with Obama-Biden “leading from behind”. It’s 10 years since the start of the savage destruction of Syria by proxy – complete with jihadis disguised as “moderate rebels”.

Yet now the “Western partners” are so mortified by the plight of Muslims in Western China.

At least there are some cracks within the EU illusionist circus. Last week, the French Armed Forces Joint Reflection Circle (CRI) – in fact an independent think tank of former high officers – wrote a startling open letter to cardboard NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg de facto accusing him of behaving as an American stooge with the implementation of NATO 2030 plan. The French officers drew the correct conclusion: the US/NATO combo is the main cause of appalling relations with Russia.

These Ides of March

Meanwhile, sanctions hysteria advance like a runaway train. Biden-Harris has already threatened to impose extra sanctions on Chinese oil imports from Iran. And there’s more in the pipeline – on manufacturing, technology, 5G, supply chains, semiconductors.

And yet nobody is trembling in their boots. Right on cue with Russia-China, Iran has stepped up the game, with Ayatollah Khamenei issuing the guidelines for Tehran’s return to the JCPOA.

1. The US regime is in no position to make new demands or changes regarding the nuclear deal.

2. The US is weaker today than when the JCPOA was signed.

3. Iran is in a stronger position now. If anyone can impose new demands it’s Iran and not the US.

And with that we have a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the Hegemon.

In our latest conversation/interview, to be released soon in a video + transcript package, Michael Hudson – arguably the world’s top economist – hit the heart of the matter:

The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give the wealth, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially. And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.

To be continued. As it stands, we should all make sure that the Ides of March – the 2021 version – have already configured a brand new geopolitical chessboard. The Russia-China Double Helix on high-speed rail has left the station – and there’s no turning back.

Conclusion

Oh, Pepe said it so clearly and so wonderfully. Today there is a massive new Geo-political alignment, and it is the direct result of insanity and poor leadership from the West. And they are so very incompetent that they have no idea with the kind of “fire” that they are playing with.

Even with an enormous military, control of all media and communication, and some hidden ultra-powerful technology, the leadership is so seriously incompetent, the systems so hopelessly flawed, and the participants so absolutely corrupted that a catastrophic collapse of their government is imminent.

I hope and pray that I am wrong.

That all this will “blow over” and just go away, and I can fall into the “dust bin” with the rest of the “doom and gloom” predictors throughout history. Let’s hope the MM is wrong.

Trivia of the Day:

The total spending on the F-35 is greater than the total spending by China on the entire Belt and Road Initiative

Meanwhile, the insanity of what the West is today is gearing up. It’s the same-old, same-old. Only on a bigger scale. So the carpet bombing of China by biological weapons dis not work. So the aggressive attacks on trade and technology did not work. So the enormous armada of ships to the South China Sea did not work. So the riots and revolution in Hong Kong did not work…

…and neither will “boots on the ground” in Xinjiang either.

…nor “saving” Taiwan from China.

…nor a strong QUAD.

But they still have dreams of conducting “the rape of Nanjing” in modern Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. They still have dreams of invading and seizing Chinese held islands. They still have the dreams of sinking all cargo ships on the high seas. They still believe that all this can be ignored…

…as long as they control the American media.

EXCEPT…

Only Americans read American media.

They do not control the thoughts of the world. And the world is getting mightily pissed. Gosh! It’s going to be one fuck of a year.

As a reminder. This is what a “double tap” looks like. As this video from Boston, Massachusetts clearly shows…

 

Be careful of your neighbors when you shovel your driveway.

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America has decided to wage a hot war against China. It’s not if, it’s when.

I pretty much agree with migueljose. I'm 77 years old, US native-born citizen and life-long resident. The main problem in the US is the intense interracial animosity of all against all, and the deliberate race baiting by our ruling class. Race relations were better in the 50's despite segregation (worse in the North).

The second problem is the collapse of our educational system K-post doc, and the resulting incompetence of our Ruling Class. The attempt to actually destroy important Russian and Chinese companies and institutions, like Huawei, is an actual act of war. When that game was run against Japan in the late 30's, we got the Pacific War. Our current policies will give us a war with Russia-China. After the Biden interview and Alaska meeting fiascos, it is clear Russia and China are now coordinating their future actions. One fears the worst.

Posted by: bob sykes | Mar 23 2021 19:23 utc | 6

I do not want to sound alarming. But… Jeeze Louise…

After this last week with [1] the events of the Alaskan meeting between the United States and China, and [2] the “write ups” leading to it are quite horrifying.

I wonder what the Hell is going on in the minds of the folks back in Washington DC, for they have obviously have a mixture of numerous mental illnesses. Not a singular one. A mixture.

The Alaskan meeting was stunning in it’s insanity.

For starters, America demands that China (and the rest of the world) STOP working with the United Nations. Instead they order all other nations, and their leaders to “follow the United States” as it leads.

Yes.

You read that correctly.

Well, for one thing, the Americans demand a “Rules based obedience“. Not one that follows the United Nations. I know that it sounds so nice, and so orderly. “Rules”. ‘Why would anyone not want to follow “rules”?’ says the American sheeple. And yes, it does play well in the “red states” back inside of America, but it is dangerous.

It is very, very dangerous.

Because this “rules based obedience” means…

  1. There is not any kind of national sovereignty, only American sovereignty.
  2. Nations exist at the pleasure and allowance of the United States.
  3. The United States makes the rules at will.
  4. The United States changes the rules at will.
  5. All other nations are subservient to the United States.
  6. The United Nations has no say what so ever in International affairs.
  7. The United Nations is a convenience that America uses when it wants to, and ignores when it decides to.

This is a very authoritarian and demanding posture.

It is unyielding and fixed.

It’s almost as if the leaders in America are Megalomaniacs. To believe and allow such an insane level of insanity.

Megalomania is a psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of power, relevance, omnipotence, and by inflated self-esteem. 

Historically it was used as a name for narcissistic personality disorder prior to the latter's first use by Heinz Kohut in 1968, and is used today as a non-clinical equivalent.

But it’s not just that.

It’s many other things.

Such as the litany of demands that America placed on China.

Such as…

  • China’s actions and behavior regarding 台湾.
  • China’s actions and behavior regarding 西藏.
  • China’s actions and behavior regarding 香港.
  • China’s actions and behavior regarding 快乐的脚.

All of which might not look familiar to the American readers in the audience.

As all of the items (that America demanded on China) are de facto Chinese land, cities, areas and territories.

These are regions as specified within the United Nations and identified as Chinese domains.

Such as Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.

So it really is insulting that these jackasses from Washington DC have the fucking nerve to tell the Chinese what to do in 香港.

Which is like China demanding that America do thing about Baltimore, the killings in Chicago, and the maritime operations in the Gulf of Mexico and Boston harbor.

This illness, where you cannot understand the personal barriers of others is known as Cognitive Dysfunction.

Cognitive disorders, also known as neurocognitive disorders, are a category of mental health disorders that primarily affect cognitive abilities including learning, memory, perception, and problem solving. 

Neurocognitive disorders include delirium and mild and major neurocognitive disorder. 

They are defined by deficits in cognitive ability that are acquired, typically represent decline, and may have an underlying brain pathology. 

The DSM-5 defines six key domains of cognitive function: executive function, learning and memory, perceptual-motor function, language, complex attention, and social cognition.

Why were the American delegation so rude, demanding, and ill behaved during the Alaskan meeting? Could it be that they ACTUALLY BELIEVED that they were that powerful, and that they indeed represented the United States within that capacity?

How and why would they hold this amazingly dangerous position? It’s not patriotism. It’s pure evil.

It is exactly what Hitler demanded of Austria, West Prussia, Poland, the Netherlands, and France in the late 1930’s.

It’s pure evil.

The hatred towards China inside America is just ripe for war

The last four years of spewed hate has been horrible. Here’s the “news” from today…

The Mike Pompeo Speech is codified into policy

In April 2020, immediately after China stopped the COVID-19B virus, Mike Pompeo laid out a speech decrying China. In his speech he stated that all efforts to contain it has failed and that new aggressive measures must be taken.

I guess Pompeo and trump were surprised that China could completely stop a major bio-weapons attack with an R0=20; the very dangerous “B strain” when China was must vulnerable; CNY.

In comparison, the American "safe strain", has a much smaller R0=0.01, and a much small lethality footprint. Which is why it is called the "herd inoculation strain".

This speech was bemoaned by the entire global community as unrealistic, a throwback to World War II, and entirely antagonistic as well as a violation of the UN charter.

Well, guess what?

Yup. It’s now official American policy.

The Longer Telegram

Don’t believe me? Here we look at an American “policy paper” known as “The Longer Telegram“.

It’s called a “telegraph” as it is used as a “fair warning” that the United States considers China as a hostile enemy that must be destroyed. Thus the message is “telegraphed” to all people involved.

It is a reissue, and rewording of a post World War II document on how to be Master of the World. And it is being followed with religious fervor in the United States by the Biden administration. Following this outdated, outmoded, and insane cartoon-image of what the world is today is hastening the demise of the United States.

As well as forcing the hands of the Chinese, Iranians and Russians towards nuclear war.

It’s authored by “anonymous“, but we can see clearly that the contributors are the entire neocon establishment on “K street”. That’s John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and the rest of the neocon cabal.

What is this “telegram”?

It’s a strategy and orders towards “reclaiming American greatness” by the destruction of the largest threats “to the American way of life” in the world. In it, it describes a very militaristic policy of total annihilation of the enemies of the United States.

Not cooperation.

Not negotiation, and trade.

Not Geo-political alignments, and posturing.

No.

It’s about total annihilation of all the threats the the United States global leadership, and how to go about making sure that it is successful.

  • Primarily the destruction of China.
  • Isolation of China from Russian support and alliances.
  • Isolation of China geographically.
  • Isolation of China internationally, culturally and socially.
  • Isolation of China in technology, skills, knowledge and science.

America is a military empire.

It’s a long-worded tome.

Obviously it was written by one or more “think tanks” in the military-industrial complex. Obviously a number of committees wrote various parts, spliced them together, and achieved “buy in” as a group.

As Strategic Culture writes…

The Atlantic Council has emitted The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy written by Anonymous. Clearly it is supposed to echo Mr X’s (George Kennan’s) Long Telegram. But some differences: this is longer – much longer, grinding on for seven times the length of Kennan’s essay.

And what is it about…

It’s about China…

It’s about Russia too.

The document describes a China that exists only in their furtive imaginations; 

An “authoritarian” country whose communist rulers are divorced from the people they rule, in which President Xi is described as more or less a warlord surrounded by “cronies,” enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, and who have visions of ruling the world. 

This fantasy is in fact a mirror-image of the United States.

Indeed.

It has absolutely no resemblance with China, as it is today, in any way, shape or form.

The American military are experts at fighting wars in far away lands.

Facts do not matter to the ideologically obsessed.

The Strategic Culture Foundation says it quite clearly…

But, enough of Anonymous’ fancies – they have no base in reality: 

The USA out-sourced its manufacturing to China long ago and won’t be getting it back.

Wokeism is killing its education system.
America's politics are broken.
America's military is losing everywhere and doesn’t realize it.
A tsunami of debt has built up. 

Most absurd of all, after years of needless hostility to Russia, Washington has no hope of separating Moscow from Beijing. 

And Xi Jinping is not some rogue who seized control...
...he is the top of a robust pyramid.

The only significance of this paltry effort is that it gives us another – and depressingly influential – example of the curious American obsession with personalities – everything in Chinese-U.S. relations was going along swimmingly until Xi. 

But actually, as anyone capable of seeing reality knows, China is much, much more than one man.

China/Russia/Iran/Iraq/insert-name-of-country was happy to accept its place in the Rules-Based International Order...

... until that nasty Xi/Putin/Ayatollah/Saddam/insert-name changed everything; get rid of him and it will all fix itself.

Sure...

When are they going to understand that it’s a whole country, not just one guy?

America is a Military Empire.

How about the details…

But what is this thing… this “Longer Telegram”…

In an extraordinarily provocative move, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has warned China that it is pushing for a more aggressive strategy...

... all the way up to instigating war. 

In a tome-like article published by the Washington-based Atlantic Council, there are foreboding demands for numerous “red lines” to confront China over.

Entitled ‘The Longer Telegram’ the article is a strange throwback to Cold War thinking. It is ostentatiously mimicking the famous document authored by George Kennan in 1946 who as a U.S. diplomat based in the Moscow wrote ‘The Long Telegram’ prescribing a hostile strategy of containment against the Soviet Union.

Thus the Atlantic Council is billing the recent article as a seminal historical contribution to formulating U.S. policy towards China, and one that is more bellicose and “comprehensive”.

The suppression of China will require “boots on the ground” inside of China.

Here’s a reprint of a very informative article…

The Longer Telegram: To Contain China or the USA?
Christopher Black
March 14, 2021

The paper repeats the mistake inherent in all American thinking about the world, of [1] inventing a rival that does not exist, and then [2] positing strategies to deal with this fiction.

Washington, Beijing and European capitals have been firing off barrages of commentary in the past weeks on an anonymously authored paper on China published on January 28 by the U.S.-NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, entitled “The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy.”

It is modeled on another policy paper written by George Kennan in 1946.

That policy paper was called the Long Telegram. In it Kennan set out a strategy for “containing” the Soviet Union.

Which is a nice euphemism that means “destroying it”.

The American military has been training to seize Chinese islands and fight within Chinese cities.

Kennan’s advice was adopted and became U.S. strategy. The Longer Telegram purports to set out a strategy for undermining China and its socialist system.

Which is really fucked up as the Chinese system is far, far, FAR superior to the American system of oligarchy-run military-empire that pretends to be a democracy.

The Longer Telegram has met with approval by some U.S. and allied strategists and governments but alarm by others. China has denounced it for what it is, a plan for aggression against China and its socialist system.

The paper repeats the mistake inherent in all American thinking about the world, of inventing a rival that does not exist, and then positing strategies to deal with this fiction.

This delusory thinking has led the United States into one defeat after another and caused the world untold troubles as it tried to throw its weight around to secure markets and resources for its industries and capital.

  • Yemen
  • Panama
  • Libera
  • Afghanistan
  • Syria
  • etc, etc…

The destruction of one country after another to achieve that objective, the deaths of millions, the immiseration of entire regions of the world are nothing to American capital so long as it can make money.

All their rhetoric about “human rights” “democracy” and other such platitudes is just a cover for maintaining their economic hegemony and keeping everyone else down.

American occupation of Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet and Hing Kong are all part of the war plans.

They even sometimes admit this.

In the National Defence Strategy issued in 2018, the real reason for the slanders against China, the constant provocations in Hong Kong, and the South China Sea is stated clearly…

“Failure to meet our defense objectives will result in decreasing U.S. global influence...

...eroding cohesion among allies and partners...

...and reduced access to markets...

...that will contribute to a decline in our prosperity and standard of living.”

Of course even this is a lie since American capital does not care at all about the standard of living of the American people, only about the prosperity and standard of living of the big capitalists.

The world can see what conditions are in the United States.

The [1] failure to protect their people from the Covid pandemic, [2] the almost daily extrajudicial killings of blacks and poor people, [3] the hollow promise of Biden to institute a higher minimum wage, [4] the collapse of the power grid in Texas are[5] eloquent expressions of the contempt and disregard big capital has for the common people.

The document describes a China that exists only in their furtive imaginations;

…an “authoritarian” country whose communist rulers are divorced from the people they rule, in which President Xi is described as more or less a warlord surrounded by “cronies,” enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else, and who have visions of ruling the world.

This fantasy is in fact a mirror image of the United States.

The American marines have been drilling and practicing the invasion and seizure of Chinese held islands for the last four years.

The anonymous author(s) sees China as he has been conditioned to see America, and then projects that outward to any nation that attempts to develop its economy and improve the conditions of its people.

And just as the forces of capital in the United States manipulate elections and the political system to guarantee their power in order to feather their own nests, the author of the Longer Telegram accuses the President of China of doing the same in China, of using his position for his own benefit.

It then offers recommendations on how to try to split the Chinese leadership from the people, and even on how to split the Communist Party from its membership and the people, using false claims as propaganda to undermine social cohesion.

American military.

China did well to kick out the BBC last week and to arrest the U.S. and British agents in Hong Kong.

The document adopts the Henry Kissinger strategy urging a soft approach to Russia to try to lure it away from its alliance with China.

This would require a complete reversal of American strategy of surrounding Russia with bases, ships and missile systems, of attempting to ruin the Russian economy with all the illegal trade and financial embargoes.

It is not going to happen.

But the suggestion shows the confusion in the American leadership on how to stop its economic decline that precedes its decline as the world hegemon.

For decades the Americans have claimed to support nations trying to raise themselves from the poverty created by European and American colonialism, to achieve economic prosperity and a better life for their peoples.

But when a country achieves those goals it suddenly becomes an enemy.

America want no rivals.

The Chinese military are not 1980’s era conscripts with out-of-date Russian weapons systems. They are a modern and formidable army.

China is declared an enemy simply because the Communist Party has, over its long struggle from the Long March to today, raised a billion and more people out of poverty, has created a social and economic system no western nation can equal.

  • China is as big as the United States.
  • China has more factories than the United States.
  • China has a peer capable military.
  • China is a threat on all levels of (former) United States dominance.

And most importantly…

Their example shows the world what can be achieved by nations finally freed from colonialism, and shows the strength and vitality of socialism.

But now America faces renewed threats from the aspiring colonial powers.

China is a serious, serious nation that does not play.

Defeated in 1949, the colonial powers have never abandoned their ambitions to again reduce China to a colony.

They are, once again, actively engaged in trying to undermine China as a sovereign nation.

To slander it.

To sabotage its economy.

To threaten it with armed force.

And to break it into smaller, manageable pieces, as they want to do with Russia.

The method of attack is wide.

The Canadians, on U.S. orders, have essentially kidnapped and still hold hostage, Meng Wanzhou, Chief Financial Officer of the technology company, Huawei.

At the same time, the U.S. used the arrest as a warning to others trading with Iran.

They have increased their military provocations off the Chinese coast.

With the U.S. and its vassal states sending naval ships, time and again, through the Taiwan Strait, claiming to be enforcing “freedom of navigation” …

…but in reality declaring that Taiwan, a province of China, is an American protectorate.

The Chinese are not illiterate goat herders living in mud huts.

The complete response to the Longer Telegram is found in China’s national defence white paper which states, “Though a country may become strong, bellicosity will lead to its ruin.

The Chinese nation has always loved peace.

Since the beginning of modern times, the Chinese people have suffered from aggressions and wars, and have learned the value of peace and the pressing need for development.

Therefore, China will never inflict such sufferings on any other country.

Any attack on China will come with an enormous price tag.

Since its founding 70 years ago, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never started any war or conflict.

You just cannot say this about America; the biggest military empire in history.

Since the introduction of reform and opening-up, China has been committed to promoting world peace, and has voluntarily downsized the PLA by over 4 million troops.

China has grown from a poor and weak country to be the world’s second largest economy neither by receiving handouts from others nor by engaging in military expansion or colonial plunder.

Instead, it has developed through its people’s hard work and its efforts to maintain peace.

China has made every effort to create favorable conditions for its development through maintaining world peace, and has equally endeavored to promote world peace through its own development.

China sincerely hopes that all countries will choose the path of peaceful development and jointly prevent conflicts and wars.”

All those who want peace in the world, can support that statement.

The US military experts gave a high estimate of the tests of the new Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile which showed that the US aircraft carriers are in real danger as reported by Washington Free Beacon at the beginning of July. The tests took place in the South China Sea, where, in particular, the US Navy ships are deployed. It is specified that the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM) requires hi-tech surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting systems. According to the Pentagon, China has already deployed all of those. The US has no missile systems of the kind, and the possibilities to counteract them are limited, according to the website.

The Longer Telegram is not just a policy paper, it is also propaganda.

Dangerous anti-UN propaganda

Propaganda which must be rejected as a call for the violation of all the principles set out in the Charter of the United Nations.

A charter that guarantee every nation [1] the right to peaceful development, [2] to its sovereignty and [3] to non-interference from other nations; [4] to be treated with respect.

All of which were missing in the 19MAR21 Alaskan meeting between the USA and America.

Instead of contemplating strategies on how to contain China…

….the world must instead contemplate strategies for containing the United States of America.”

It’s all pretty damning. But why does MM believe that America has chosen to engage in a hot war?

Americans are ripe and “chomping at the bit” for a war.

There is unrestrained budget constraints and the debt is at twenty trillion dollars with no signs of any kind of fiscal responsibility. Either the American governance is counting on a financial and fiscal collapse, or…

…or…

…they plan on looting a large, plump and ripe nation to compensate for their fiscal irresponsibility.

And they are eyeing China.

History tells us that when nations have depleted their coffers, and their citizenry have taken to “torches and pitchforks” the only way out…

…socially, economically, and as a way to control the situation…

…is a war.

If they win, and conquer the opposing targeted nation, they can loot it, and fill their empty coffers. They can unite an upset and disturbingly angry citizenry with an enemy, and they can postpone the demise of their government that caused the fiscal irresponsibility in the first place.

China does not play.

Let’s look at this article, shall we…

Washington Telegrams China of Red Lines and Aggression

For a start (the policy paper) denigrates China’s President Xi Jinping in the most pejorative terms unbecoming of diplomatic norms. It proposes that “U.S. strategy must remain laser-focused on Xi, [and] his inner circle.”

The document states:

“At home, Xi has returned China to classical Marxism-Leninism and fostered a quasi-Maoist personality cult, pursuing the systematic elimination of his political opponents… Xi is no longer just a problem for U.S. primacy. He now presents a serious problem for the whole of the democratic world.”

What the Washington policy elite are explicitly calling for is “regime change” in Beijing by aiming to destabilize the senior government.

This marks an unprecedented notice of increased hostility towards the Chinese leadership. This is taking things way past U.S. aggression under Obama and Trump and brings it to a whole new level.

What’s even more alarming is the Atlantic Council article sets out numerous “red lines” which could trigger military confrontation.

These red lines include [1] “major hostile action” by China in the South China Sea, or [2] an attack on Taiwan, or [3] cyberattacks against the United States.

This is alarming because these actions are being exacerbated by the U.S. itself.

China is not afraid to use it’s nuclear weapons on any attacking force, and no one within America, England, Australia or wherever the aggressors want to hide .

[1] A“major hostile action” by China in the South China Sea

Since Biden took office last month, his administration has sent two navy carrier strike groups to conduct exercises in the South China Sea, which Beijing has condemned.

[2] Taiwan

A U.S. warship also recently passed through the Strait of Taiwan.

[3] And cyberattacks against the United States.

As for cyberattacks, they can be easily fabricated and falsely attributed by U.S. intelligence agencies. As clearly specified in the Vault 7 release by Wikileaks.

At one point the Atlantic Council article notes:

“U.S. strategy must understand that China remains for the time being highly anxious about military conflict with the United States, but that this attitude will change as the military balance shifts over the next decade. 

If military conflict were to erupt between China and the United States, and China failed to win decisively, then – given the party’s domestic propaganda offensive over many years proclaiming China’s inevitable rise – Xi would probably fall and the regime’s overall political legitimacy would collapse.”

This last paragraph is a clear sign that Washington planners are actually considering a preemptive war against China in which the latter “failed to win decisively” thereby precipitating the fall of President Xi.

The reaction from China has been surprisingly reserved.

Beijing condemned the American Cold War mentality but seemed to avoid condemning what are clearly U.S. threats of war.

One analyst for Global Times speculated that the Atlantic Council article was a “remnant from the Trump administration”.

Such thinking is dangerously complacent.

America wants China destroyed

For the evidence points to the article being an expression of policy formulation by the Biden administration.

It is notable in a recent interview with CBS, President Biden sounded remarkably disrespectful towards his Chinese counterpart.

Biden said he hadn’t yet spoken directly with Xi since the U.S. presidential inauguration ceremony nearly three weeks ago.

Such an absence of communication seems to be a calculated snub from Biden and his policy planners in Washington which is in total keeping with the proposed strategy outlined in the Atlantic Council article to “laser-focus” on denigrating Xi and his leadership.

Here’s another notable oddity.

While Biden has yet to contact Xi, the American leader held a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin the day after his inauguration.

In the Atlantic Council article, the author proposes:

“Dividing Russia from China… is critical.” It calls for “stabilizing relations with Russia” and the United States.

In the 1970s, it was the other way around.

U.S. policy then, first under Richard Nixon and later successors, was all about drawing China away from the Soviet Union because Moscow was perceived as the main threat to American hegemony.

Now, as the Biden administration and other Washington planners assert over and over, it is Beijing that is perceived as the principal challenger to the waning U.S. global empire.

But the same tactic of divide and rule is at play.

Officially, the Biden White House says it has yet to formulate definitive policies on relations with China or Russia.

America has no defense for the hypersonic DF-17 carrier killer.

But the vibe and tone of the Atlantic Council article has Team Biden’s fingerprints all over it – indicating that it is preparing to take a reckless aggressive course toward China. The Trump administration – which was brazenly antagonistic to China – is criticized for lacking “comprehensive strategy”.

That’s Orwellian euphemism for the Biden administration telegramming the threat of much more confrontational policy.

It may all just be reckless rhetoric by Washington’s imperial planners.

Nevertheless, the mere playing with war rhetoric is reprehensible and speaks of American desperation to salvage its diminishing global power.

It’s a time to be very careful and guarded.

Do not be under the impression that Russia and China are all unaware of all this.

No wonder, China has been hurriedly mass-producing nuclear warheads, MIRV ICBM missiles, and state of the art weapons technology at a hectic pace.

They are not fools.

The DF-41 will render all of America completely radioactive rubble.

Do not be under the illusion that China is a far away land and that American military can engage China…

…on Chinese territory…

… in a superior manner…

…where American lays out the terms of conflict…

…and Americans can watch on their television sets eating popcorn as the war and conflict rages in far, far away China.

Nope.

It’s not going to be like that.

As the Saker has pointed out…

And crucially, “keep the barbarians from coming together” applied to Russia, China and Iran. That was Pax Americana in a nutshell. And that’s what’s totally unraveling now.

Hence the Kill Bill logic. It goes back a long way. Less than two months after the collapse of the USSR, the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance preached total global dominance and, following Dr Zbig, the absolute imperative of preventing the emergence of any future peer competitor.

Especially Russia, defined as “the only power in the world with the capacity of destroying the United States.”

Then, in 2002, at the start of the “axis of evil” era, came the full spectrum dominance doctrine as the bedrock of the US National Security Strategy. Domination, domination everywhere: terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, cosmic, psychological, biological, cyber-technological.

And, not by accident, the Indo-Pacific strategy – which guides the Quad – is all about “how to maintain US strategic primacy.”

China should be taken seriously and respected.

This mindset is what enables US Think Tankland to formulate risible “analyses” in which the only “win” for the US imperatively requires a failed Chinese “regime.”

After all, Leviathan is congenitally incapable of accepting a “win-win”; it only runs on “zero-sum,” based on divide and rule.

And that’s what’s leading the Russia-China strategic partnership to progressively establish a wide-ranging, comprehensive security environment, spanning everything from high-tech weaponry to banking and finance, energy supplies and the flow of information.

Yup. Russia and China are coming together to defend against the American monster…

Do not be under the misguided impression that America can conduct a far-away war with China or Russia independently. They are working together.

It will not happen that way.

Neither China, or Russia will allow that to occur.

Doing so, would result in American cities blasted out of existence. It’s real.

Consider the “dead hand” for instance…

Dead Hand
Dead Hand, also known as Perimeter, is a Cold War-era automatic nuclear weapons-control system that was used by the Soviet Union. 

General speculation from insiders alleges that the system remains in use in the post-Soviet Russian Federation as well. 

An example of fail-deadly and mutual assured destruction deterrence, it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles by sending a pre-entered highest-authority order from the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Strategic Missile Force Management to command posts and individual silos if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity, and pressure sensors even with the commanding elements fully destroyed. 

By most accounts, it is normally switched off and is supposed to be activated during times of crisis; however, it is said to remain fully functional and able to serve its purpose whenever it may be needed.

-Wikipedia

Yup. Read about it…

But, America need not worry, right? A few strategically placed bombs here and there, a capture of an island or two and some “boot on the ground” will force China to obey America. Right?

Dead Hand

Russia upgrading its ‘Dead Hand’

29 Mar 2018 in 10:20

It’s active and alive. As this three year old article points out…

Russia is upgrading its nuclear final defence system which automatically launches it entire arsenal in a doomsday-like barrage, one of the US leading authorities on nuclear disarmament Bruce Blair said.

Russia’s defence chiefs are working to improve the so-called “Dead Hand” weapons system – also known as Perimeter. It has been referred to as a “Doomsday device” by analysts and was first developed during the paranoia of the Cold War.

Blair, who is the former US Air Force nuclear launch officer, said he believes the system is still operational and is even being “upgraded,” Daily Star Online reported.

Dead Hand is described as a “fully automatic” system which is turned on amid times of crisis by Russia. It is operated by three crew members whose sole job is just to make sure the system is operational with “no judgement” involvement.

Despite the terrifying concept, Dr Blair, co-founder of disarmament campaign group Global Zero, said the existence of such a weapon actually helps reduce the risk of nuclear war.

However, he questioned the system’s “vulnerability to cyber attack” as a cause for concern to global security. Dead Hand’s operation means the West will always have to think twice if there is a temptation for a nuclear strike.

“[Dead Hand] is fully automatic except that it has to be turned on by the general staff during a crisis, and there is a small crew that would perform a small number of functions before it would operate,” Blair said. “It is not a risk unless it could hacked and trigger an unauthorized launch,” he added

But don’t worry. China is isolated from Russia. And can be beaten easily by the superior American military…

Right?

Are you willing to bet your life, and your families lives on it?

So you really trust this man with your future…

Mike Pompeo

Or

Or, his “official” replacement in the Biden Administration.

Antony Blinken

So

So, do you really think that things are just going to be a lot of “hot air” and posturing?

And that nothing will come of all this, that somehow it will all go away…?

China will not be provoked

America will try and push and push China into an action. If China fails “to take the bait”, then America will make up and excuse a “false flag” event that will justify a war.

Now, let it be understood that America is not allowed to go to war without Congressional approval.

But that is meaningless.

America is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars all over the world directly and another twenty or so surreptitiously. None of which were specifically authorized by Congress.

So do not expect that the normal war declaration process will be followed. It will not.

Just expect a “false flag” event as an excuse to go to war within the next couple of years, if not months.

A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on a second party. The term is popular amongst conspiracy theory promoters in referring to covert operations of various governments and cabals.

-Wikipedia

Keep in mind that war is unpredictable

Please keep in mind that war is madness.

.

Yes it is crazy.

On one hand, don’t be so sure that China will be able to stop America, and this “road map towards destruction”. They might not be able to. And the United States might, and could very well, roll right over China. Destroy it, and carve it up into much smaller vassal states to service the American wealthy. Indeed, China might easily crumble after a concerted attack by skilled military forces working in unison.

After all, America is a well trained battle empire. It has over 75 years of non-stop military excursions, the top line and highest quality weaponry, and lots and lots of nuclear missiles.

It also has it’s cronies like the UK, Australia Korea, Japan and India who will participate in a conflict with China. Combined, it seems that China doesn’t have a chance, and while China can train and train, they do not have active hostile fighting experience like the American military has. The United States could plausibly rip right through China like a hot knife though butter.

And of course, please don’t be so sure that Russia will sit everything out. They might. They might just allow America and China to duke it out while they watch from the side-lines. Yes. That could happen, but don’t count on it. Russia and China see America as a very unpredictable enemy.

But war is about betrayals.

You will think that one nation and people are on your side, and then they could flip at a moments notice. Sort of how Italy was aligned with the Nazi Germans and then flipped and allied with the American during World War II.

Expect betrayals, and sabotage.

Expect messy things, and terrible reporting of the “news“. Like how the Trump Armada flotilla fared in the South China Sea in 2020.

Don’t be so sure that America will win a war against Asia. I know that this will come to a shock to those that watch the Rush Limbaugh show and watch FOX news. For in their minds, America is invincible!

There is no such thing as invincibility. There is only layers and degrees of damage, and ones varying ability to contain and repair the damage.

Don’t be so sure that any destroyed American cities will be able to be rebuilt either. America does have that ability any longer. Sure there are handymen, and construction companies. Sure there is the potential. But the real, active and genuine skills required to rebuild a devastated nation, it’s not really there.

I am sure that any destroyed city can be rebuilt. However we know from history that when Genghis Khan decimated Western Europe and the “Silk Road” cities, they remained empty and devoid of inhabitants for centuries afterwards. Indeed, many were never rebuilt.

America has lost the skills, and the ability to build, let alone rebuild. As well as the technical expertise in the most basic of constructions. While there are trillions of dollars in the value of American companies, most do not make anything. They either play with numbers or images in communication venues, or provide services. Both of which are not capable of rebuilding cities, infrastructure or societies.

Don’t be so sure that nuclear weapons will not be used. China does not play. They have repeatedly warned in words and deeds that they will respond in absolute terms with any American aggression. Do not think, for a minute, that they will risk allowing the United States to attack them unopposed.

This idea, this fantasy, that America can dictate terms to China, and bludgeon them into compliance as some kind of bargain-basement slave is very dangerous. China is like the nerd in High School that everyone picks on, makes fun of, and taunts without mercy….

….Meanwhile he’s also the kid who has built a death-ray in his basement.

Don’t expect anything.

But do not be under the misguided impression that the bullshit narrative the the “Long Telegram” is based upon has validity. It is a fantasy, and if the American leadership follows this “roadmap” for the “suppression” of China, it was end up turning out quite…

…ugly.

Conclusion

Yes, this is a profoundly sobering and disgusting article. I am sorry for it.

Any war with China will not be contained to the South China Sea, but will land inside of America in a most horrific manner.

But everything points to a historical progression of events. One that can no longer be ignored. It’s not if there will be a hot war, but rather how it will develop and whether or not it can be contained.

Certainly the American leadership believes that China can be “suppressed” and a war could be fought on American terms, with American rules of engagement, and on American defined battle fields. They might be right.

But I have a completely different projection.

And the earth might not survive the resulting insanity that will manifest.

If I were to take bets, I would argue that both Russia and China are working on plans to preemptively annihilate and castrate the United States before it slaughters the entire world.

But what do I know?

Be safe you all.

This is the meeting that China had with Russia immediately after the Alaskan meeting with the United States. I wonder why China was in such a rush to chat with the Russians…?

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying’s Regular Press Conference on March 22, 2021

CCTV:Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said in an interview that the Untied States and Western countries are pursuing policy of hegemony in international affairs, trying to impede the trend toward a multi-polar and democratic world, and imposing its will and requirements on others. The primary task of China and Russia is to strengthen high-level collaboration and jointly advance multipolarity and regional integration and collaboration. What’s your comment?
Hua Chunying: Foreign Minister Lavrov’s remarks are right to the point. The more unstable the world is, the more China and Russia need to advance our cooperation.
For a long period, the US and the West wantonly interfered in other country’s domestic affairs by using democracy and human rights as an excuse. Such moves created troubles in the world and even became the source of instability and war.
China and Russia always stand together in close cooperation, firmly rejects hegemony and bullying practice and have become a pillar for world peace and stability.
In the past year, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping and President Putin, China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era achieved remarkable outcomes. In the face of once-in-a-century pandemic and changes, China and Russia stand in solidarity to fight the virus together, and advance cooperation in such areas as economy, trade and scientific innovation despite challenges.
The two sides firmly support each other on issues concerning each other’s core interests and jointly uphold international fairness and justice. It is fair to say that China-Russia relations withstood the test and emerged stronger with our friendship becoming even closer.
We believe Foreign Minister Lavrov’s on-going visit will further cement the sound momentum of the high-level bilateral relations and bring the two countries closer in the strategic collaboration on international affairs.
China is ready to work with Russia to follow through on the consensus of the two heads of state, and take the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Good-neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation as an opportunity to carry forward the spirit of the treaty and advance China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era at greater scope, in wider areas and at deeper levels.
The two sides will join hands in building a model of international relations featuring strategic trust, mutually beneficial cooperation, close people-to-people ties, fairness and justice. Together, the two sides can make greater contribution to upholding world peace and stability.

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Forever War by Joe Haldeman (Full Text)

Everyone, I think that you are all going to enjoy this. It took me a while to find this classic work of 1970’s science fiction. It is a science fiction novel much like “Starship Troopers” only much better. I tried to clean up the scanning, and OCR, but there’s still errors here and ther. Never the less, it’s a great read, and it should enable you to get your minds off of… well, what ever your minds are on right now. Enjoy.

Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The Forever War in the seventies, and his novel soon became a classic of the so-called “military science fiction” genre, in keeping with (and way better than) Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The book tells the story of an intergalactic war with an alien race, that spans well over a millennium, as seen from Private Mandella.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow inc to clarify things here.

The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.

It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won “Best Novel” awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. “Pretty good book,” was the usual reaction, “but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam”. ‘Seventy-Five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s okay. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War

At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations”, as they say in Hollywood.

The paperback of that version stayed in print for about~ sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version, which now appears in Britain for the first time. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.

But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.

Joe Haldeman

Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

THE

FOREVER WAR

PRIVATE MANDELLA

“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

I already knew eighty ways to. kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.

After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.

“Sir”-we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation- “most of those methods, really, they looked. . . kind of silly.”

“For instance?”

“Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actualiy have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”

“He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.

“Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!” He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome.

“But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit  because  you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.”

She sat back down, not looking too convinced. “Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.

“OK. Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and be looked at us expectantly. “Fuck you, sir,” came the familiar tired chorus.

“Louder!”

“FUCK YOU, SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

“That’s better. Don’t forget. pie-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.”

I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago.

~ They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.

Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training.

I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.

I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

“You’re late, Mandella,” a voice yawned. It was Rogers. “Sorry I woke you up,” I whispered.

”saliright.” She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.

I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “Night, Rogers.” “G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture more pointedly.

Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

2

“Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up-move your ass up!”

A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.

“Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

“Goddammit, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.

“Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers-epoxy team! Dog’em! Dog’em!”

Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.”

“Me, too,” the girl said with more feeling than logic.

“One-two–heave!” We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.

We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.

We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougeistein, but we called him “Awright”) blew a whistle and bellowed, “Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke’em if you got ’em.” He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.

Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.

“Were you in school when you got drafted?” she asked.

“Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.” She nodded soberly. “I was in biology . . .”

“Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”

“Six years, bachelor’s and technicaL” She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. “Why the fuck did this have to happen?”

I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tairan menace. Soyashit It was all just a big experiment See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground

Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.

There really wasn’t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half- logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow- cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the tune-since collapsars don’t shine-and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.

Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same “line” (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way- until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars.. . exactly zero.

It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomaihaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalbaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.

The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.

That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since “Aldebaranian” is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy “Tauran.”

Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the

 

Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most cutely conscripted army in the history of warfare.

So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging cutely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

3

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.

The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top  speed, as we  roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one- twentieth of the speed of light-not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.

Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal.. . it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air.

I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-digested

“Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor (Soya).”

We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn’t much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn’t have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.

Inside, the walls were the same drab color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.

“Jeff-feeling better?” He still looked a little pale.

“If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast iron glottis.” He sighed heavily. “A little better. Dying for a smoke.”

 

“You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn’t you?”

 

“Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah. Three weeks in Earth orbit.” I sat back and reached for my weed box for the thousandth time. It still wasn’t there. The Life Support Unit didn’t want to handle nicotine and mc.

“Training was bad enough,” Jeff groused, “but this shit-”

“Tench-hut!” We stood up in a raggedy-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out beforelwasborn.Hedidn’tlookthatold.

“Sit, sit.” He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company, a small smile on his face. “Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land, the temperature outside is a summery eight point one fIve degrees Absolute. We expect little thange for the next two centuries or so.” Some of them laughed haltbeartedly.

Joe Haldeman 12

“Best you enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base; enjoy it while you can. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature stays a chilly two point zero eight.

“You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the moon as just an elementary exercise, designed to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should; weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.”

He studied the clipboard in his hand. “Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths on Earth, one psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

“But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you, half, graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth-including me-is after a combat tour.

“You will complete your training in one month. From here you go to Stargate collapsar, half a light year away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate 1, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.

“When you leave Stargate, you will go to some strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, you will maintain the base until further orders.

“The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing exactly that kind of a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.”

They had spent all that money on us just to kill us in training? ‘[HE FOREVER WAR

13

“All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age. Butlthinkwecankeepupwithyou. Twoofuswill be with you at all times and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain

Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Corte~ your first sergeant. Gentlemen?”

Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold: face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.

Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen. Still, if you didn’t look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could have posed as the “after” advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn smooth.

“Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again:

“Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, just some leftover equipment from the expedition of 1991. A working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you’ll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them and follow their example; all of them have survived here much longer than you’ll have to. Captain?” The captain stood up as the major went out the door.

“Tench-hut!” The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet. “Now I’m only gonna say this once so you better listen,” he growled. “We are in a

combat situation here, and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience or insubordination.” He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. “This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol, caliber .45, and it is a primitive but effective weapon. The Sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline. Don’t make us do it because we will. We will.” He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.

“Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1987.

“Keep in mind what I’ve said while the First Sergeant instructs you mote specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant” He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The expression on his face hadn’t changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.

The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, “At ease, siddown,” in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.

“Now the captain talks scaly and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.”

He touched the flat part of his head. “And speaking of brains, I still have Just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act So I suspect all of you are smart and tough-but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.”

He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. “Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying; Charon’ll save us the trouble.

“Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference… . But once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.

“Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.”

4

“Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.” The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him “sir,” since he was a lieutenant.

“But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?”

Coitez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.

“Camouflage, Sergeant.” The green faded to white, then dirty gray. “This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,” said Cortez, as if from a deep well. “But there are several other combinations available.” The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: “Jungle.” Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: “Desert.” Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black:

“Night or space.”

“Very good, Sergeant To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your trainin& The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.

“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.

“Case in point.” He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot- especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures-as they bleed off the body’s heat.

“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of

frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’ and fracture it… and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.

“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

“I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?” He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. “He’s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds’ gives ten; four pounds’, twenty-three; five pounds’, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you’d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It’d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You’d die no matter which won.

“The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you’re really skilled, don’t try to run, or jump. You’re likely to trip, and that means you’re likely to die.”

“Charon’ s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it’s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it’d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It’s a slow way to travel.

“Tomorrow morning, we’ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That’s all, Sergeant.”

Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclainped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock; then he stepped out and sealed the outside door.

It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.

“First I want Private Omar Ahnizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I’ll call you over the squawker.”

“Alphabetical order, sir?”

“Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.”

That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about get- ting sacked.

5

The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.

“This is considerably more light than you’ll have on a portal planet.” Captain Stott’s voice crackled in our collective ear. “Be glad that you’ll be able to watch your step.”

We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked oxya~ri.

The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.

“Today we’re only going to walk around the company area, and nobody will leave the company area.” The captain wasn’t wearing his .45-unless he carried it as a good luck charm, under his suit-but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.

Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed  the captain over smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.

“Now everybody pay close attention. I’m going out to that blue slab of ice”-it was a big one, about twenty meters away-‘ ‘and show you something that you’d better know if you want to stay alive.”

He walked out in a dozen confident steps. “First I have to heat up a rock-filters down.” I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.

“It doesn’t take long for these to cool down.” He stopped and picked up a piece. “This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees. Watch.” He tossed the “warm” rock onto the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side. He tossed another one, and it did the same.

“As you know, you are not quite pe,fecrly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.

“The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice-a little puddle of liquid hydrogen-and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can’t stand up without any friction under your boots.

“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough. Watch.”

The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.

“The idea is to keep your exhaust tins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”

After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock~ we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.

“William?” She had MCCOY stenciled above her faceplate. “Hi, Sean. Anything special?”

“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”

That’s right; I’d forgotten. There wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no. . . no, I haven’t asked anybody. Sure, if you want to. . . .”

“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.

Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit- ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold-the air, the floor and especially the suits-and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.

I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.

“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.

“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as MiSSOUrI was.”

“Ung.. . wish they’d, get some, fucken, h~ai in, this place.” It always affects the small women more than any-body else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.

“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”

“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.” I was glad she wasn’t. 6

We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.

With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and

shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.

The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.

The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.

Just about  everybody had  blown a double hole; everybody  but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about foily power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.

23

joe narneman

“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast

“Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”

“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath. “Ice or rock?”

“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant The greenish stuff.”

“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.” “God dam it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”

“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d Just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.”

“Okay, one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.

“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”

“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.

“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”

“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb.  We listened to her reathing for a few minutes.

“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound, the bomb sliding ~Iown. “Slow and easy now. You’ve got five minutes.”

“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regLilar. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go- “Shit” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.

“What’s wrong, private?” “Oh, shit.” Silence. “Shit!”

“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”

“I. . . shit, I’m stuck. Fucken rockslide. . . shit. . . . DO SOMETHiNG! I can’t move, shit I can’t move I, I-”

“Shut up! How deep?”

“Can’t move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME-”

“Then goddainmit use your arms-push! You can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.

She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.

“I’m free.” Two minutes.

“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was fiat, emotionless. At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim. “Run, girl. . . . You better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again- It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All tight, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.

That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it..

I sacked with Rogers-everybody sacked with a good friend-but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.

7

“Fire team A-move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.

I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack-the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.

“Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over.”

We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said, “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.

Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men find women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.

“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-klick downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a salvo of three.

Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.

Three magnesi urn-bright flashes blinked simultaneously about thirty meters Short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to he good with that thing.”

“Damn it, Potter-it only throws half a klick. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”

“Sure you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.

“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”

“Potter here-no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”

“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay, start.” Soft click: “A team, follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her, and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while A team laid down a cover for us.

All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, SO I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had  B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser. They must have lost their grenadier.

“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”

“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.

We angled to the right and lay down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to hug the ground.

“Freeman, this is Potter.”

“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get-”

“Roger, Smithy.” Click. “Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.” Joe tialdeman

I peeked out over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees, three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters; then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.

I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine- When the laser hit my image converter, there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.

Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off, and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin (and it ached where the image converter had shone on it) and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine.

“You okay, Mandella?” Potter’s voice.

“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”

“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back-it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate-but after we’d cycled through the airlock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.

“Nice shooting, Mandella.” “Huh?”

“Didn’t you see? Of course not.. . . The last salvo before you got hit-four direct hits. The bunker decided it was

knocked out, and all we bad todo was walk the rest of the way.”

“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes, and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.

“You should see yourself. You look like-”

“All personnel, report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news, usually.

She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.” The

assembly area-chop hail was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door, I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, only four. We hadn’t lost anybody during today’s maneuvers.

The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bulishit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.

Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did fairly well today. Nobody killed, and I expected some to be. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.

“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.

“But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way, and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three Jays. Each person who was a casualty in this baffle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each Jay.”

We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially  on the  faces  that had  singed eyebrows  and  a pink  rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.

“Mandella.” “Sir?”

“You are far and away the worst-burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”

Oh, shit. “No, sir. Log two.”

~su

Joe Ilaftieman

“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercises?” “Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”

“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?” “Sir, I. . . I don’t remember.”

“You don’t Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right Dismissed.”

I selected the meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.

“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”

“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.

“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”

“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff.. . .”

“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Macjima.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day . .

“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”

“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “Okay.”

Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her though. I’d like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.

8

The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahiquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.

Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.

Now darkside. A flyer brought us over in groups of twenty and set us down beside a pile of building materials thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium H.

We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.

I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire  didn’t  drop  the  helium  level appreciably. It didn’t  boil, either;

helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.

We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.

The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The

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Joe Haldeman

uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.

It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing ap, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in ~ny of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.

We couldn’t build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium 11-so the first thing to do was to build an tnsulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.

I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site- two people can carry one easily-when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.

“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way. “Sony, Corporal. I’m bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.,’

“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.

I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.

“Singer! After you set the plank, I want to see you.”

“OK.” He labored through the task and mooched over. “Let me check your readout.” I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.

“You sick or something?”

“Hell, Mandella, I feel OK, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy.”

I chinned the medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Man-della. You wanna come over here for a minute?”

“Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside. “What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.

irir. r’.iiir.vr.n witn

He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella… he’s just hot.”

“Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.

“Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”

I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.

“Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”

“Well, put it down and get on over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.

“Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.

“What’s wrong?” Singer asked.

“You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”

“Sure, Corporal-that’s it. It must not be working right.”

“I don’t think it’s working at all,” said Doc. Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.

Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”

“What? Can’t you fix the goddamn thing?”

“Maybe.. . maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way-”

“Hey! Sanchez?” Singer was talking on the general freak. “Find out what’s wrong?” He was panting.

Click. “Keep your pants on, man, we’re working on it.” Click. “He won’t last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can’t work on the heat exchanger from outside of the suit.”

“You’ve got a spare suit, haven’t you?” 34

Joe Haldeman

“Two of ’em, the fit-anybody kind. But there’s no place …say…”

“Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.” I chinned the general freak. “Listen, Singer, we’ve gona get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare suit, but to make the switch, we’re gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Look, we’ll make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.”

“Soun’s pretty compis. . . compil. . . cated t’me.” “Look, just come along-”

“I’ll be all right, man, jus’ lemme res’. . .

I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us, we kept him from falling over.

“Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.” Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.

“Go away, Mandella, I’m, busy.”

“You’re going to be busier.” I outlined the problem to her. While her  group hurried to adapt the LSU-for this purpose, it need only be an air hose and heater-I got my crew to bring around six slabs of permaplast, so we could build a big box around Singer and the extra suit. It would look like a huge coffin, a meter square and six meters long.

We set the suit down on the slab that would be the floor of the coffin. “OK, Singer, let’s go.”

No answer. “Singer, let’s go.”

No answer.

“Singer!” He was just standing there. Doc Jones checked his readout. “He’s out, man, unconscious.”

My mind raced. There might just be room for another person in the box. “Give me a hand here.” I took Singer’s shoulders and Doc took his feet, and we carefully laid him out at the feet of the empty suit.

Then I lay down myself, above the suit. “OK, close’er up.,,

THE FOREVER WAR 35

“Look, Mandella, if anybody goes in there, it oughta be me.”

“Fuck you, Doc. My job. My man.” That sounded all wrong. William Mandella, boy hero.

They stood a slab up on edge-it had two openings for the LSU input and exhaust- and proceeded to weld it to the bottom plank with a narrow laser beam. On Earth, we’d just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.

After about ten minutes we were completely walled up. I could feel the LSU humming. I switched on my suit light-the first time since we landed on darkside-and the glare made purple blotches dance in front of my eyes.

“Mandella, this is Ho. Stay  in your suit at least two or three minutes. We’re putting hot air in, but it’s coming back just this side of liquid.” I watched the purple fade for a while.

“OK, it’s still cold, but you can make it.” I popped my suit. It wouldn’t open all the way, but I didn’t have too much trouble getting out. The suit was still cold enough to take some skin off my fingers and butt as I wiggled out.

I had to crawl feet-first down the coffin to get to Singer. It got darker fast, moving away from my light. When I popped his suit a rush of hot stink hit me in the face. In the dim light his skin was dark red and splotchy. His breathing was very shallow and I could see his heart palpitating.

First I unhooked the relief tubes-an unpleasant business-then the biosensors; and then I had the problem of getting his arms out of their sleeves.

It’s pretty easy to do for yourself. You twist this way and turn that way and the arm pops out. Doing it from the outside is a different matter: I had to twist his arm and then reach under and move the suit’s arm to match-it takes muscle to move a suit around from the outside.

Once I had one arm out it was pretty easy; I just crawled forward, putting my feet on the suit’s shoulders, and pulled on his free ann. He slid out of the suit like an oyster slipping out of its shell.

I popped the spare suit and after a lot of pulling and 36

Joe Haldeman

pushing, managed to get his legs in. Hooked up the biosensors and the front relief tube. He’d have to do the other one himself; it’s too complicated. For the nth time I was glad not to have been born female; they have to have two of those damned plumber’s friends, instead of just one and a simple hose.

I left his arms out of the sleeves. The suit would be useless for any kind of work, anyhow; waldos have to be tailored to the individual.

His eyelids fluttered. “Man. . . della. Where. . . the fuck..

I explained, slowly, and he seemed to get most of it. “Now I’m gonna close you up and go get into my suit. I’ll have the crew cut the epd off this thing and I’ll haul you out. Got it?”

He nodded. Strange to see that-when you nod or shrug inside a suit, it doesn’t communicate anything.

I crawled into my suit, hooked up the attachments and chinned the general freak. “Doc, I think he’s gonna be OK. Get us out of here now.”

“Will do.” Ho’s voice. The LSU hum was replaced by a chatter, then a throb. Evacuating the box to prevent an explosion.

One corner of the seam grew red, then white, and a bright crimson beam lanced through, not a foot away from my head. I scrunched back as far as I could. The beam slid up the seam and around three corners, back to where it started.

The end of the box fell away slowly, trailing filaments of melted ‘plast.

“Walt for the stuff to harden, Mandella.” “Sanchez, I’m not that stupid.”

“Here you go.” Somebody tossed a line to me. That would be smarter than dragging him out by myself. I threaded a long bight under his arms and tied it behind his neck. Then I scrambled out to help them pull, which was silly-they had a dozen people already lined up to haul.

Singer got out all right and was actually sitting up while Doc Jones checked his readout. People were asking me

THE FOREVER WAR         37

 

about it and congratulating me, when suddenly Ho said “Look!” and pointed toward the horizon.

It was a black ship, coming in fast. I just had time to think it wasn’t fair, they weren’t supposed to attack until the last few days, and then the ship was right on top of us.

9

We all flopped to the ground instinctively, but the ship didn’t attack. It blasted braking rockets and dropped to land on skids. Then it skied around to come to a iest beside the building site.

Everybody had it figured out and was standing around sheepishly when the two suited figures stepped out of the ship.

A familiar voice crackled over the general freak. “Every one of you saw us coming in and not one of you responded with laser fire. It wouldn’t have done any good but it would have indicated a certain amount of fighting spirit. You have a week or less before the real thing and since the sergeant and I will be here I will insist that you show a little more will to live. Acting Sergeant Potter.”

“Here, sir.”

“Get me a detail of twelve people to unload cargo. We brought a hundred small robot drones for target practice so that you might have at least a fighting chance when a live target comes over.

“Move now. We only have thiity minutes before the ship returns to Miami.” I checked, and it was actually more like forty minutes.

Having the captain and sergeant there didn’t really make much difference. We were still on our own; they were just observing.

Once we got the floor down, it only took one day to complete the bunker. It was a gray oblong, featureless except for the airlock blister and four windows. On top was a

swivel-mounted gigawatt laser. The operator-you couldn’t call him a “gunner”-sat in a chair holding deadman switches in both hands. The laser wouldn’t fire as long as he was holding one of those switches. If he let go, it would automatically aim for any moving aerial object and

38

fire at will. Primary detection and aiming was by means of a kilometer-high antenna mounted beside the bunker.

It was the only arrangement that could really be expected to work, with the horizon so close and human reflexes  so slow. You couldn’t have the thing fully automatic, because in theory, friendly ships might also approach.

The aiming computer could choose among up to twelve targets appearing simultaneously (firing at the largest ones first). And it would get all twelve in the space of half a

second.

The installation was partly protected from enemy fire by an efficient ablative layer that covered everything except the human operator. But then, they were dead-man switches. One man above guarding eighty inside. The army’s good at that kind of arithmetic.

Once the bunker was finished, half of us stayed inside at all times-feeling very much like targets-taking turns operating the laser, while the other half went on maneuvers.

About four klicks from the base was a large “lake” of frozen hydrogen; one of our most important maneuvers was to learn how to get around on the treacherous stuff.

It wasn’t too difficult You couldn’t stand up on it, so you had to belly down and sled.

If you had somebody to push you from the edge, getting started was no problem. Otherwise, you had to scrabble with your hands and feet, pushing down as hard as was practical, until you started moving, in a series of little jumps. Once started, you’d keep going until you ran out of ice. You could steer a little bit by digging in, hand and foot, on the appropriate side, but you couldn’t slow to a stop that way. So it was a good idea not to go too fast and wind up positioned in such a way that your helmet didn’t absorb the shock of stopping.

We went through all the things we’d done on the Miami side: weapons practice, demolition, attack patterns. We also launched drones at irregular intervals, toward the bunker. Thus, ten or fifteen times a day, the operators got to demonstrate their skill in letting go of the handles as soon as the proximity light went on.

I had four hours of that, like everybody else. I was ner Joe tialneman

vous until the first “attack,” when I saw how little there was to it. The light went on, I let go, the gun aimed, and when the drone peeped over the horizon-zzt! Nice touch of color, the molten metal spraying through space. Otherwise not too exciting.

So none of us were worried about the upcoming “graduation exercise,” thinking it would be just more of the same.

Miami Base attacked on the thirteenth day with two Simultaneous missiles streaking over opposite sides of the horizon at some forty kilometers per second. The laser vaporized the first one with no trouble, but the second got within eight klicks of the bunker before it was hit.

We were coming back from maneuvers, about a klick away from the bunker. I wouldn’t have seen it happen if I hadn’t been looking directly at the bunker the moment of the attack.

The second missile sent a shower of molten debris straight toward the bunker. Eleven pieces hit, and, as we later reconstructed it, this is what happened:

The first casualty was Macjima. so well-loved Macjima, inside the bunker, who was hit in the back and the head and died instantly. With the drop in pressure, the LSU went into high gear. Friedman was standing in front of the main airco outlet and was blown into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him unconscious; he died of decompression before the others could get him to his suit.

Everybody else managed to stagger through the gale and get into their suits, but Garcia’s suit had been holed and didn’t do him any good.

By the time we got there, they had turned off the LSU and were welding up the holes in the wall. One man was trying to scrape up the unrecognizable mess that had been Macjima. I could hear him sobbing  and retching. They had already taken Garcia and Friedman outside for burial. The captain took over the repair detail from Potter. Sergeant Cortez led the sobbing man over to a corner and came back to work on cleaning up Macjima’s  remains, alone. He didn’t order anybody to help  and nobody volunteered.

10

As a graduation exercise, we were unceremoniously stuffed

into a ship-Earth’s Hope, the same one we rode to Charon-and bundled off to Stargate at a little more than one gee.

The trip seemed endless, about six months subjective time, and boring, but not as hard on the carcass as going to Charon had been. Captain Stott made us review our training orally, day by day, and we did exercises every day until we were worn to a collective frazzle.

Stargate 1 was like Charon’s darkside, only more so. The base on Stargate 1 was smaller than Miami Base-only a little bigger than the one we constructed on darkside-and we were due to lay over a week to help expand the facilities. The crew there was very glad to see us, especially the two females, who looked a little worn around the edges.

We all crowded into the small dining hail, where Sub-major Williamson, the man in charge of Stargate 1, gave us some disconcerting news:

“Everybody get comfortable. Get off the tables, though, there’s plenty of floor.

“I have some idea of what you just went through, training on Charon. I won’t say it’s all been wasted. But where you’re headed, things will be quite different. Warmer.”

He paused to let that soak in.

“Aleph Aurigae, the first collapsar ever detected, revolves around the normal star Epsilon Aurigae in a twenty-seven year orbit. The enemy has a base of operations, not on a regular portal planet of Aleph, but on a planet in orbit around Epsilon. We don’t know much about the planet, just that it goes around Epsilon once every 745 days, is about three-fourths the size of Earth, and has an albedo of 0.8, meaning it’s probably covered with clouds. We can’t say precisely how hot it will be, but judging from its distance

41

42

from Epsilon, it’s probably rather hotter than Earth. Of course, we don’t know whether you’ll be working. . . fighting on lightside or darkside, equator or poles. It’s highly unlikely that the atmosphere will be breathable-at any rate, you’ll stay inside your suits.

“Now you know exactly as much about where you’re going as I do. Questions?” “Sir,” Stein drawled, “now we know where we’re goin’

anybody know what we’re goin’ to do when we get there?”

Williamson shrugged. “That’s up to your captain-and your sergeant, and the captain of Earth’s Hope, and Hope’s logistic computer~ We just don’t have enough data yet to project a course of action for you. It may be a long and bloody battle; it may be just a case of walking in to pick up the pieces. Conceivably, the Taurans might want to make a peace offer,’ ‘-Cortez snorted-“in which case you would simply be part of our muscle, our bargaining power.” He looked at Cortez mildly. “No one can say for sure.”

The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hail; they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.

The eighteen men acted as if they were compelled to try as many permutations as possible, and their performance was impressive (in a strictly quantitative sense, that is). Those of us who were keeping count led a cheering section for some of the more gifted members. I think that’s the right word.

The next morning-and every other morning we were on Stargate 1-we staggered out of bed and into our suits, to go outside and work on the “new wing.” Eventually, Stargate would be tactical and logistic headquarters for the war, with thousands of permanent personnel, guarded by half-a-dozen heavy cruisers in Hope’s class. When we

started, it was two shacks and twenty people; when we left, it was four shacks and twenty people. The work was hardly work at all, compared to darkside, since we had plenty of light and got sixteen hours inside for every eight hours’

work. And no drone attack for a final exam.

When we shuttled back up to the Hope, nobody was too happy about leaving (though some of the more popular females declared it’d be good to get some rest). Stargate was the last easy, safe assignment we’d have before taking up arms against the Taurans. And as Williamson had pointed out the first day, there was no way of predicting what that would be like.

Most of us didn’t feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We’d been assured that we wouldn’t even feel it happen, just free fall all the way.

I wasn’t convinced. As a physics student, I’d had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time- Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school-but the mathematical model seemed clear enough.

The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there. . . the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.
At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.

But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1,

44       Joe tialdeman

 

made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.

Then a bell rang and we sank into our cushions under a steady two gravities of deceleration. We were in enemy territory.

11

We’d been decelerating at two gravities for almost nine days when the battle began. Lying on our couches being miserable, all we felt were two soft bumps, missiles being released. Some eight hours later, the squawkbox crackled:

“Attention, all crew. This is the captain.” Quinsana, the pilot, was only a lieutenant, but was allowed to call himself captain aboard the vessel, where he outranked all of us, even Captain Stott. “You grunts in the cargo hold can listen, too.

“We just engaged the enemy with two fifty-gigaton tachyon missiles and have destroyed both the enemy vessel and another object which it had launched approximately three microseconds before.

“The enemy has been trying to overtake us for the past 179 hours, ship time. At the time of the engagement, the enemy was moving at a little over half the speed of light, relative to Aleph, and was only about thirty AU’s from Earth’s Hope. It was moving at .47c relative to us, and thus we would have been coincident in space- time”- rammed!-‘ ‘in a little more than nine hours. The missiles were launched at 0719 ship’s time, and destroyed the enemy at 1540, both tachyon bombs detonating within a thousand klicks of the enemy objects.”

The two missiles were a type whose propulsion system was itself only a barely- controlled tachyon bomb. They accelerated at a constant rate of 100 gees, and were traveling at a relativistic speed by the time the nearby mass of the enemy ship detonated them.

“We expect no further interference from enemy vessels. Our velocity with respect to Aleph will be zero in another five hours; we will then begin the journey back. The return will take twenty-seven days.” General moans and dejected cussing. Everybody knew all that already, of course; but we didn’t care to be reminded of it.

 

So after another month of logy calisthenics and drill, at a constant two gravities, we got our first look at the planet we were going to attack. Invaders from outer space, yes sir.

It was a blinding white crescent waiting for us two AU’s out from Epsilon. The captain had pinned down the location of the enemy base from fifty AU’s out, and we had jockeyed in on a wide arc, keeping the bulk of the planet between them and us. That didn’t mean we were sneaking up on them-quite the contrary; they launched

three abortive attacks-but it put us in a stronger defensive position. Until we had to go to the surface, that is. Then  only  the ship  and its  Star Fleet crew would be reasonably safe.

Since the planet rotated rather slowly-once every ten and one-half days-a “stationary” orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second’s time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship’s battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.

Our vague orders were to attack the base and gain control, while damaging a minimum of enemy equipment. We were to take at least one enemy alive. We were under no ~ircumstances to allow ourselves to be taken alive, however. And the decision wasn’t up to us; one special pulse from the battle computer, and that speck of plutonium in your power plant would fiss with all of .01% efficiency, md you’d be nothing but a rapidly expanding, very hot plasma.

They strapped us into six scoutships-one platoon of twelve people in each-and we blasted away from Earth’s Fiope at eight gees. Each scoutship was supposed to follow its own carefully random path to our rendezvous point, 108 klicks from the base. Fourteen drone ships were launched it the same time, to confound the enemy’s anti-spacecraft ;ystem.

The landing went off almost perfectly. One ship suffered THE FOREVER WAR

47

minor damage, a near miss boiling away some of the ablative material on one side of the hull, but it’d still be able to make it and return, keeping its speed down while in the atmosphere.

We zigged and zagged and wound up first ship at the rendezvous point. There was only one trouble. It was under four kilometers of water.

I could almost hear that machine, 90,000 miles away, grinding its mental gears, adding this new bit of data. We proceeded just as if we were landing on solid ground: braking rockets, falling, skids out, hit the water, skip, hit the water, skip, hit the water, sink.

It would have made sense to go ahead and land on the bottom-we were streamlined, after all, and water just another fluid-but the hull wasn’t strong enough to hold up a four kilometer column of water. Sergeant Cortez was in the scoutship with us.

“Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get-”

“Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.” “Lord” was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.

There was a loud bubbly sigh, then another, and a slight increase in pressure on my back that meant the ship was rising. “Flotation bags?” Cortez didn’t deign to answer, or didn’t know.

That was it. We rose to within ten or fifteen meters of the surface and stopped, suspended there. Through the port I could see the surface above, shimmering like a mirror of hammered silver. I wondered what it would be like to be a fish and have a definite roof over your world.

I watched another ship splash in. It made a great cloud of bubbles and turbulence, then fell-slightly tail-first-for a short distance before large bags popped out under each delta wing. Then it bobbed up to about our level and stayed.

“This is Captain Stott. Now listen carefully. There is a beach some twenty-eight klicks from your present position, in the direction of the enemy. You will be proceeding to this beach by scoutship and from there will mount your assault on the Tauran position.” That was some improvement; we’d only have to walk eighty klicks.

48

Joe Haldeman

We deflated the bags, blasted to the surface and flew in a slow, spread-out formation to the beach. It took several minutes. As the ship scraped to a halt, I could hear pumps humming, making the cabin pressure equal to the air pressure outside. Before it had quite stopped moving, the escape slot beside my couch slid open. I rolled out onto the wing of the craft and jumped to the ground. Ten seconds to find cover-I sprinted across loose gravel to the “treeline,” a twisty bramble of tall sparse bluish-green shrubs. I dove into the briar patch and turned to watch the ships leave. The drones that were left rose slowly to about a hundred meters, then took off in all directions with a bone-jarring roar. The real scoutships slid slowly back into the water. Maybe that was a good idea.

It wasn’t a terribly attractive world but certainly would be easier to get around in than the cryogenic nightmare we were trained for. The sky was a uniform dull silver brightness that merged with the mist over the ocean so completely it was impossible to tell where water ended and air began. Small wavelets licked at the black gravel shore, much too slow and graceful in the three-quarters Earth-normal gravity. Even from fifty meters away, the rattle of billions of pebbles rolling with the tide was loud in my ears.

The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth’s. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both…?

“This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.” He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air.

They wouldn’t offer much in the way of cover.

“We’ll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right.

mr.. rultLvLiI wi~n LW

Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?” Sure, we could do that “arrowhead” maneuver in our sleep. “OK, let’s move out.”

I was in Platoon Seven, the “command group.” Captain Stott put me there not because I was expected to give any commands, but because of my training in physics.

The command group was supposedly the safest pl~e, buffered by six platoons: people were assigned to it because there was some tactical reason for them to survive at least a little longer than the rest. Cortez was there to give orders.

Chavez was there to correct suit malfunctions. The senior medic, Doe Wilson (the only medic who actually had an M.D.), was there, and so was Theodopolis, the radio engineer, our link with the captain, who had elected to stay in orbit.

The rest of us were assigned to the command group by dint of special training or aptitude that wouldn’t normally be considered of a “tactical” nature. Facing a totally unknown enemy, there was no way of telling what might prove important. Thus I was there because I was the closest the company had to a physicist. Rogers was biology. Tate was chemistry. Ho could crank out a perfect score on the Rhine extrasensory perception test, every time. Bohrs was a polyglot, able to speak twenty- one languages fluently, idiomatically. Petrov’s talent was that he had tested out to have not one molecule of xenophobia in his psyche. Keating was a skilled acrobat. Debby Hoffister-“Lucky” Ho!lister-showed a remarkable aptitude for making money, and also had a consistently high Rhine potential.

12

 

When we first set out, we were using the “jungle” camouflage combination on our suits. But what passed for jungle in these anemic tropics was too sparse; we looked like

a band of conspicuous harlequins trooping through the

woods. Cortez had us switch to black, but that was just as bad, as the light of Epsilon came evenly from all parts of

the sky, and there were no shadows except ours. We finally settled on the dun- colored desert camouflage.

The nature of the countryside changed slowly as we walked north, away from the sea. The thorned stalks-I guess you could call them trees-came in fewer numbers but were bigger around and less brittle; at the base of each was a tangled mass of vine with the same bluegreen color, which spread out in a flattened cone some ten meters in diameter. There was a delicate green flower the size of a man’s head near the top of each tree.

Grass began to grow some five klicks from the sea. It seemed to respect the trees’ “property rights,” leaving a strip of bare earth around each cone of vine. At the edge of such a clearing, it would grow as timid bluegreen stubble, then, moving away from the tree, would get thicker and taller until it reached shoulderhigh in some places, where the separation between two trees was unusually large. The grass was a lighter, greener shade than the trees and vines. We changed the color of our suits to the bright green we had used for maximum visibility on Charon.

Keeping to the thickest part of the grass, we were fairly inconspicuous.

We covered over twenty klicks each day, buoyant after months under two gees. Until the second day, the only form of animal life we saw was a kind of black worm, fingersized, with hundreds of cilium legs like the bristles of a brush. Rogers said that there obviously had to be some

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THE FOREVER WAR 51

larger creature around, or there would be no reason for the trees to have thorns. So we were doubly  on guard, expecting trouble both from the Taurans  and the unidentified “large creature.”

Potter’s second platoon was on point; the general freak was reserved for her, since her platoon would likely be the first to spot any trouble.

“Sarge, this is Potter,” we all heard. “Movement ahead.” “Get down, then!”

“We are. Don’t think they see us.”

“First platoon, go up to the right of point. Keep down. Fourth, get up to the left. Tell me when you get in position. Sixth platoon, stay back and guard the rear. Fifth and third, close with the command group.”

Two dozen people whispered out of the grass to join us. Cortez must have heard from the fourth platoon.

“Good. How about you, first?. . . OK, fine. How many are there?” “Eight we can see.” Potter’s voice.

“Good. When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.” “Sarge,.. . they’re just animals.”

“Potter-if you’ve known all this time what a Tauran looks like, you should’ve told us. Shoot to kill.”

“But we need . . .”

“We need a prisoner, but we don’t need to escort him forty klicks to his home base and keep an eye on him while we fight. Clear?”

“Yes. Sergeant.”

“OK. Seventh, all you brains and weirds, we’re going up and watch. Fifth and third, come along to guard.”

We crawled through the meter-high grass to where the second platoon had stretched out in a firing line.

“I don’t see anything,” Cortez said. “Ahead and just to the left. Dark green.”

They were only a shade darker than the grass. But after you saw the first one, you could see them all, moving slowly around some thirty meters ahead.

“Fire!” Cortez tired tirst; then twelve streaks of crimson leaped out and the grass wilted black, disappeared, and the

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creatures convulsed and died trying to scatter.

“Hold fire, hold it!” Cortez stood up. “We want to have something left-second platoon, follow me.” He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage

I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality. . . that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want- “OK, seventh, come on up.” While we were walking

toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature’s middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.

They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur- white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity. . . . Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.

“Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?”

Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. “One way we might be

able to find out.” Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.

“Here.” She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.

“So?”

“It’s grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.” She tossed it away. “They’re animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.”

II1L I’URLVLD. WJiR

“I don’t know,” Doc Wilson said. “Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass. .

“Well, let’s check out the brain.” She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. “Look at that.”

It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. “What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or. . .” She stood up.

“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”

“If I could shrug, I’d shrug,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t prove anything-a brain doesn’t have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn’t have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn’t bone, maybe that’s the brain, some crystal lattice. .

“Yeah, but the fucken stomach’s in the right place, and if those aren’t intestines I’ll eat-”

“Look,” Cortez said, “this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all-”

“They aren’t dangerous,” Rogers began. “They don’t-”

“Medic! DOC!” Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Dcc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.

“What’s wrong?” He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run. “It’s Ho. She’s out.”

Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” Cortez said. “What the hell-”

“Just a minute.” Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. “Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to-there!”

“What?”

“Four and a half minutes ago-must have been when you opened fire-Jesus!” “Well?”

“Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No. . .” He watched the ’54

Joe Haldeman

dials. “No. . . warning, no indication of anything out of the

ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances. . . nothing to. . . indicate-” He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.” “Oh flick,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”

“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”

“I. . . I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.

Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine- sensitive. The others didn’t know.

“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these. . . monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”

“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.

“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”

“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.

“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”

After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.

13

 

We stopped for the “night”-actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours-atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I bad to remind myself-we were.

Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.

Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency. “Hi, Marygay.”

“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”

“It’s over now-”

“I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the . . .”

1 put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is. . . belongs evenly to all of us,. . . but a triple portion for Cor-”

“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.” “OK, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only

touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each

trapped in our own plastic world- ”G’night, William.”

“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try

lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day- “Mandella-wake up, goddammit, your shift!”

I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what. . . but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.

For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.

Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.

“Movement!” “Movement!”

“Jesus Chri-there’s one right-”

“HOLD YOUR FIRE! F’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!” “Movement.”

“Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.

Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.

The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front Leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.

“All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. THE FOREVER WAR

57

Don’t make any quick gestures. .. . Anybody got a headache or anything?” “Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.

“They’re trying to say something. . . I can almost… no, just.. .” “All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re…

well, fimny. They’re not afraid.”

“You mean the one in front of you isn’t-”

“No, the feeling comes from all of them., they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”

“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.” “Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.” “Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”

 

“The Taurans’ve been here at least a year-maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these.. . overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back-”

“I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they-want to.”

“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be carefliL”

I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.

“OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”

I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us sur

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rounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.

We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation  forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.

Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.

14

 

Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.

The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.

We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:

“Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!”

I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass. “Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little

more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.

He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscied. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a

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nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he  was wearing absolutely  nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.

Obviously, he either didn’t see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.

“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.” Forty minutes.

Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.

But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez-the only one with a visor in his suit-when we were five klicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.

“OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.

“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the

THE FOREVER WAR 61

hell knows. . . . Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings-the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”

“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”

“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.

“After we do that. . . all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings- and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like. . . a garbage dump or something.”

“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind-seems to me we ought to. .

“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.

“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.

“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means.. . we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.

“Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned-there just isn’t one. Nothing.

“That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”

“Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”

“I wish we knew, Private.

“Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their 62

Joe Haldeman

numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though… we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.

“There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”

“Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”

“That’s right-maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.

“We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”

“Radio!”

“That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.”

“Why don’t.. . Tate here. . . why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of-”

“That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.

“We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.”

“Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.”

“I mean what I say. One only. Potter.. . you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.”

THE FOREVER WAR 63

“All right, Sergeant.” The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

 

Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.

The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.

Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base. . . and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.

On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat-we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.

“One last thing,” Cortez rasped. “Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way.. . that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.

“They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand any-

Joe Haldeman

 

body who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post- hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”

“Sergeant..

“Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.”

The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us-plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.

15

We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.

Cortez’s voice came over the general freak: “Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.”

We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.

There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.

We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.

“Less than a minute now-filters down!-when I say ‘fire,’ grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.”

There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot olf to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference;

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Joe Haldeman t~1)

it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications- “Drones!” A ship came screaming in just about tree

level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.

“FIRE!” Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.

“Filters up.” Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.

“Listen up:

 

‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!’

 

I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories:

shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then

raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein).. . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscioUs mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien hlood, secure in the Conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters.

Ikth FUIthVMt WAlt b7

I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men  who had taken  such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-Lust. . . A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.

Lucky groaned, half-whining, “Dirty. .. filthy fucken bastards.” Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.

“Watch it, goddaminit,” Cortez screamed. “Aim those fuckin things-they aren’t toys!

“Team A, move out-into the craters to cover B.”

Somebody was laughing and sobbing. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?” Strange to hear Cortez cussing.

I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.

“Fuck,” Cortez said. “Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C-into the craters with A.”

I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.

“Team A-ten meters, past team B, down in line.” Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.

It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backwards and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spreadeagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.

“Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report… check.. . check, check .. . check, check, check.. . check.

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Joe Haldeman

We have three deaders. Wouldn’t be any if you’d have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.”

They completed the maneuver without incident. “OK. Team C, rush to where B. . . hold it! Down!”

Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.

“B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B’s place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.”

Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles-still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.

Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building and widened to the size of a large door. Taurans came swarming out.

“Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right-keep’m bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.”

One Tauran died trying to run through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.

In a suit, it’s pretty awkward to run and keep your head down at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise you’ll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.

I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.

They weren’t fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubbles (obviously not designed as an anti-personnel weapon), and they didn’t retreat back into the building, either. They milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the pris

oner.

“OK, when I say ‘go,’ we’re going to flank ’em. B team will hold fire.. . Second and fourth platoons to the right, sixth and seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.

“Go!” We peeled off to the left As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.

“A team, down and fire! Don’t shoot until you’re sure of your aim-if you miss you might hit a friendly. ~And fer Chris’ sake save me one!”

It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leaps-the bubbles avoiding them-and they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around their whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.

Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream, and I looked down the line to see someone-I think it was Perry-writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers, and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white- jungle-desert-green-gray. I don’t know how long I stared- long enough for the medic

to run over and start giving aid-but when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.

My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Tauran’s protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically. Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backwards, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him. 1 hated myself for smiling.

It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of

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joe tlaiAleman

bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank~ The ground between us was slick red with Tauran blood-all God’s children got hemoglobin-and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we slashed them to gory chunks, and I almost didn’t hear Cortez:

“Hold your fire-I said HOLD iT, goddammit! Catch a couple of the bastards, they won’t hurt you.”

I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to try to tackle him around those spindly legs.

It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he popped out of my arms and kept running.

We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.

“We’ve got our prisoner,” Cortez shouted. “Kill!”

They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.

They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasn’t enough-the concussion would just send them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.

“The buildings! Get the fucken buildings!” The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans, not so much to get them as to blow

THE FOREVER WAR 71

them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.

All this time, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blasts, yet too far away for good aim.

Still, we were getting them one by one and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant’s intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.

1 picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit-when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.

‘4Catch the bastard! Catch him!” In the confusion, the Tauran had gotten free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.

There were four people on top of him, and a ring around them of about fifty people, watching the struggle.

“Spread out, dammit! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place.” We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.

Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creature. . . Even from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.

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Joe Haldeman

 

“Damn!” Co,tez was right there. “Get off that bastard.” The four men got off and Cortez used his laser In slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heart- warming sight.

“That’s all right, though, we’ll find another one-everybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.”

Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunition (it was still belching, but no bubbles), and it was empty. We scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.

The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the

“Salami,” and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had “captured” dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission, capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh well, they could have all the bits and pieces they’d ever want. That was something.

After we’d combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scoutship came in with the real exploration ciew, the scientists. Cortez said, “All right, snap out of it,” and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.

At first it was pretty grim. Alot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times.  Cortez ordered everybody to take a sed-tab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.

Because it was murder, unadorned butchery-once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we hadn’t been in any danger. The Taurans hadn’t seemed to

have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over THE FOREVER WAR

73

that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth centuly, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct. . . but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.

I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and honified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so. . . . Well, there was always brain-wipe.

A ship with a lone Tauran survivor had escaped and had gotten away clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earth’s Hope  while it dropped into Aleph’s collapsar field.

Escaped home, I guessed, wherever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.

I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.

SERG EANT MANDELLA 2007-2024 A.D.

1

 

I was scared enough.

Sub-major Stott was pacing back and forth behind the small podium in the assembly room/chop hall/gymnasium of the Anniversary. We had just made our final collapsar jump, from Tet-38 to Yod-4. We were decelerating at 11/2 gravities and our velocity relative to that collapsar was a respectable .9(k. We were being chased.

“I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship’s computer. The Tauran vessel at any rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks. Mandella!”

He was always very careful to call me “Sergeant” Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this particular briefing was either a sergeant or a corporal: squad leaders. “Yes, sit”

“You’re responsible for the psychological as well as the physical well-being of the men and women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware that there is a morale problem aboard this vessel, what have you done about it?”

“AS far as my squad is concerned, sir?” “Of course.”

“We talk it out, sir.”

“And have you arrived at any cogent conclusion?”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in this ship for fourteen-”

“Ridiculous! Every one of us has been adequately conditioned against the pressures of living in close quarters and the enlisted people have the privilege of confraternity.” That was a delicate way of putting it. “Officers must remain celibate, and yet we have no morale problem.”

if he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony. Maybe he just meant line officers, though. That would be

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Joe Haldeman

just him and Cortez. Probably 50 percent right. Cortez was awfully friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.

“Sir, perhaps it was the detoxification back at Stargate; maybe-”

“No. The therapists only worked to erase the hate conditiomng-everybody knows how I feel about that-and they may be misguided but they are skilled.

“Corporal Potter.” He always called her by her rank to remind her why she hadn’t been promoted as high as the rest of us. Too soft. “Have you ‘talked it out’ with your people, too?”

“We’ve discussed it, sir.”

The sub-major could “glare mildly” at people. He glared mildly at Marygay until she elaborated.

“I don’t believe it’s the fault of the conditioning. My

people are impatient, just tired of doing the same thing day after day.” “They’re anxious for combat, then?” No sarcasm in his voice.

“They want to get off the ship, sir.”

“They will get off the ship,” he said, allowing himself a microscopic smile. “And then they’ll probably be just as impatient to get back on.”

It went back and forth like that for a long while. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that their squad was scared: scared of the Tauran cruiser closing on us, scared of the landing on the portal planet. Sub-major Stott had a bad record of dealing with people who admitted fear.

I fingered the fresh T/Othey had given us. It looked like tills: THE FOREVER WAR

I knew most of the people from the raid on Aleph, the first face-to-face contact between humans and Taurans. The only new people in my platoon were Luthuli and Heyrovsky. In the company as a whole (excuse me, the “strike force”), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four dead-era, fourteen psychotics.

I couldn’t get over the “20 Mar 2007” at the bottom of the 1/0. I’d been in the anny ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.

After this raid, I would probably be eligible for retirement, with full pay. If I lived through the raid, and if they didn’t change the rules on us. Me a twenty-year man, and only twenty-five years old.

Stott was summing up when there was a knock on the door, a single loud rap. “Enter,” he said.

An ensign I knew vaguely walked in casually and handed Stott a slip of paper, without saying a word. He stood there while Stoit read it, slumping with just the

right  degree  of  insolence.  Technically,  Stou  was  out  of  his  chain  of  command; everybody in the navy disliked him anyhow.

Stott handed the paper back to the ensign and looked through him.

“You will alert your squads that preliminary evasive maneuvers will commence at 2010, fifty-eight minutes from now.” He hadn’t looked at his watch. “All personnel will be in acceleration shells by 2000. Tench . . . hut!”

We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, “Fuck you, sir.” Idiotic custom. Stott strode out of the room and the ensign followed, smirking.

I turned my ring to my assistant squad leader’s position and talked into it: “Tate, this is Mandella.” Everyone else in the mom was doing the same.

A tinny voice came out of the ring. “Tate here. What’s up?”

“Get ahold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.”

THE FOREVER WAR 81

“Crap. They told us it would be days.”

“I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.” “The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?”

 

“Bring me back a cup when you come, okay? Little sugar?” “Roger. Be down in about half an hour.”

“Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.

“What do you think, Marygay?”

“Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.” “Before the real thing.”

“Maybe.” She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. “Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I’ve wondered why they don’t do it.

We do, at Stargate.”

“Stargate’s a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can’t afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.”

She didn’t say anything while she filled her cup. “Maybe we’ve stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.”

I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. “No way to tell.” We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.

“Maybe Singhe knows something,” she said. “Maybe he does. But I’d have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.”

“Oh, I can get him directly. We. . .” She dimpled a little bit. “We’ve been friends.”

I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. “So that’s where you’ve been disappearing to.”

“You disapprove?” she said, looking innocent. “Well. . . damn it, no, of course not. But-but he’s an officer! A navy officer!”

82        Joe Haldeman

 

“He’s attached to us and that makes him part army.” She twisted her ring and said, “Directory.” To me: “What about you and Little Miss Harmony?”

“That’s not the same thing.” She was whispering a directory code into the ring.

“Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.” The ring bleated twice. Busy. “How was she?”

“Adequate.” I was recovering.

“Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.” “Neither am I,” I said. “If he ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break his ass.”

She looked at me across her cup. “If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break her ass.”

“It’s a deal.” We shook on it solemnly. 2

The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.

Tate was  waiting for me in  the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.

“Thanks. Find out anything?”

“Afraid not. Except the swabbies don’t seem to be scared, and it’s their show. Probably just another practice run.”

He slurped some coffee. “What the hell. It’s all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.”

“Maybe they’ll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.”

“Sure thing.” The medic came by and gave me my shot. I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad, “Let’s go. Strip down and zip up.”

The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life support package, there’s a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They’re crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.

When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution-ethylene glycol and something else-foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That’s what the shot was

83

for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said “2” (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn’t feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.

The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G’S would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer-which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.

Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.

And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.

The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.

Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.

“How’d that happen?” I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.

“That’s the second time,” she said, mad. “The first one was on my back-I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases.”

“Maybe you’ve lost weight.”

“Wise guy.” Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.

A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. “Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.”

It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.

 

The Commodore began the briefing. “There’s not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.

“Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.

“After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.” Collective gasp.

“Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.

“We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probable future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.”

That was practically next door. “The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than  ones  we  have observed  in  the  past, so  at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.

“This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.” He pointed at Negulesco. “How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?”

“That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,” she answered dutifully. “To me, it’s been about eight months.”

“Exactly. You’ve lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven’t done any important research and development aboard ship.. . that enemy vessel comes from our future!” He paused to let that sink in.

“As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don’t have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.

“For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.

“We’re going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.

“I’ll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven’t launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire… or maybe they only had one. In that case, it’s we who have them.

“At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes’ notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.

“That’s all I have to say. Sub-major?”

“I’ll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.”

“Dismissed.” And none of this “fuck you, sir” nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention-all except Stott-until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said “dismissed” again, and we left.

My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.

There wasn’t much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.

3

We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone.  He emphasized the  fact  that  all we  knew  about  the  Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.

But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we’d had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we’d expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.

But that, of course, didn’t mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod4 and the Tauran home base-so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.

The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.

We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we’d gone before was half that.

Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of-or safe in the arms of-the logistic computer.

While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.

The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts. . . If you  program it to be Ghengis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.

But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavermg bloodthirsty warrior.

Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.

But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don’t do that anymore.

And the only reason, I said, they don’t do it is that they think you’ll kill better without it. That’s logic.

Speaking of logic, the original question was, why do they THE FOREVER WAR                                       89

 

send a logistic computer to do a man’s job? Or something like that. . . and we were off again.

The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. The pressure was down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.

I was only partly right.

I was belting on my tunic when my ring tingled and I held it up to listen. It was Rogers.

“Mandella, go check squad bay 3. Something went wrong; Dalton had to depressurize it from Control.”

Bay 3-that was Marygay’s squad! I rushed down the corridor in bare feet and got there just as they opened the door from inside the pressure chamber and began straggling out.

The first out was Bergman. I grabbed his ann. “What the hell is going on, Bergman?”

“Huh?” He peered at me, still dazed, as everyone is when they come out of the chamber. “Oh, s’you. Mandella. I dunno. Whad’ya mean?”

I squinted in through the door, still holding on to him. “You were late, man, you depressurized late. What happened?”

He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Late? Whad’ late. Uh, how late?”

1 looked at my watch for the first time. “Not too-” Jesus Christ. “Uh, we zipped in at 0520, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it.”

Still no Marygay among the dim figures picking their way through the ranked couches and jumbled tubing. “Urn, you were only a couple of minutes late. . . but we were only supposed to be under for four hours, maybe less. It’s

1050.”

“Um.” He shook his head again. I let go of him and stood back to let Stiller and Demy through the door.

“Everybody’s late, then,” Bergman said. “So we aren’t in any trouble.” “Uh-” Non sequiturs. “Right, right-Hey, Stiller!

You seen-”

From inside: “Medic! MEDIC!”

Somebody who wasn’t Marygay was coining out. I pushed her roughly out of my way and dove through the door, landed on somebody else and clambered over to where Struve, Marygay’s assistant, was standing over a pod and talking very loud and fast into his ring.

“-and blood God yes we need-”

It was Marygay still lying in her suit she was “-got the word from Dalton-”

covered every square inch of her with a uniform bright sheen of blood “-when she didn’t come out-”

it started as an angry welt up by her collarbone and was just a welt as it traveled between her breasts until it passed the sternum’s support

“-I came over and popped the-”

and opened up into a cut that got deeper as it ran down over her belly and where it stopped

“-yeah, she’s still-”

a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding… “-OK, left hip. Mandella-”

She was still alive, her heart palpitating, but her blood-streaked head lolled limply, eyes rolled back to white slits, bubbles of red froth appearing and popping at the corner of her mouth each time she exhaled shallowly.

“-tattooed on her left hip. Mandella! Snap out of it! Reach under her and find out what her blood-”

“TYPE 0 RH NEGATIVE GOD damn. . . it. Sony- Oh negative.” Hadn’t I seen that tattoo ten thousand times?

Struve passed this information on and I suddenly remembered the first-aid kit on my belt, snapped it off and fumbled through it.

Stop the bleeding-protect the wound-treat for shock, that’s what the book said. Forgot one, forgot one. . . clear air passages.

She was breathing, if that’s what they meant. How do you stop the bleeding or protect the wound with one measly pressure bandage when the wound is nearly a meter long? Treat for shock, that I could do. I fished out the green ampoule, laid it against her arm and pushed the button.

Then I laid the sterile side of the bandage gently on top of the exposed intestine and passed the elastic strip under the small of her back, adjusted it for nearly zero tension and fastened it.

“Anything else you can do?” Struve asked.

I stood back and felt helpless. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything?”

“I’m no more of a medic than you are.” Looking up at the door, he kneaded a fist, biceps straining. “Where the hell are they? You have morph-plex in that kit?”

“Yeah, but somebody told me not to use it for internal-” “William?”

Her eyes were open and she was trying to lift her head. I rushed over and held her. “It’ll be all right, Marygay. The medic’s coming.”

“What. . . all right? I’m thirsty. Water.”

“No, honey, you can’t have any water. Not for a while, anyhow.” Not if she was headed for surgery.

“Why is all the blood?” she said in a small voice. Her head rolled back. “Been a bad girl.”

“It must have been the suit,” I said rapidly. “Remember earlier, the creases?”

She shook her head. “Suit?” She turned suddenly paler and retched weakly. “Water. . . William, please.”

Authoritative voice behind me: “Get a sponge or a cloth soaked in water.” I looked around and saw Doe Wilson with two stretcher bearers.

“First half-liter femoral,” he said to no one in particular as he carefully peeked under the pressure bandage. “Follow that relief tube down a couple of meters and pinch it off. Find out if she’s passed any blood.”

One of the medics ran a ten-centimeter needle into Mary-gay’s thigh and started giving her whole blood from a plastic bag.

“Sorry I’m late,” Doe Wilson said tiredly. “Business is booming. What’d you say about the suit?”

“She had two minor injuries before. Suit doesn’t fit quite right, creases up under pressure.”

He nodded absently, checking her blood pressure. “You, anybody, give-” Somebody handed him a paper towel

dripping water. “Uh, give her any medication?” “One ampoule of No-shock.”

He wadded the paper towel up loosely and put it in Marygay’s hand. “What’s her name?” I told him.

“Marygay, we can’t give you a drink of water but you can suck on this. Now I’m going to shine a bright light in your eye.” While he was looking through her pupil with a metal tube, he said, “Temperature?” and one of the medics read a number from a digital readout box and withdrew a probe. “Passed blood?”

“Yes. Some.”

He put his hand lightly on the pressure bandage. “Mary-gay, can you roll over a little on your right side?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, and put her elbow down for leverage. “No,” she said and started crying.

“Now, now,” he said absently and pushed up on her hip just enough to be able to see her back. “Only the one wound,” he muttered. “Hell of a lot of blood.”

He pressed the side of his ring twice and shook it by his ear. “Anybody up in the shop?”

“Harrison, unless he’s on a call.”

A woman walked up, and at first I didn’t recognize her, pale and disheveled, bloodstained tunic. It was Estelle Harmony.

Doe Wilson looked up. “Any new customers, Doctor Harmony?”

“No,” she said dully. “The maintenance man was a double traumatic amputation. Only lived a few minutes. We’re keeping him running for transplants.”

“All those others?”

“Explosive decompression.” She sniffed. “Anything I can do here?”

“Yeah., just a minute.” He tried his ring again. “God damn it. You don’t know where Harrison is?”

“No.. . well, maybe, he might be in Surgery B if there was trouble with the cadaver maintenance. Think I set it up all right, though.”

“Yeah, well, hell you know how..

“Mark!” said the medic with the blood bag.

“One more hilf-liter femoral,” Doe Wilson said. “Estelle,  you  mind  taking  over  for  one  of  the  medics  here,  prepare  this  gal  for surgery?”

“No, keep me busy.”

“Good-Hopkins, go up to the shop and bring down a roller and a liter, uh, two liters isotonic fluorocarb with the primary spectrum. If they’re Merck they’ll say ‘abdominal spectrum.'” He found a part of his sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead. “If you find Harrison, send him over to surgery A and have him set up the anesthetic sequence for abdominal.”

“And bring her up to A?”

“Right. If you can’t find Harrison, get somebody-” he stabbed a finger in my direction, “-this guy, to roll the patient up to A; you run ahead and start the sequence.”

He picked up his bag and looked through it. “We could start the sequence here,” he muttered. “But hell, not with paramethadone-Marygay? How do you feel?”

She was still crying. “I’m. . . hurt.”

“I know,” he said gently. He thought for a second and said to Estelle, “No way to tell really how much blood she lost. She may have been passing it under pressure.

Also there’s some pooling in the abdominal cavity. Since she’s still alive I don’t think she could’ve bled under pressure for very long. Hope no brain damage yet.”

He touched the digital readout attached to Marygay’s arm. “Monitor the blood pressure, and if you think it’s indicated, give her five cc’s vasoconstrictor. I’ve gotta go scrub down.”

He closed his bag. “You have any vasoconstrictor besides the pneumatic ampoule?”

Estelle checked her own bag. “No, just the emergency pneumatic.. . uh. . . yes, I’ve got controlled dosage on the ‘dilator, though.”

“OK, if you have to use the ‘constrictor and her pressure goes up too fast-” “I’ll give her vasodilator two cc’s at a time.”

“Check. Hell of a way to run things, but. . . well. If you’re not too tired, I’d like you to stand by me upstairs.”

“Sure.” Doe Wilson nodded and left.

Estelle began sponging Marygay’s belly with isopropyl alcohol. It smelled cold and clean. “Somebody gave her No-shock?” “Yes,” I said, “about ten minutes ago.”

“Ah. That’s why the Doe was worried-no, you did the right thing. But No-shock’s got some vasoconstrictor. Five cc’s more might run up an overdose.” She continued silently scrubbing, her eyes coming up every few seconds to check the blood pressure monitor.

“William?” It was the first time she’d shown any sign of knowing me. “This worn-, uh, Marygay, she’s your lover? Your regular lover?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s very pretty.” A remarkable observation,  her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

“Yes, she is.” She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.

“Can she have some more water?” “OK, same as before. Not too much.”

I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metalworking shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we’d used the acceleration chambers.

Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.

“Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?” “Probably,” I said. “If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.”

“There won’t be any more battles,” she said flatly. “You mean you haven’t heard?” “What?”

“Don’t you know the ship was hit?”  “Hit!” Then how could any of us be alive?

“That’s right.” She went back to her scrubbing. “Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn’t a fighting suit left on the ship.. . and we can’t fight in our underwear.”

“What-squad bays, what happened to the people?” “No survivors.”

Thirty people. “Who was it?”

“All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.” Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. “My God.”

“Thirty deaders, and they don’t have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don’t know but that it may happen again any minute.”

“It wasn’t a drone?”

“No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of We ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn’t the drive or the life support system.” I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.

She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. “Be a gentleman and look the other way,” she said. “Oh, here.” She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. “Be useful. Do her face.”

I started and, without opening her eyes, Maiygay said, “That feels good. What are you doing?”

“Being a gentleman. And useful, too-”

“All personnel, attention, all personnel.” There wasn’t a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. “All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.”

“I’ve got to go, Marygay.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she bad heard the announcement. “Estelle,” I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. “Will you-”

“Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.” ”Well.”

“It’s going to be all right.” But her expression was grim THE FOREVER WAR                                       97

 

and worried. “Now get going,” she said, softly.

By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ‘box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn’t want to identify.

5

Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurnedly brushing her hair.

“William! What happened to you?”

“Nothing.” I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. “It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit.. . well, evidently it got a crease, ub.. .”

“Dead?”

“No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery-” “Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.”

“Oh. Right.” I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. “Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“No. Yes. Not when it happened.” For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. “It’s a mess.”

I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. “DON’T touch me!” she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. “Sorry. Let’s go.”

At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. “William. . .” She looked at me defiantly. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.”

I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.

“I can sum it up very briefly,” the commodore said in a tight voice, “if only because we know so little.

“Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.”

When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a “ramjet” effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.

Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.

“I shouldn’t have to emphasize ~ow formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed.

And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.

“Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffier coined the term future shock to describe this situation.” The commodore could get pretty academic.

“We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help

bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.

“Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry.Butlthinktherewouldbeaverygreatriskinvolved. We might be. . . shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind., technologically.

“Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.”

Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. “All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.

“It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your. . . as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.

“One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures-dozens, literally dozens of factors.”

I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our Mends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.

“So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.

“This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may. look like cowardice.

“The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival-as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.” Jesus Christ.

“I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision.

When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.” He sat up straight.

“More important than one soldier’s career.”

I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice”

had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unnulitary as a will to live.

The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was wiffing to sacrifice his Career.

The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn’t so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.

 

I went to Estelle’s cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.

“It wouldn’t serve any good purpose for you to see her now.” Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.

“Is she out of danger?”

“Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.” She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. “This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we’d simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.

“But there are complications. Nobody’s ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.

“Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?” “Yes.” Well, vaguely.

“Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn’t want to settle for normal prophylaxis be-cause a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then, of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.”

“I see.” And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

“This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system-not dangerous, since she’s under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.

“With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we’re decelerating at a constant l-1/2 gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well

THE FOREVER WAR 103

know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she’s going to die.” “But. . . but we’re bound to go over two on the final approach! What-”

“I know, I know. But that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.

“William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special

person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death.. . you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.”

I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. “You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.”

“Maybe. . . no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.”

“Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I’m a civilian.”

“Don’t be so sure.” The old familiar argument. “Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or-”

“Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won’t. It would be mutiny.”

“I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.”

That was a chiller.

Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.

 

I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn’t seen any evidence of brain damage.

She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn’t have a chance. I couldn’t get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay’s resilience.

The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle’s acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn’t move under her own power, not at I-1/2 gees.

I went to see her. “Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph- 9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years’ combat pay when we get back to Earth.”

“That’s good.”

“Ah, just think of the great things we’ll-” “William.”

I let it trail off. Never could lie.

“Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bulishit me about getting back to Earth.” She turned her face to the wall.

“I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody’d been moping around.

“So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?”

We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr. Wilson.

 

“We’re giving her  a fifty-fifty chance, but that’s pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.”

“But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.”

“Certainly. For what it’s worth. The commodore’s going to take it as gently as possible, but that’ll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won’t know until it’s over.”

I nodded impatiently. “Yes, but I think there’s a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.”

“If you’ve developed an acceleration shield,” he said smiling, “you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable-”

“No, Doc, it wouldn’t be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.”

“Explain away.”

“We put Marygay into a shell and flood-”

“Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she’d have to use somebody else’s.”

“I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn’t have to fit her exactly as long as the life support hookups can function.

The shell won’t be pressurized on the inside; it won’t have to be because she won’t be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“It’s just an adaptation of-you’ve studied physics, haven’t you?” “A little bit, in medical school. My worst courses, after Latin.” “Do you remember the principle of equivalence?”

“I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?”

“Uh-huh. It means that.. . there’s no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of-it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees’ surface gravity.”

“Seems obvious.”

“Maybe it is. It means that there’s no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.”

“Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if-”

“Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.” “All right. I’ll accept that. So?”

“You know Archimedes’ Law?”

“Sure, the fake crown-that’s what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts-”

“Archimedes’ Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it’s buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you’re in-In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it’s water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.”

“Sure.”

“So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she’s weightless, she’ll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.”

“Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won’t work.”

“Why not?” I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn’t.

“What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?” “Submarine?”

“That’s right. They work by Archimedes’-”

“Ouch! You’re right. Jesus. Hadn’t thought it through.”

“That wrench fails right to the floor just as if the submarine weren’t weightless.” He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. “What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn’t give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn’t do Marygay any good.. . .”

I stood up to go. “Sorry I wasted-”

“Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part- way.”

“How do you mean?”

“I wasn’t thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.” I didn’t like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.

THE FOREVER WAR 107

“Yeah, that’s obvious, it’d tear her-say.. . you mean, low pressure-”

“That’s right. We wouldn’t need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees’ straight-line acceleration; that’s only for all the swerving and dodging-I’m going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that’s the one we’ll use. Dalton’ll meet you there.”

 

Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and  I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn’t really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as the nonnal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out- Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw

blood.

“She hemorrhaged.” Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.

“Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it.           She’ll be just fine.”

Marygay was walking in another week, “Confratermzing” in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.

Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures-there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.

All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.

Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.

We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.

 

The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.

 

They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.

We went planetside in two scoutships. 7

General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.

“You know,” he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, “you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.

“And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses-but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective. . . there’s no need to be afraid.”

He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.

“My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.”

Or have a very selective memory, I thought.

“But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.

“We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth-I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years,

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will probably never go back-and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.

“Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.”

He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. “Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two- percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.

“Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.

“Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.

“But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Sin, who just arrived from Earth. Captain?”

“Thank you, General.” It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.

“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.

“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph. . . to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.

“Most governments encourage homosexuality-the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual

countries-they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”

That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit

in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

“As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.

“Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?”

He was looking at me, so I answered. “Fourteen.”

He nodded. “It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?” Hofstadter had his hand up.

“Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?”

“Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.

“But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.”

He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. “Let me do some history to you.

I guess the first really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.

“That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.”

Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used THE FOREVER WAR

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“tha, ther, thini” instead of “he, his, him,” for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal

“Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.

“Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty- two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million K’S, kilocalories.

“Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it’s practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn’t rationed… . It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.

“Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood. . . probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.”

He went on like that for a long time. Well, bell, it wasn’t really surprising, much of it. We’d probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was

going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we’d prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.

The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they’d taken over most of the good parkiand and subdivided it into little

farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.

He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called “breeders” were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.

I don’t guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were “cool,” joints  were “grass,” and so on.

We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We’d be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.

Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we’d get to-.

gether at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren’t supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.

I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.

Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six- month journey. Cortez didn’t insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.

8

I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable-I made a million K’s from Time-Life/Fax-but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.

I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.

She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War- having moved out in 1980-and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.

She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl unifonn, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.

“William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.” Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. “Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.”

We got into a groundcar that had “Jefferson” written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid lOOK per kilometer for the use of it.

I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises,

roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings.

We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.

“Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.”

“Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.” That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.

“Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?”

“Mostly boring,” I said automatically. “When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.”

He nodded wisely. “Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ‘vailable anytime after six. Riglny-oh?”

“That’s fine, Carl.”

The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.

“Gots ta watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerseif, Miz Mandella.” We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. “What’s a rider?”

“Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.”

The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.

“Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?” I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand “calories” and I’d used up only half of them.

It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.

When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration hooks, so they’d made the new currency K’S, kilocalories, because that’s the unit

THE FOREVER WAR 117

for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalones of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread.

So they  instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing.

Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever. . . anything but kilocalories.

Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef,  costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80K.

I also got a head of lettuce for 140K and a little bottle of olive oil for 175ic Mother said she had some vinegar.

Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.

At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.

Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.

Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ‘fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his ann.

“Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?” I called into the kitchen. “As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?” “Well .. . I found the classified section, but no ‘Help Wanted.'”

She laughed. “Son, there hasn’t been a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs . . . well, most of them.”

“Everybody works for the government?”

“No, that’s not it.” She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. “The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.”

“Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?”

“Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.”

“No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.”

“Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy-there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good-”

“No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t-”

“But you said you had a job!”

“I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.”

“Hand-me-down? Dealer?”

“Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Halley Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000K a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.

“Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I

would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.

“Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.

“Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has ‘Halley Williams’ identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700K, so she gets half that, 1350K, and pays the dealer 135.”

She got a pad an4 a stylus and did some figuring. “So the real Hailey Williams gets 6000K weekly for doing nothing. I work three days a week for 4050K. My assistant works three days for 1115K. The dealer gets 100,000K in fees and 735K per week. Lopsided, isn’t it?”

“Hmm. . . I’ll say. Quite illegal, too, I suppose.”

“For the dealer. Everybody else might lose their job and have to start over, if the Employment Board finds out. But the dealer gets brainwiped.”

“Guess I better find a dealer, while I can still afford the fifty-grand bite.” Actually, I still had over three million, but planned to run through most of it in a short time. Hell, I’d earned it.

 

I was getting ready to go the next morning when Mother came in with a shoebox. Inside, there was a small pistol in a clip-on holster.

“This belonged to your father,” she explained. “Better wear it if you’re planning to go downtown without a bodyguard.”

It was a gunpowder pistol with ridiculously thin bullets. I hefted it in my hand. “Did Dad ever use it?”

“Several times. . . just to scare away riders and hitters, though. He never actually shot anybody.”

“You’re probably right that I need a gun,” I said, putting it back. “But I’d have to have something with more heft to it. Can I buy one legally?”

“Sure, there’s a gun store down in the Mall. As long as you don’t have a police record, you can buy anything that suits you.” Good, I’d get a little pocket laser. I could hardly hit the wall with a gunpowder pistol.

“But.. . William, I’d feel a lot better if you’d hire a bodyguard, at least until you know your way around.” We’d gone all around that last night. Being an official Trained Killer, I thought I was tougher than any clown I might hire for the job.

“I’ll check into it, Mother. Don’t worry-I’m not even going downtown today, just into Hyattsville.”

“That’s just as bad.”

When the elevator came, it was already occupied. He looked at me blandly as I got in, a man a little older than me, clean-shaven and well dressed. He stepped back to let me at the row of buttons. I punched 47 and then, realizing his motive might not

have been politeness, turned to see him struggling to get at a metal pipe stuck in his waistband. It had been hidden by his cape.

“Come  on, fella,”  I said, reaching for a  nonexistent  weapon. “You  wanna  get caulked?”

He had the pipe free but let it hang loosely at his side. “Caulked?”

“Killed. Anny term.” I took one step toward him, trying to remember. Kick just under the knee, then either groin or kidney. I decided on the groin.

“No.” He put the pipe back in his waistband. “I don’t want to get ‘caulked.'” The door opened at 47 and I backed out.

The gun shop was all bright white plastic and gleamy black metal. A little bald man bobbed over to wait on me. He had a pistol in a shoulder rig.

“And a fine morning to you, sir,” he said and giggled. “What will it be today?” “Lightweight pocket laser,” I said. “Carbon dioxide.”

He looked at me quizzically and then brightened. “Coming right up, sir.” Giggle. “Special today, I throw in a handful of tachyon grenades.”

“Fine.” They’d be handy.

He looked at me expectantly. “So? What’s the popper?” “Huh?”

“The punch, man; you set me up, now knock me down. Laser.” He giggled. I was beginning to understand. “You mean I can’t buy a laser.”

“Of course not, sweetie,” he said and sobered. “You didn’t know that?” “I’ve been out of the country for a long time.”

“The world, you mean. You’ve been out Of the world a long time.” He put his left hand on a chubby hip in a gesture that incidentally made his gun easier to get. He scratched the center of his chest.

I stood very still. “That’s right. I just got out of the Force.”

His  jaw  dropped.  “Hey,  no  bully-bull?  You  been  out  shootin’  ’em  up, out in space?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, all that crap about you not gettin’ older, there’s nothin’ to that, is there?” “Oh, it’s true. I was born in 1975.”

“Well, god . . . damn. You’re almost as old as I am.”

He giggled. “I thought that was just something the government made up.” “Anyhow. . . you say I can’t buy a laser-”

“Oh, no. No no no. I run a legal shop here.” “What can I buy?”

“Oh, pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, body armor. . . just no lasers or explosives or fully automatic weapons.”

“Let me see a pistol. The biggest you have.”

“Ah, I’ve got just the thing.” He motioned me over to a display case and opened the back, taking out a huge revolver.

“Four-ten-gauge six-shooter.” He cradled it in both hands. “Dinosaur-stopper. Authentic Old West styling. Slugs or flechettes.”

“Flechettes?”

“Sure-uh, they’re like a bunch of tiny darts. You shoot and they spread out in a pattern. Hard to miss that way.”

Sounded like my speed. “Anyplace I can try it out?”

“‘Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.” He rang a bell and a boy caine out to

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watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.

The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.

He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. “Please don’t pick it up until the door’s closed.” He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. “Okay. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.” I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. Doubted I’d even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.

“No, no,” he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. “Authentic Old West styling. You’ve got to pull the hammer back.”

Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.

The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.

“I’ll take it.”

He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavily armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.

The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.

Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.

I pushed a “cab call” button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.

THE FOREVER WAR 123

During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I’d bought the shield.

Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.

I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.

This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged

broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering  around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.

It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.

The cab pulled up in front of Tom & Jerry’s Bar and Grill and let me out after I paid 430K. I stepped to the sidewalk with my hand on the shotgun-pistol, but there was nobody around. I hustled into the bar.

It was surprisingly clean on the inside, dimly lit and furnished in fake leather and fake pine. I went to the bar and got some fake bourbon and, presumably, real water for 120K. The water cost 20K. A waitress came over with a tray.

“Pop one, brother-boy?” The tray had a rack of oldfashioned hypodermic needles. Joe Haldeman

124

“Not today, thanks.” If I was going to “pop one,” I’d use an aerosol. The needles looked unsanitary and painful.

She set the dope down on the bar and eased onto the stool next to me. She sat with her chin cupped in her palm and stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“God. Tuesdays.”

I mumbled something.

“You wanna go in back fer a quickie?”

I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression. She was wearing only a short skirt of some gossamer material, and it plunged in a shallow V in the front, exposing her hipbones and a few bleached pubic hairs. I wondered what could possibly keep it up. She wasn’t bad looking, could have been anywhere from her late twenties to her early forties. No telling what they could do with cosmetic surgery and makeup nowadays, though. Maybe she was older than my mother.

“Thanks anyhow.” “Not today?” “That’s right.”

“I can get you a nice boy, if-” “No. No thanks.” What a world.

She pouted into the mirror, an expression that was probably older than Hoino sapiens. “You don’t like me.”

“I like you fine. That’s just not what I caine here for.”

“Well. . . different funs for different ones.” She shrugged. “Hey, Jerry. Get me a short beer.”

He brought it.

“Oh, damn, my purse is locked up. Mister, can you spare forty calories?” I had enough ration tickets to take care of a whole banquet. Tore off a fifty and gave it to the bartender.

“Jesus.” She stared. “How’d you get a full book at the end of the month?”

I told her in as few words as possible who I was and how I managed to have so many calories. There had been two months’ worth of books waiting in my mail, and I hadn’t even used up the ones the Force had given me. She offered to buy a book from me for ten grand, but I didn’t

want to get involved in more than one illegal enterprise at a time.

Two men came in, one unarmed and the other with both a pistol and a riot gun. The bodyguard sat by the door and the other came over to me.

“Mr. Mandella?” “That’s right.”

“Shall we take a booth?” He didn’t offer his name.

He had a cup of coffee, and I sipped a mug of beer. “I don’t keep any written records, but I have an excellent memory. Tell me what sort of a job you’re interested in, what your qualifications are, what salary you’ll accept, and so on.”

I told him I’d prefer to wait for a job where I could use my physics-teaching or research, even engineering. I wouldn’t need a job for two or three months, since I planned to travel and spend money for a while. Wanted at least 20,000K monthly, but how much I’d accept would depend on the nature of the job.

He didn’t say a word until I’d finished. “Righty-oh. Now, I’m afraid. . . you’d have a hard time, getting a job in physics. Teaching is out; I can’t supply jobs where the person is constantly exposed to the public. Research, well, your degree is almost a quarter of a century old. You’d have to go back to school, maybe five or six years.”

“Might do that,” I said.

“The one really marketable feature you have is your combat experience. I could probably place you in a supervisory job at a bodyguard agency for even more than twenty grand. You could make almost that much, being a bodyguard yourself.”

“Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to take chances for somebody else’s hide.”

“Righty-oh. Can’t say I blame you.” He finished his coffee in a long slurp. “Well, I’ve got to run, got a thousand things to do. I’ll keep you in mind and talk to some people.”

“Good. I’ll see you in a few months.”

“Righty-oh. Don’t need to make an appointment. I come

in here every day at eleven for coffee. Just show up.”

I finished my beer and called a cab to take me home. I wanted to walk around the city, but Mother was right. I’d get a bodyguard first.

9

I came home and the phone was blinking pale blue. Didn’t know what to do so I punched “Operator.”

A pretty young girl’s head materialized in the cube. “Jefferson operator,” she said. “May I help you?”

“Yes. . . what does it mean when the cube is blinking blue?” “Huh?”

“What does it mean when the phone-”

“Are you serious?” I was getting a little tired of this kind of thing. “It’s a long story. Honest, I don’t know.”

“When it blinks blue you’re supposed to call the operator.” “Okay, here I am.”

“No, not me, the real operator. Punch nine. Then punch zero.” I did that and an old harridan appeared. “Ob-a-ray-duh.”

“This is William Mandella at 301-52-574-3975. I was supposed to call you.”

“Juzza segun.” She reached outside the field of view and typed something. “You god.da call from 605-19-556-2027.”

I scribbled it down on the pad by the phone. “Where’s that?” “Juzza segun. South Dakota.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t know anybody in South Dakota.

A pleasant-looking old woman answered the phone. “Yes?” “I had a call from this number. . . uh… I’m-”

“Oh. Sergeant Mandella! Just a second.”

I watched the diagonal bar of the holding pattern for a second, then fifty or so more. Then a head came into focus.

Marygay. “William. I had a heck of a time finding you.” Lz~j

Joe Ilaldeman

“Darling, me too. What are you doing in South Dakota?”

“My parents live here, in a little commune. That’s why it took me so long to get to the phone.” She held up two grimy hands. “Digging potatoes.”

“But when I checked.. . the records said-the records in Tucson said your parents were both dead.”

“No, they’re just dropouts-you know about dropouts?- new name, new life. I got the word through a cousin.”

“Well-well, how’ve you been? Like the country life?”

“That’s one reason I’ve been wanting to get you. Willy, I’m bored. It’s all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.,,

“I’m flattered. Pick you up at eight?”

She checked a clock above the phone. “No, look, let’s get a good night’s sleep. Besides, I’ve got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at. . . the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm. . . Trans-World information desk.”

“Okay. Make reservations for where?” She shrugged. “Pick a place.” “London used to be pretty wicked.”

“Sounds good. First class?”

“What else? I’ll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.” “Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?”

“We’ll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.” She giggled. “Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.”

“Fine-ub. . . Marygay, do you have a gun?” “It’s that bad?”

“Here around Washington it is.”

“Well, I’ll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they’re left over from Tucson.”

“We’ll hope we won’t need them.”

“Willy, you know it’ll just be for decoration. I couldn’t even kill a Tauran.”

“Of course.” We just looked at each other for a second. “Tomorrow at ten, then.” “Right. Love you.”

”lJh . .

She giggled again and hung up.

That was just too many things to think about all at once.

I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.

She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn’t see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed, various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don’t know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.

Whispering: “What are we going to do for three hours?” She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.

“Um.. . where are we headed?”

“Don’t ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.”

We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked innocently.

I tried to leer. “Any alternatives?”

She laughed gaily. Several people stared. “Just a second here!” We jumped off. It was a corridor marked

“Roomettes.” She handed me a key.

That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.

I recovered.

We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.

“William, have you used that thing yet?” “What thing?”

“That hawg-leg. The pistol.” 130

Joe Haldeman

“Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.”

“Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?”

I took a shallow puff and passed it back. “Hadn’t given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.”

“Well?”

“I. . . I don’t really know. The only time I’ve killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don’t think it would. . . bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?”

“Life,” she said plaintively, “life is. . .”

“Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass-”

“Oh,William. You sound like old Cortez.” “Cortez kept us alive.”

“Not many of us,” she snapped.

I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. “I’m sorry, William. I guess we’re both just trying to adjust.”

“That’s okay. You’re right, anyhow.”

We talked for a long time. The only urban center Mary-gay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her

parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.

We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked

up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.

It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were-like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long-at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air-but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.

But this war. . . the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.

Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.

The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontmental transport.

We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century.. . the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb- sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.

London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.

The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn’t be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I

supposed there were probably sections as rough as Washington.

I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.

Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.

“Oh, it happens often enough,” she said. “Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He’d gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.”

“Bodysnatcher?”

“That’s right. All the commune organizations have them. They’ve got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren’t eligible for relief. . . people who can’t just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn’t on the government’s fecal roster.”

“So he skipped out before his trial came up?”

She nodded. “It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn’t easy, and going on the dole after a few years’ working on a prison farm; exconvicts can’t get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which

they’d put up for bail, but the government would’ve gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.

“So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.”

“Arid what did the bodysnatcher get?”

“He himself probably didn’t get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn’t have very much-”

“What happens if they get caught?”

“Not a chance.” She laughed. “The communes provide over half the country’s produce-they’re really just an unofficial arm of the government. I’m sure the CBI knows

Joe Haldeman 134

exactly where they are.. . . Dad grumbles that it’s just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.”

“What a weird setup.”

“Well, it keeps the land farmed.” She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. “And they’re eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.”

After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a “cultural translation” of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn’t allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any bluriy-eyed nostalgia over

  1. it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I’d seen, and some of the physical feats perfonned were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.

 

We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.

It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun- pistol over their heads.

It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.

The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent

‘l’HE FOREVER WAR 135

one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.

The girl looked dazedly around,  saw the mutilated body  of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should

have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my

feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.

“What hap-” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Whwhat was he doing?”

I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing

  • . . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give

Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brainwipe you!”

She was tight. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse  and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.

 

Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.

I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse

than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.

Still, Britishers called their island “the most civilized country in Europe.” From what we’d heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.

I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States.~We could finish the tour after we’d become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.

The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed.

They’d made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.

We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.

10

I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.

“Pardon me,” I said, “isn’t this Mrs. Mandella’s residence?”

“Oh, you must be William!” She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. “Beth, look who’s here!”

My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “Willy.. . what are you doing back so soon?”

“Well, it’s-it’s a long story.”

“Sit down, sit down,” the other woman said. “Let me get you a drink, don’t start till I get back.”

“Wait,” my mother said. “I haven’t even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.”

“I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Beth has told me all about you-one cold beer, right?”

“Right.” She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn’t met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.

“Uh. . . really more than that, William. She’s been my roommate for a couple of years. That’s why I had an extra room when you came home-a single person isn’t allowed two bedrooms.”

“But why-”

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren’t, actually; she has-”

“That’s right.” Rhonda came in with the beer. “I’ve got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.”

“Thanks.” I took the beer. “Actually, I won’t be here long. I’m kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.”

“Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “I can take the couch.” I was too old-fashioned male- chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.

I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.

We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.

Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.

“Rhonda-” I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?”

She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.”

I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?

“Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.”

She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. “William. . . look, I’m only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.”

I didn’t say anything.

She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.”

Accusation in her eyes. “Especially flOW with you com THE FOREVER WAR

139

ing back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.

I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

 

A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.

It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.

“Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood. “Stranger asking directions.”

“Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child. “I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”

“Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back.

“Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”

“Thanks.”

“If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”

“1 understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.

I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 arid take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.

At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of

plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.

Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.

“Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”

“Indeed you should have. . . save you a long dusty walk-but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that.”

She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.

Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.

Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.

“Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”

“More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.

“No, no.. . not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else. . .”

“Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.” “That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a

two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here,  by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.

“Why don’t you children go down there tonight.. show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”

“Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”

“Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”

“Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”

“No problem. Mrs. Potter-April-and I’ll take the first four hours-oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”

We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.

“A little crowded in here, with two,” Richard said.

“Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”

He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”

“Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training.

“Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers-where the hell did you get it?”

“Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart.

Clean, too clean.

“Has it ever been used?”

“Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”

I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.

“Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”

I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away.

Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.

“Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”

He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”

“All right, what’s a jumper?”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t know.” He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. “I don’t know why they don’t just call ’em thieves, that’s what they ar~’Murderers, too, sometimes.

“They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.

“Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don’t get this far in, but the farms closer to the road.. . we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.”

“Doesn’t sound fair to the people living close to the road.”

“There’re compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they’re issued heavier weapons.”

 

Marygay and I took the family’s two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.

It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl  was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a “cultural relativity” class.

Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the “eighteen years’ compulsory education” they had startled us with at Stargate.

Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty

uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn’t grown up in this world. And they had never known “peacetime.”

We went home about midnight and Maiygay and 1 each stood two hours’ guard. By the middle of the next morning, I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.

The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.

It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an ear-clip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard’s collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.

Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it’d be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn’t have any wood.

I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn’t say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.

April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.

Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round bole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.

I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.

Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.

April whispered something and Maiygay asked, “Mother wants to know whether..

. Daddy had a hard time of it She knows he’s dead.” “No. I’m sure he didn’t feel anything.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s something.” I should keep my mouth shut. “It is good, yes.” I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage

point. I couldn’t find anyplace that wouldn’t allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.

“I’m going to go outside and get on top of the house.” Couldn’t go back to the tower. “Don’t you shoot unless somebody gets inside. . . maybe they’ll think the place is deserted.”

By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver’s face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could hear them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn’t see me.

The truck wasn’t ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.

The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me,though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.

No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof’s overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn’t have worried.

There was a deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny fiechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.

I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door. Marygay had her mother’s head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay’s cheeks were dry under my palms.

“Good work, dear.”

She didn’t say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.

I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn’t answer when we talked to her.

A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with j white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in The back with a megaphone repeating, “Wounded. . . wounded.” I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.

Marygay didn’t want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn’t disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.

We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April’s small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune’s sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers’ bodies.

We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently. 11

We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.

It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.

We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom’s place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.

Mom didn’t answer her door, but she’d given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.

We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.

“William? I didn’t-” coughing “-come in, I didn’t know you were…”

She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.

She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. “When did you get in? I didn’t know…”

“Just a few minutes ago. .. . How long has this. . . have you been…”

“Oh, it’s just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.” She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don’t have.. . it’s not serious . . . don’t-” ”Not serious?” At eighty-four. “For Chrissake, mother.” I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.

A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. “Nurse Donalson, general services.” She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.

“My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a-” “Name and number, please.”

“Beth Mandella.” I spelled it. “What number?” “Medical services number, of course,” she smiled.

I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. “She says she can’t remember.”

“That’s all right, sir, I’m sure I can find her records.”

She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code. “Beth Mandella?” she said, her smile wrning quizzical.

“You’re her son? She must be in her eighties.”

“Please. It’s a long story. She really has to see a doctor.” “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What do you mean?” Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. “Really-this might be very serious, you’ve got to-”

“But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.” “What the hell is that supposed to me”

“S-i-r…” The smile was hardening in place.

“Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a ‘zero priority rating’?” “Another-oh! I know you!” She looked off to the left. “Sonya-come over here a

second. You’d never guess who…” Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse’s. “Remember? On the stat this morning?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “One of the soldiers-hey, that’s really max, really max.” The head withdrew.

“Oh, Mr. Mandella,” she said, effusive. “No wonder you’re confused. It’s really very simple.”

“Well?”

“It’s part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.”

“What does it rate? What does it mean?” But the ugly truth was obvious.

“Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he’s allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else’s; class two is the same except for certain life- extending-”

“And class zero is no treatment at all.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Mandella.” And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.

“Thank you.” I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.

 

I found mountaineer’s oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematonum had the same fixed smile.

I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.

I finally got through to him. Without preamble: “Mother’s dead.”

For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction,  came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. “No surprise. Every  time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.” He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage- plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

We commiserated for a while and then Mike said,

“Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an

150

Joe Haldeman

individual. Where we don’t throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.”

“We’d have to rejoin UNEF.”

“True, but you wouldn’t have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date-maybe wind up eventually in research.”

We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.

Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn’t been staying there, surrounded by Mother’s life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.

We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.

 

“In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.” The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin men-tally and it came up tails.

“Last I heard, there had been nine others,” she said in her husky tenor. “All of them opted for the moon… maybe you’ll find some of your friends there.” She slid two simple forms across the desk. “Sign these and you’re in again. Second lieutenants.”

The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.

“There’s nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate.” “That won’t be necessary. The Force will-”

“I think it is necessary, Lieutenant.” I handed back the form. So did Marygay.

“Let me check.” She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.

She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: GUARANTEED LOCATION OF CHOICE

[LUNA] AND ASSIGNMENT OF CHOICE [col~iaAT TRAINING SPECIALIST].

We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning’s shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.

On the door to the Transient Officers’ Billet, some wag had scraped “abandon hope all ye who enter.” We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.

Two raps on the door. “Mail call, sirs.”

I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a second and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:

* *ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

 

THE FOLLOWING NAMED PERSONNEL:

Mandella, William 2LT [11 575 278] COCOMM D Co GRITRABN

AND

Potter, Marygay 2LT [17 386 907] COCOMM B Co GRITRABN ARE HEREBY REASSIGNED TO:

LT Mandella. PLCOMM 2 PL STFFHETA STARGATE Lr Potter: PLCOMM 3 PL STF~HETA STARGATE. DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

Command infantry platoon in Tet-2 Campaign.

THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY

TO  GRIMALDI  TRANSPORTATION  BATTALION  TO  BE  MAN  IFESTED  TO STARGATE.

ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/l 298-8684-1450/20 Aug 2019 SO:

BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.

 

**ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

 

“They didn’t waste any time, did they?” Marygay said bitterly.

“Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command’s light-weeks away; they can’t even know we’ve re-upped yet.”

“What about our. . .” She let it trail off.

“The   guarantee.   Well,   we   were   given   our   assignment   of   choice.   Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.”

“It’s so dirty.”

I shrugged. “It’s so army.”

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going home.

 

 

 

 

LIEUTENANT MANDELLA 2024-2389 A.D.

 

 

 

 

“Quick and dirty.” 1 was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.

“Yeah,” he said. “Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we’re screwed tight.” He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.

Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unself- consciously. “Lieutenant Mandella?” Her voice btoke a little. “Can we have just a minute?”

“One minute,” I said, too abruptly. “We have to leave in five, I’m sorry.”

Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But  they  knew  what  everybody  did;  how  slim  their chances  were of ever being

together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins’s eyes shone but she wasn’t weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.

I’d gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we’d left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.

I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest- and-recreation planet.

I finished the set-up sequence and  the suit  closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.

Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon’s staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.

She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.

“Feeling OK, honey?”

“All right,” she said. “Took my pill.”

“Yeah, happy times.” I’d taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. “Sack with me tonight?”

“If we’re both here,” she said neutrally. “Have to take a pill for that, too.” She tried to laugh. “Sleep, I mean. How’re the new people taking it? You have ten?”

“Ten, yeah, they’re OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.” “I did that, too; try to keep them loose.”

In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn’t ever fought.

The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, “Two minutes. Get your people lined up.”

We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.

“All right, load ’em up.” With the word “up,” the bay door in front of me opened- the staging area having already been bled of air-and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.

These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as

possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.

We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees’ acceleration, straight down.

The planet, which we hadn’t bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans’ outpost.

Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn’t be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.

I wasn’t worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn’t taken the pill.

We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock’s escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo- cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.

The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.

“Prepare for ejection,” the machine’s female-mechanical voice said. “Five, four. . .” The ship’s lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random

black

rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.

“Three-” It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship’s tail pitched down-then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship’s bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad.

 

The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then “trauma maintenance” cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either

die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship’s aid station.

We’d won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infinnary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or  less) saved by his suit’s trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship’s two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.

lrlErunEvLjt wttit I ..)~

Finally I woke up in a regular bay.I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached lere and there, but no medics around. The only other peron in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

I didn’t wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait to see.

Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think “Hello, broken toy,” she said.

“How-how do you feel?” Bright question.

She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. “Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.” She smiled. “Did they tell you? We’re going to Heaven.”

“No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.”

“Heaven will be better.” Anything would. “I wish we were there now.” “How long?” I asked. “How long before we get there?”

She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. “No telling. You haven’t talked to anybody?”

“Just woke up.”

“There’s a new directive they didn’t bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we’ve done all four. Or until we’ve sustained so many casualties that it wouldn’t be practical to go on.”

“How many is that?”

“I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we’re headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.” New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.

One knock on the door and Dr. Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. “Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.” Foster was all right A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.

He examined Marygay’s stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn’t talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You’re both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you’ve sustained isn’t going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I’m keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can’t handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.

“Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you’ll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you’re going to think of how lucky  the other one is. You’re going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… . You may be at each other’s throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.

“Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don’t kid yourselves if it doesn’t work out.”

He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. “Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.” He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, “We’ve got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.”

We went into the tanks-so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells-and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.

Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren’t exactly straining at the leash.

It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.

We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it’s by far the planet’s largest city, but you couldn’t tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.

Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks.  They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to

the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large

joe naweman

predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.

We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital’s reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren’t set up for that

“Earth-year” was 2189. So I was 215 years  old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat-no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I’d find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.

They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.

An aide came in. “How you feelin’, sir?” I almost told him to forget the “sir” bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.

“I don’t know. Hurts a little.”

“Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait’ll the nerves start to grow.” “Nerves?”

“Sure.” He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. “How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It’d just sit there.”

“Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think ‘move’ and the thing moves?”

“‘Course you can.” He looked at  me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.

What a wonder. “Prosthetics has sure come a long way.”

THE FOREVER WAR 163

“Pross-what-ics?” “You know, artificial-”

“Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.” How’d he ever get a job? “Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.”

“Look, sir.” He set down the clipboard he’d been scribbling on. “You’ve been away a long time. That’s gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can’t break.”

“They do it with arms, too?”

“Sure, any limb.” He went back to his writing. “Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.”

“Fantastic.” Marygay would be whole again, too.

He shrugged. “Guess so. They’ve been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?”

I told him, and he whistled. “God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.” His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.

“Yeah. 1 was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.” They’d started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.

“Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?”

“I don’t know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago-hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.”

He shrugged. “Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.”

“What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?” No wonder I couldn’t place his accent.

“Born, raised and drafted.” He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. “Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.” He spelled it out, didn’t say “youneff” the way I’d always heard it.

“Look, I’ve gotta run, lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.” He backed out the door. “You need anything, there’s a buzzer on the table there.”

Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?

It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.

The guy wasn’t kidding about the pain. And it wasn’t just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to “take,” they’d had to subvert my body’s resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.

I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fas- cinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt-she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning”-a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor

THE FOREVER WAR 165

guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven-excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities-was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat,

armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.

We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was

dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.

Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.

Maybe ten of the spears hit him-mine didn’t-and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.

We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.

Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren’t out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.

But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working

order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

Heaven’s economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.

We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.

We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields-sleep naked in a blizzard-or we could take nature straight. At Marygay’s suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I’m still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.

Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.

The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled-sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night-ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and

sampled every service and product that wasn’t too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whose

Ion

Joe tialcieman

salary was rather more than that of a major general.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

We did have the consolation, not small, that however

short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.

 

We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent “first floor” of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes:

our orders.

Marygay had been bumped to captain, and 1 to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer.

But they weren’t the same company.

She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” before taking command.

For a long time we couldn’t say anything. “I’m going to protest,” I said finally, weakly. “They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.”

She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.

We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had

all been allotted. I pointed out That most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said.

It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.

Not in terms of people.

We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the

1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it

was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from “our” desert.

I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me- having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.

That much, I owed to the enemy. MAJOR

MANDELLA 2458-3143 A.D.

What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.

I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth. Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.

At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo “indoctrination and education” prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.

For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks.

Glucose and electricity.

They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.

I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review

everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for.  Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was

long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and

sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party c~ommander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on.

That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.

TABLE OF ORGANIZATION

Strike Force Gamma Sade-138 Campaign

IECHN:

MAJ Mondella

COMM Anwpol 2ECHN:

CAPT Moore

3ECHN:

ILT Hilleboe

4ECHN:

2LT Riland
2LT Rusk

2LT ALvever MD

5ECHN:

2LT Borgstedz
2LT Brill
2LT Gainor

2LT Heimoff 6ECHN:

SSgr Webster
SSgt Gillies
SSgr Abram:

SSgt Dole 7ECHN:

Sgt Dolins
Sgz Bell
Cpl Geller
Cpl Kahn
Sgt Anderson

Cpl Kalvm

Sgt Noyes
Cpl Spraggs

8ECHN:

Pvt Boas
CpJ Weiner
Pvt Lingeman
Pvt IkIe

Pvt Rosevear
Pvt Schon
Pvt Wolfe, R.
Pvt Shubik
Pvt Lin
Pvt Duhl

Pvt Simmons
Pvt Perloff
Pvt Winograd
Pvt Moynihan
Pvt Brown
Pvt Frank

Pvt Bloomquist
Pvt Graubard
Pvt Wong
Pvt Orlans

Pvt Louria
Pvt Mayr
Pvt Gross
Pvt Quarton
Pvt Asadi
Pvt Hin

Pvt Horman
Pvt Stendahi
Pvt Fox
Pvt Erikson
Pvt Born
Pvt Miller

Pvt Reisman
Pvt Coupling
Pvt Rosiow

Pvt Huntington
Pvt Dc Sola

Pvt Pool
Pvt Nepala
Pvt Schuba
Pvt Ulanov
Pvt Shelley
Pvt Lynn
Pvt Slaer
Pvt Schenk
Pvt Deelstre
Pvt Levy
Pvt Conroy
Pvt Yakata
Pvt Burns

Pvt Cohen Pvt Graham

Pvt Schoeliple Pvt Wolfe, E. Pvt Karkoshka Pvt Majer

Pvt Dioujova Pvt Armaing Pvt Baulez Pvt Johnson Pvt Oitrecht Pvt Kayibanth Pvt Tschudi

Supporting:  ILT Williams (NAy), 2LTs Jarvil (MED), Laasonen (MED), Wilber (PSY), Szydlowska (MAINT), Gaptchcnko (ORD), Gedo (COMM),

Gim (COMP); 1SGTs Evans (MED), Rodriguez (MED), Kostidinov (MED), Rwabwogo (PSY), Blazynski (MAINT), Turpin (ORD); SSGTS

Carreras (MED), Kousnetzov (MED), Waruinge (MED). Rojas (MED), Botos (MAINT), Orban (CK), Mbugua (COMP); SGTs Perez (MED), Seales

(MAINT), Anghelov (01W), Vugin (COMP); CPLs Daborg (MED), Correa (MED), Kajdi (SEX), Valdez (SEX), Muranga (01W); PVTs Kottysch (MAINT), Rudkoski (CK), Minter (ORE)).

 

APPROVED STFCOM STARGATE 12 Mar 2458. FOR ThE COMMANDER:

Olga Torischeva BGEN STFCOM I iO

I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. Sol munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.

“Major Mandeila?” I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.

“I’m in your debt,” he said. “You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.” He offered his hand. “Jack Kynock, at your service.”

“Colonel-”

“Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossits have to. – – keep our perspective. William.”

“All right with me.”

He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. “Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t like it much, did you?” “No.” Zombies, happy robots.

“Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.” A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. “Then they got better again, then worse, then. . . I don’t know. Cycles.”

“What’s it like now?”

“Well – . – I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hmn, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.”

“I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.” He smiled. “They must have missed one.”
“For good reason. It was run by veterans-survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.”

“But didn’t win.”

“We’re still here.” He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. “Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.”

“It surprises me a little,” I said, “well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all.. – against the government’s wishes.”

He made a noncommittal sound.

“Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF-or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.”

“Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.” He settled back in his chair. “It’s not a matter of technique. if they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over. . . every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.

“They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?”

I thought for a moment. “if I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

“That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.”

Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. “Tet-17,

Sed-2l, Aleph-14. The Lazlo

‘The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report.’ June, 2106.”

“Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-l. Robots don’t make good soldiers.”

“They would,” I said. “Up to the twenty-first century. BehaViOral conditioning would have been the answer to a i to

Joe Ilauleman

general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.”

He laughed over his glass. “Then put that army up against a squad of men in modem fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.”

“So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.” The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports

had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival-and the Taurans cut them to ribbons.

The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.

Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. “I’ve seen your psych profile,” he said. “Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.”

“That’s reassuring.” I signaled for another beer. “Maybe it shouldn’t be.”

“What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.”

“Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?” I shrugged. “Classified, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you’re a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.”

“I don’t suppose it has any big surprises.” But I was a little curious. What animal isn’t fascinated by a mirror?

“No. It says you’re a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.”

The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. “No surprises yet.”

“And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you’re right, you’ll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.”

I had to laugh. “UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training.”

“There are other parameters,” he said. “For instance, you’re adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you’re one of the eleven people who’s lived through the whole war.”

“Surviving is a virtue in a private.” Couldn’t resist it.  “But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.”

He harrumphed at that. “Not when you’re a thousand light years from your replacement.”

“It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my ‘shaping up,’ when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!”

“I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.”

“That’s all time dilation. I’ve only been in three campaigns.”

“Immaterial. Besides, that’s two-and-a-half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero.”

“Folk hero.” I sipped at the beer. “Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?”

“John Wayne?” He shook his head. “I never went in the can, you know. I’m no expert at military history.”

“Forget it.”

Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him-I swear to God-a “rum Antares.”

“Well, I’m supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present.”

Still on my mind: “You’ve never been in the can?”

“No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us deskwarmers.”

“Your decorations say you’re combat.”

“Honorary. I was.” The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.

“What’s that red stuff?”

“Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good. . . want a taste?” “No, I’ll stick to beer, thanks.”

“Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to.. . prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.”

“What, they’re all cyborgs? Clones?”

He laughed. “No, it’s illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you’re heterosexual.”

“Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant.”

“Yes, your profile shows that you.. . think you’re tolerant, but that’s not the problem, exactly.”

“Oh,” I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance. “Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF.

I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”

“If they think they’re going to cure me-”

“Relax, you’re too old.” He took a delicate sip. “It won’t be as hard to get along with them as you might-”

“Wait. You mean nobody.. . everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?” “William,  everybody  on  Earth  is  homosexual.  Except  for  a  thousand  or  so;

veterans and incurables.”

“AK” What could I say? “Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.”

“Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth’s population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened.”

“Not ‘born.'”

“Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was ‘test-tube babies,’ but of course they don’t use a test-tube.” “Well, that’s something.”

“Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn’t the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.”

O brave new world, I thought. “No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.”

“Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.”

“That’s an understatement.” I drank off the rest of my beer. “Yourself, you, uh.. . are you homosexual?”

“Oh, no,” he said. I relaxed. “Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”

Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

“Make it a double, please.”

They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hail where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.

Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists-pediatricians and teachers, mostly-had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor- parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.

They’re observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He’s either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.

Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is “sociopathic,” even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.

Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about ~wo one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian.

There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you  could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn’t seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.

How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I’d been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They’d all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way. . . and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.

Most of the women were achingly  handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I’d been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.

I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander’s eccentricity. It is absolately forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, ~f the relationship iiue~feres with a unit’s combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF’s regulations could be broken SO Casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they’d look after another year, I wasn’t sure.

“Tench-hut!” That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn’t jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.

“My name is Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.” That used to be “Field First Sergeant.” A good sign that an anny has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I’d seen her profile and knew that she’d only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.

Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.

She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don’t waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.

It made me wish I’d had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster-we were scheduled to board ship the next day-and I’d only had a few words with my officers.

Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential “good guy-bad guy” situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.

We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we’d arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in “modern” armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We’d used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I’d been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.

She had them at ease while delivering this organizational harangue; pretty soon she’d call them to attention and introduce me. What would I talk about? I’d planned just to say a few predictable words and explain my Open Door policy, then turn them over to Commodore Antopol, who would say something about the Masaryk II. But I’d better put off my explanation until after I’d had a long talk with Hilleboe; in fact, it would be best if she were the one to introduce the policy to the men and women, so it wouldn’t look like the two of us were at loggerheads.

My executive officer, Captain Moore, saved me. He came rushing through a side door-he was always rushing, a pudgy meteor-threw a quick salute and handed me an envelope that contained our combat orders. I had a quick whispered conference with the Commodore, and she agreed that it wouldn’t do any harm to tell them where we were going, even though the rank and file technically didn’t have the “need to know.” One thing we didn’t have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I’d been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn’t mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed. Nor that I’d resigned from the army at the earliest opportunity and only got back in because conditions on Earth were so intolerable.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” I took her place at the podium. “At ease.” I unfolded the single sheet that had our orders, and held it up. “I have some good news and some bad news.” What had been a joke five centuries before was now just a statement of fact.

“These are our combat orders for the Sade-138 campaign. The good news is that we probably won’t be fighting, not immediately. The bad news is that we’re going to be a target.”

They stirred a little bit at that, but nobody said anything Ion

or took his eyes off me. Good discipline. Or maybe just fatalism; I didn’t know how realistic a picture they had of their future. Their lack of a future, that is.

“What we are ordered to do.. . is to find the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade- 138 collapsar and build a base there. Then stay at the base until we are relieved. That will be two or three years, probably.

“During that time we will almost certainly be attacked. As most of you probably know, Strike Force Command has uncovered a pattern in the enemy’s movements from collapsar to collapsar. They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through tune and space and find the Taurans’ home planet. For the present, they can only send out intercepting forces, to hamper the enemy’s expansion.

“In a large perspective, this is what we’re ordered to do. We’ll be one of several dozen strike forces employed in these blocking maneuvers, on the enemy’s frontier. I won’t be able to stress often enough or hard enough how important this mission is-if UNEF can keep the enemy from expanding, we may be able to envelop him. And win the war.”

Preferably before we’re all dead meat. “One thing I want to be clear we may be attacked the day we land, or we may simply occupy the planet for ten years and come on home.” Fat chance. “Whatever happens, every one of us will stay in the best fighting trim all the time. In transit, we will maintain a regular program of calisthenics as well as a review of our training. Especially construction techniques- we have to set up the base and its defense facilities in the shortest possible time.”

God, I was beginning to sound like an officer. “Any questions?” There were none. “Then I’d like to introduce Commodore Antopol. Commodore?”

The commodore didn’t try to hide her boredom as she outlined, to this room full of ground-pounders, the characteristics and capabilities of Masaryk Ii. I had learned most of what she was saying through the can’s forcefeeding, but the last thing she said caught my attention.

“Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn’t even in the galaxy proper, hut rather is part

of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant.

“Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate’s calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.”

And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn’t another person alive who meant anything to me.

“As the major said, you mustn’t let these figures lull you into complacency. The enemy is also headed for Sade-138; we may all get there the same day. The mathematics of the situation is complicated, but take our word for it; it’s going to be a close race.

“Major, do you have anything more for them?” I started to rise. “Well. . .”

“Tench-hut!” Hilleboe shouted. Had to learn to expect that

“Only that I’d like to meet with my senior officers, echelon 4 and above, for a few minutes. Platoon sergeants, you’re responsible for getting your troops to Staging Area 67 at 0400 tomorrow morning. Your time’s your own until then. Dismissed.”

 

I invited the five officers up to my billet and brought out a bottle of real French brandy. It had cost two months’ pay, but what else could I do with the money? Invest it?

I passed around glasses but Alsever, the doctor, demurred. Instead she broke a little capsule under her nose and inhaled deeply. Then tried without too much success to mask her euphoric expression.

“First let’s get down to one basic personnel problem,” I said, pouring. “Do all of you know that I’m not homosexual?”

Mixed chorus of yes sirs and no sirs.

“Do you think this is going to. . . complicate my situation as commander? As far as the rank and tile?”

“Sir, I don’t-” Moore began.

“No need for honorifics,” I said, “not in this closed 100

joe naiueman

circle; I was a private four years ago, in my own time frame. When there aren’t any troops around, I’m just Man-della, or William.” I had a feeling that was a mistake even as I was saying it. “Go on.”

“Well, William,” he continued, “it might have been a problem a hundred years ago. You know how people felt then.”

“Actually, I don’t. All I know about the period from the twenty-first century to the present is military history.”

“Oh. Well, it was, uh, it was, how to say it?” His hands fluttered.

“It was a crime,” Alsever said laconically. “That was when the Eugenics Council was first getting people used to the idea of universal homosex.”

“Eugenics Council?”

“Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.” She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. “The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.”

I didn’t know they had gone quite that far. But I suppose it was logical. “You approve? As a doctor.”

“As a doctor? I’m not sure.” She took another capsule from her pocket and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. Or something the rest of us couldn’t see.

“In a way, it makes my job simpler. A lot of diseases simply no longer exist. But I don’t think they know as much about genetics as they think they do. It’s not an exact science; they could be doing something very wrong, and the results wouldn’t show up for centuries.”

She cracked the capsule under her nose and took two deep breaths. “As a woman, though, I’m all in favor of it.” Hilleboe and Rusk nodded vigorously.

“Not having to go through childbirth?”

“That’s part of it.” She crossed her eyes comically, looking at the capsule, gave it a final sniff. “Mostly,

though, it’s not.. . having to. . . have a man. Inside me. You understand. It’s disgusting.”

Moore laughed. “If you haven’t tried it, Diana, don’t-”

“Oh, shut up.” She threw the empty capsule at him playfully. “But it’s perfectly natural,” I protested.

“So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major, progress.”

“Anyway,” Moore said, “it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable.. .”

“Dysfunction,” Alsever said.

“Thank you. And now, well, it’s so rare. .. I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.”

“Just an eccentricity,” Diana said, magnanimously. “Not as if you ate babies.” “That’s right, Mandella,” Hilleboe said. “I don’t feel any differently toward you

because of it.”

“I-I’m glad.” That was just great. It was dawning on me that I had not the slightest idea of how to conduct myself socially. So much of my “normal” behavior was based

on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I suppose to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.

I finished off my glass and set it down. “Well, thanks for your reassurances. That was mainly what I wanted to ask you about. . . I’m sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don’t let me hold you prisoner.”

They all wandered off except for Charlie Moore. He and

I decided to go on a monumental binge, trying to hit every bar and officer’s club in the sector. We managed twelve and probably could have hit them all, but I decided to get a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s muster.

The one time Charlie made a pass at me, he was very polite about it. I hoped my refusal was also polite-but figured I’d be getting lots of practice.

3

UNEF’s first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you’d tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK ii, stenciled in dull blue letters across the.

obsidian hull.

Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull.  With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).

That didn’t mean there was going to be plenty of elbowroom. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.

We had about six hours before going into the acceleration tank. I dropped my kit in the tiny billet that would be my home for the next twenty months and went off to explore.

Charlie had beaten me to the lounge and to the privilege of being first to evaluate the quality of Masaryk if’s coffee.

“Rhinoceros bile,” he said.

“At least  it  isn’t soya,” I said, taking a first cautious sip. Decided I might be longing for soya in a week.

The officers’ lounge was a cubicle about three meters by four, metal floor and walls, with a coffee machine and a

library readout. Six hard chairs and a table with a typer on it.

“Jolly place, isn’t it?” He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. “Lots of military theory.”

“That’s good. Refresh our memories.” “Sign up for officer training?”

“Me? No. Orders.”

“At least you have an excuse.” He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. “I signed up. They didn’t tell me it’d feel like this.”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t talking about any subtle problem:

burden of responsibility or anything. “They say it wears off, a little at a time.” All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.

“Ah, there you are.” Hileboe came through the door and exchanged greetings with us. She gave the room a quick survey, and it was obvious that the Spartan arrangements met with her approval. “Will you be wanting to address the company before we go into the acceleration tanks?”

“No, I don’t see why that would be. . . necessary.” I almost said “desirable.” The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I’d have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn’t in charge.

Or I could just switch insignia with her. Let her experience the joys of command. “You  could, please, round  up  all  platoon  leaders  and  go  over the  immersion

sequence with them. Eventually we’ll be doing speed drills. But for now, I think the troops could use a few hours’ rest.” If they were as hungover as their commander.

“Yes, sir.” She turned and left. A little miffed, because what I’d asked her to do should properly have been a job for Riland or Rusk.

Charlie eased his pudgy self into one of the hard chairs and sighed. “Twenty months on this greasy machine. With her. Shit.”

“Well, if you’re nice to me, I won’t billet the two of you together.” “All right. I’m your slave forever. Starting, oh, next Fri

day.” He peered into his cup and decided against drinking the dregs. “Seriously, she’s going to be a problem. What are you going to do with her?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie was being insubordinate, too, of course. But he was my XO and out of the chain of command. Besides, I had to have one friend. “Maybe she’ll mellow, once we’re under weigh.”

“Sure.” Technically, we were already under weigh, crawling toward the Stargate collapsar at one gee. But that was only for the convenience of the crew; it’s hard to batten down the hatches in free fall. The trip wouldn’t really start until we were in the tanks.

The lounge was too depressing, so Charlie and I used the remaining hours of mobility to explore the ship.

The bridge looked like any other computer facility; they had dispensed with the luxury of viewscreens. We stood at a respectful distance while Antopol and her officers went through a last series of checks before climbing into the tanks and leaving our destiny to the machines.

Actually, there was a porthole, a thick plastic bubble, in the navigation room forward. Lieutenant Williams wasn’t busy, the pre-insertion part of his job being fully automated, so he was glad to show us around.

He tapped the porthole with a fingernail. “Hope we don’t have to use this, this trip.”

“How so?” Charlie said.

“We only use it if we get lost” If the insertion angle was off by a thousandth of a radian, we were liable to wind up on the other side of the galaxy. “We can get a rough idea of our position by analyzing the spectra of the brightest stars. Thumbprints. Identify three and we can triangulate.”

“Then find the nearest collapsar and get back on the rack,” I said.

“That’s the problem. Sade-l38 is the only collapsar we know of in the Magellanic Clouds. We know of it only because of captured enemy data. Even if we could find another collapsar, assuming we got lost in the cloud, we wouldn’t know how to insert.”

“That’s great.”

“It’s not as though we’d be actually lost,” he said with I’HI~ FOREVER WAR

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a rather wicked expression. “We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We’d get there in about three months, ship time.”

“Sure,” I said. “But 150,000 years in the future.” At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you’re in the arms of Saint Albert.

“Well, that is a drawback,” he said. “But at least we’d find out who’d won the war.” It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There  were  forty-two  strike  forces  lost  somewhere  and  unaccounted  for.  It  was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and

would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries.

A convenient way to go AWOL, since once you were out of the chain of collapsar jumps you’d be practically impossible to track  down. Unfortunately,  your jump sequence was  pre-programmed by Strike Force Command; the human navigator only came into the picture if a miscalculation slipped you into the wrong “wormhole,” and you popped out in some random part of space.

Charlie and I went on to inspect the gym, which was big enough for about a dozen people at a time. I asked him to make up a roster so that everyone could work out for an hour each day when we were out of the tanks.

The mess area was only a little larger than the gym- even with four staggered shifts, the meals would be shoulder-to-shoulder affairs-and the enlisted men and women’s lounge was even more depressing than the officers’. I was going to have a real morale problem on my hands long before the twenty months were up.

The armorer’s bay was as large as the gym, mess hail and both lounges put together. It had to be, because of the great variety of infantry weapons that had evolved over the centuries. The basic weapon was still the fighting suit, though it was much more sophisticated than that first model I had been squeezed into, just before the Aleph-Null campaign.

Lieutenant Riland, the armory officer, was supervising

his four subordinates, one from each platoon, who were doing a last-minute check of weapons storage. Probably the most important job on the whole ship, when you contemplate what could happen to all those tons of explosives and radioactives under twenty-five gees.

I returned his perfunctory salute. “Everything going all right, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir, except for those damned swords.” For use in the stasis field. “No way we can orient them that they won’t be bent. Just hope they don’t break.”

I couldn’t begin to understand the principles behind the stasis field; the gap between present-day physics and my master’s degree in the same subject was as long as the time that separated Galileo and Einstein. But I knew the effects.

Nothing could move at greater than 16.3 meters per second inside the field, which was a hemispherical (in space, spherical) volume about fifty meters in radius. Inside, there was no such thing as electromagnetic radiation; no electricity, no magnetism, no light. From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome- which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to “phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,” so much phlogiston to me.

The result of it, though, was to make all conventional weapons of warfare useless. Even a nova bomb was just an inert lump inside the field. And any creature, Terran or Tauran, caught inside the field without the proper insulation would die in a fraction of a second.

At first it looked as though we had come upon the ultimate weapon. There were five engagements where whole Tauran bases were wiped out without any human ground casualties. All you had to do was carry the field to the enemy (four husky soldiers could handle it in Earth-gravity) and watch them die as they slipped in through the field’s opaque wall. The people carrying the generator were invulnerable except for the short periods when they might have to turn the thing off to get their bearings.

The sixth time the field was used, though, the Taurans were ready for it. They wore protective suits and were armed with sharp spears, with which they could breach the

suits of the generator-carriers. From then on the carriers were armed.

Only three other such battles had been reported, although a dozen strike forces had gone out with the stasis field. The others were still fighting, or still en route, or had been totally defeated. There was no way to tell unless they caine back. And they weren’t encouraged to come back if Taurans were still in control of “their” real estate-supposedly that constituted “desertion under fire,” which meant execution for all officers (although rumor had it that they were simply brainwiped, imprinted and sent back into the fray).

“Will we be using the stasis field, sir?” Riland asked.

“Probably. Not at first, not unless the Taurans are already there. I don’t relish the thought of living in a suit, day in and day out.” Neither did I relish the thought of using sword, spear, throwing knife; no matter how many electronic illusions I’d sent to Valhalla with them.

Checked my watch. “Well, we’d better get on down to the tanks, Captain. Make sure everything’s squared away.” We had about two hours before the  insertion sequence would start.

The room the tanks were in resembled a huge chemical factory; the floor was a good hundred meters in diameter and jammed with bulky apparatus painted a uniform, dull gray. The eight tanks were arranged almost symmetrically around the central elevator, the symmetry spoiled by the fact that one of the tanks was twice the size of the others. That would be the command tank, for all the senior officers and supporting specialists.

Sergeant Blazynski stepped out from behind one of the tanks and saluted. I didn’t return his salute.

“What the hell is that?” In all that universe of gray, there was one spot of color. “It’s a cat, sir.”

“Do tell.” A big one, too, and bright calico. It looked ridiculous, draped over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let me rephrase the question: what the hell is a cat doing here?”

“It’s the maintenance squad’s mascot, sir.” The cat raised its head enough to hiss half-heartedly at me, then returned to its flaccid repose.

I looked at Charlie and he shrugged back. “It seems kiAd of cruel,” he said. To the sergeant: “You won’t get much use of it. After twenty-five gees, it’ll be just so much fur and guts.”

“Oh no, sir! Sirs.” He ruffed back the fur between the

creature’s shoulders. It had a fluorocarbon fitting imbedded there, just like the one above my hipbone. “We bought it at a store on Stargate, already modified. Lots of ships have them now, sir. The Commodore signed the forms for us.”

Well, that was her right; maintenance was under both of us equally. And it was her ship. “You couldn’t have gotten a dog?” God, I hated cats. Always sneaking around.

“No, sir, they don’t adapt. Can’t take free fall.”

“Did you have to make any special adaptations? In the tank?” Charlie asked.

“No sir. We had an extra couch.” Great; that meant I’d be sharing a tank with the animal. “We only had to shorten the straps.

“It takes a different kind of drug for the cell-wall strengthening, but that was included in the price.”

Charlie scratched it behind an ear. It purred softly but didn’t move. “Seems kind of stupid. The animal, I mean.”

“We drugged him ahead of time.” No wonder it was so inert; the drug slows your metabolism down to a rate barely adequate to sustain life. “Makes it easier to strap him in.”

“Guess it’s all right,” I said. Maybe good for morale. “But if it starts getting in the way, I’ll personally recycle it.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn’t really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy.

So we had seen it all. The only thing left, this side of

the engines, was the huge hold where the fighters and drones waited, clamped in their massive cradles against the coming acceleration. Charlie and I went down to take a look, but there were no windows on our side of the airlock. I knew there’d be one on the inside, but the chamber was evacuated, and it wasn’t worth going through the fill-andwarm cycle merely to satisfy our curiosity.

I was starting to feel really supernumerary. Called Hil THE FOREVER WAR

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leboe and she said everything was under control. With an

hour to kill, we went back to the lounge and had the computer mediate a game of Kriegspieler, which was just starting to get interesting when the ten-minute warning sounded.

The acceleration tanks had a “half-life-to-failure” of five weeks; there was a fifty- fifty chance that you could stay immersed for five weeks before some valve or tube popped and you were squashed like a bug underfoot. In practice, it had to be one hell of an emergency to justify using the tanks for more than two weeks’ acceleration. We were only going under for ten days, this first leg of our journey.

Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.

So I wasn’t really surprised  that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics’ convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.

Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation

in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.

Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I’d have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.

After I got dressed. 4

We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional pariods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaiyk 11 made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise-for their own good, though I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d see it that way.

After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook’s assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn’t want to stop him- life was cheerless enough; I didn’t mind as long as people showed up for duty sober-but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of conunand in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.

If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn’t extend up to officers’ country.

Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:

Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert- jelly, custard or flan-which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a Len-cent

chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one

“working” while the other was being filled.

The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.

When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski’s Worst-literally; it was a flavor that just hadn’t worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.

Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn’t finish it.

When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.

“You have a real problem, Major William.”

“Not half the problem you’ll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana.”

“Oh not really.” She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. “Some vitamins, some glu. . . cose, an eensy cc of adren. . . aline if all else fails. You.. . you. . . have… a real.. . problem.”

“Look, Diana, don’t you want me to-”

“What you need.. . is to get an appointment with that nice Corporal Valdez.” Valdez was the male sex counselor. “He has empathy. Itsiz job. He’d make you-”

“We talked about this before, remember? I want to stay the way I am.”

“Don’t we all.” She wiped away a tear that was probably one percent alcohol. “You know they call you the Old C’reer. No they don’t.”

She looked at the floor and then at the wall. “The 01′ Queer, that’s what.”

I had expected names worse than that. But not so soon. “I don’t care. The commander always gets names.”

“I know but.” She stood up suddenly and wobbled a “U’.,

little bit. “Too much t’ drink. Lie down.” She turned her back to me and stretched so hard that a joint popped. Then a seam whispered open and she shrugged off her tunic, stepped out of it and tiptoed to my bed. She sat down and patted the mattress. “Come on, William. Only chance.”

“For Christ’s sake, Diana. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“All’s fair,” she giggled. “And ‘sides, I’m a doctor. I can be cin’cal; won’t bother me a bit. Help me with this.” After five hundred years, they were still putting brassiere clasps in the back.

One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.

Perhaps fortunately, she passed out before we had made any headway. I admired the sight and touch of her for a long time before, feeling like a cad, I managed to gather everything up and dress her.

I lifted her out of the bed, sweet burden, and then realized that if anyone saw me canying her down to her billet, she’d be the butt of rumors for the rest of the campaign. I called up Charlie, told him we’d had some booze and Diana was rather the worse for it, and asked him whether he’d come up for a drink and help me haul the good doctor home.

By the time Charlie knocked, she was draped innocently in a chair, snoring softly.

He smiled at her. “Physician, heal thyself.” I off~red him the bottle, with a warning. He sniffed it and made a face.

“What is this, varnish?”

“Just something the cooks whipped up. Vacuum still.”

He set  it down carefully, as if it might explode if jarred. “I predict a coming shortage of customers. Epidemic of death by poisoning-she actually drank that vile stuff?”

“Well, the cooks admitted it was an experiment that didn’t pan out; their other flavors are evidently potable. Yeah, she loved it.”

“Well. . .” He laughed. “Damn! What, you take her legs and I take her arms?” THE FOREVER WAR

201

“No, look, we each take an arm. Maybe we can get her to do part of the walking.” She moaned a little when we lifted her out of the chair, opened one eye and said,

“Hello, Charlee.” Then she closed the eye and let us drag her down to the billet. No one saw us on the way, but her bunkmate, Laasonen, was sitting up reading.

“She really drank the stuff, eh?” She regarded her friend with wry affection. “Here, let me help.”

The three of us wrestled her into bed. Laasonen smoothed the hair Out of her eyes. “She said it was in the nature of an experiment.”

“More devotion to science than I have,” Charlie said. “A stronger stomach, too.” We all wished he hadn’t said that.

 

Diana sheepishly admitted that she hadn’t remembered anything after the first drink, and talking to her, I deduced that she thought Charlie had been there all along. Which was all for the best, of course. But oh! Diana, my lovely latent heterosexual, let me buy you a bottle of good scotch the next time we come into port. Seven hundred years from now.

We got back into the tanks for the hop from Resh-lO to Kaph-35. That was two weeks at twenty-five gees; then we had another four weeks of routine at one gravity.

I had announced my open door policy, but practically no one ever took advantage of it. I saw very little of the troops and those occasions were almost always negative: testing them on their training review, handing out reprimands, and occasionally lecturing classes. And they rarely spoke intelligibly, except in response to a direct question.

Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal un -gua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. lf there had still been such a thing as grandparents.

I thought of my first combat commander, Captain Stott- whom I had hated just as cordially as the rest of the company did-and tried to imagine how I would have felt if he had been a sexual deviate and I’d been forced to learn a new language for his convenience.

So we had discipline problems, sure. But the wonder was that we had any discipline at all. Hilleboe was responsible for that; as little as I liked her personally, I had to give her credit for keeping the troops in line.

Most of the shipboard graffiti concerned improbable sexual geometries between the Second Field Officer and her commander.

 

From Kapb-35 we jumped to Samk-78, from there to Ayin-129 and finally to Sade-

  1. 138. Most of the jumps were no more than a few hundred light years, but the last one was 140,000-supposedly the longest collapsar jump ever made by a manned craf

The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance. When I’d studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn’t seem like much, but they’d had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

But we had more pressing problems as we flashed out of Sade-1 38’s collapsar field at three-quarters of the speed of light. There was no way to tell immediately whether the Taurans had beat us there. We launched a pre-programmed drone that would decelerate at 300 gees and take a preliminary look around. It would warn us if it detected any other ships in the system, or evidence of Tauran activity on any of the collapsar’s planets.

The drone launched, we zipped up in the tanks and the computers put us through a three-week evasive maneuver while the ship slowed down. No problems except that three weeks is a hell of a long time to stay frozen in the tank; for a couple of days afterward everybody crept around like aged cripples.

if the drone had sent back word that the Taurans were already in the system, we would immediately have stepped down to one gee and started deploying fighters and drones armed with nova bombs. Or we might not have lived that long: sometimes the Taurans could get to a ship only hours after it entered the system. Dying in the tank might not be the most pleasant way to go.

It took us a month to get back to within a couple of AUs of Sade-138, where the drone had found a planet that met our requirements.

It was an odd planet, slightly smaller than Earth but more dense. It wasn’t quite the cryogenic deepfreeze that most portal planets were, both because of heat from its core and because S Doradus, the brightest star in the cloud, was only a third of a light year away.

The strangest feature of the planet was its lack of geography. From space it looked like a slightly damaged billiard ball. Our resident physicist, Lieutenant Gim, explained its relatively pristine condition by pointing out that its anomalous, almost cometary orbit probably meant that it had spent most of its life as a “rogue planet,” drifting alone through interstellar space. The chances were good that it had never been struck by a large meteor until it wandered into Sade-138’s bailiwick and was

captured-forced  to  share  space  with  all  the  other  flotsam  the  collapsar  dragged around with it.

We left the Masaryk Ii in orbit (it was capable of landing, but that would restrict its visibility and getaway time) and shuttled building materials down to the surface with the six fighters.

It was good to get out of the ship, even though the planet wasn’t exactly hospitable. The atmosphere was a thin cold wind of hydrogen and helium, it being too cold even at noon for any other substance to exist as a gas.

“Noon” was when S Doradus was overhead, a tiny, painfully bright spark. The temperature slowly dropped at night, going from twenty-five degrees Kelvin down to seventeen degrees-which caused problems, because just be-fore dawn the hydrogen would start to condense out of the air, making everything so slippery that it was useless to do anything other than sit down and wait it out. At dawn a faint pastel rainbow provided the only relief from the black-and-white monotony of the landscape.

The ground was treacherous, covered with little granular chunks of frozen gas that shifted slowly, incessantly in the anemic breeze. You had to walk in a slow waddle to stay on your feet; of the four people who would die during the base’s construction, three would be the victims of simple falls.

The troops weren’t happy with my decision to construct the anti-spacecraft and perimeter defenses before putting up living quarters. That was by the book, though, and they got two days of shipboard rest for every “day” planetside- which wasn’t overly generous, I admit, since ship days were 24 hours long, and a day on the planet was 38.5 hours from dawn to dawn.

The base was completed in just less than four weeks, and it was a formidable structure indeed. The perimeter, a circle one kilometer in diameter, was guarded by twenty-five gigawatt lasers that would automatically aim and fire within a thousandth of a second. They would react to the motion of any significantly large object between the perimeter and the horizon. Sometimes when the wind was right and the ground damp with hydrogen, the little ice granules would stick together into a loose snowball and begin to roll. They wouldn’t roll far.

For early protection, before the enemy came over our horizon, the base was in the center of a huge mine field. The buried mines would detonate upon sufficient distortion of their local gravitational fields: a single Tauran would set one off if he came within twenty meters of it; a small spacecraft a kilometer overhead would also detonate it. There were 2800 of them, mostly lOO-microton nuclear bombs. Fifty of them were devastatingly powerful tachyon devices.

They were all scattered at random in a ring that extended from the limit of the lasers’ effectiveness, out another five kilometers.

Inside the base, we relied on individual lasers, microton

grenades, and a tachyon-powered repeating rocket launcher that had never been tried in combat, one per platoon. As a

last resort, the stasis field was set up beside the living quarters. Inside its opaque gray dome, as well as enough paleolithic weaponry to hold off the Golden Horde, we’d stashed a small cruiser, just in case we managed to lose all our spacecraft in the process of winning a battle. Twelve people would be able to get back to Stargale.

It didn’t do to dwell on the fact that the other survivors would have to sit on their hands until relieved by reinforcements or death.

The living quarters and administration facilities were all underground, to protect them from line-of-sight weapons. It didn’t do too much for morale, though; there were waiting lists for every outside detail, no matter how strenuous or risky. I hadn’t wanted the troops to go up to the surface in their free time, both because of the danger involved and the administrative headache of constantly checking equipment in and out and keeping track of who was where.

Finally I had to relent and allow people to go up for a few hours every week. There was nothing to see except the featureless plain and the sky (which was dominated by S Doradus during the day, and the huge dim oval of the galaxy at night), but that was an improvement over staring at the melted-rock walls and ceiling.

A favorite sport was to walk out to the perimeter and throw snowballs in front of the laser; see how small a snowball you could throw and still set the weapon off. It seemed to me that the entertainment value of this pastime was about equal to watching a faucet drip, but there was no real harm in it, since the weapons would only fire outward and we had power to spare.

For five months things went pretty smoothly. Such administrative problems as we had were similar to those we’d encountered on the Masaryk II. And we were in less danger as passive troglodytes than we had been scooting from collapsar to collapsar, at least until the enemy showed up.

I looked the other way when Rudkoski reassembled his still. Anything that broke the monotony of garrison duty was welcome, and the chits not only provided booze for the troops but gave them something to gamble with. I only interfered in two ways: nobody could go outside unless they were totally sober, and nobody could sell sexual favors. Maybe that was the Puritan in me, but it was, again, by the book. The opinion of the supporting specialists was split. Lieutenant Wilber, the psychiatric officer, agreed with me; the sex counselors Kajdi and Valdez didn’t. But then, they were probably coining money, being the resident “professionals.”

Five months of comfortably boring routine, and then along came Private Graubard.

 

For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short. A hundred merely normal people would probably have been at each other’s throats after a week in our caves, but these soldiers had been hand-picked for their ability to get along in close confinement.

Still there were fights. Graubard had almost killed his ex-lover Schon when that worthy made a face at him in the chow line. He had a week of solitary detention (so did Schon, for having precipitated it) and then psychiatric counseling and punitive details. Then I transferred him to the fourth platoon, so he wouldn’t be seeing Schon every day.

The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details-hell, I couldn’t transfer him to another company-and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a

corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.

THE FOREVER WAR 207

If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.

By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.

We didn’t have enough room to keep Graubard in soiltaiy detention  forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaiyk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.

We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn’t be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me- when the crazy fool decided to kill me.

Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and whatnot on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor-keen outer edge. It’s a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. (3raubard was an expert.

All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the peopie on either side of him- hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick-and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.

Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.

Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really

only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.

His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savat~ leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.

If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.

A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.

I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. “Check Hilleboe and Moore,” I mumbled, and to the troops: “Dismissed.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.

“You don’t think I have to execute him?”

“Stop twitching!” Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.

“Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.” “Charlie’s right,” Diana said. “Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.” I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot.

I didn’t need her opinion. “And if the person so chosen refuses?”

“Punish him and get another,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job.. . that obviously should be detailed.”

“Any other job, sure. But for this. . . nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.”

“If it’s so damned complicated,” Diana said, “why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.”

There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi- memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.

“Finished.” Diana set the limp hand in my lap. “Don’t

try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.”

I inspected the wound closely. “The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.”

“You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.”

“Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”

“I know that, goddainmid” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”

“Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”

“Graubard?” Charlie asked.

“That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.” “What if Hilleboe-”

“She’ll be out for another half-hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in case.”  She hurried out the door.

“The scaffold.. .” I hadn’t given that any thought. “How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.”

“Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.”

“You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.” I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. “Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.”

Charlie laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

“We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.” Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.

Suddenly the inlmnnary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man’s chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. “Over by the wall,” she ordered.

It was Graubard. “Tried to kill himself,” Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. “Heart stopped.” He’d made  a noose out of his belt; it  was still banging limply around his neck.

There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. “Get your hands off the cart!” She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.

Diana was shaking her head. “Get ready to crack him,” she said to Jarvil. “Get Doris down here.” The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.

She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.

There was a small red mark between the two electrode burns. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard’s neck.

“Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.” Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to  where I’d been sitting.  With the  corner of my eye  I  saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.

Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, “Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.” She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.

He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the
blood off her arms and said, “Got to change. Back in a minute.” I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know.

I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.

“What-oh, you want something for your hand.” She was half-dressed, unseif- conscious. “Ask Jarvil.”

“No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?”

“Oh. Well,” she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. “It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.”

“And he tried to hang himself.”

“That’s right.” She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. “I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.”

“But, Diana. . . there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.” She shrugged. “The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.” “Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.”

She looked at me curiously. “I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.” You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t

leave a mark. “He was dead when you gave him the shot?”

“That would be my professional opinion.” Deadpan. “No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.”

“Yeah. I see.”

“Is something. . . what’s the matter, William?”

Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. “Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.” I opened the door. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”

She looked straight into my eyes. “That’s true.”

 

Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses

to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him-since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome court-martial.

The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military “Justice,” Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All 1 had to do was say “You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.” And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.

My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.

So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.

The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.

The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the “the buck stops here” type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me-whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficuit because my language was an archaic

dialect that they  had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master “modern” English.

Joe tialdeman hi’)

For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening-I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me-so I stopped short. Then 1 tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.

And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times  seemed scarcely less  alien than  the enemy; even the near- certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause-if only I could have had Mary-gay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.

He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference-all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a clichй in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told!

Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.

I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We

did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge be was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance, He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.

It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

“They’re here.”

 

“I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.”

Charlie was leaning over my desk. “What?” I dumped the cat. “How long? Before you can pursue?” I asked.

“Soon as  you get off the phone.” I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk ii and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-l38, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.

The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:

Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch.

If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

“Haven’t left yet.” Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.

While we were watching a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2-Pursuit Drone. Other nunibers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. “Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.”

The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to

attack much sooner-and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.

I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the parimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.

We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice- man-sized on down.

The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before  it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right).

Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.

They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-

microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or

four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of “shotgun” rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny fiechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to hanniess vapor

at six.

The tachyon- rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the

rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.

It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive,  but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.

I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.

“Another one?” The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).

“You called Antopol?”

“Yeah.” He anticipated the next question. “It’ll take

almost a day for the signal to get there and back.” “It’s never happened before,” but of course Charlie knew that

“Maybe this coliapsar is especially important to them.”

“Likely.” So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. “I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.”

“She’ll just get it earlier.”

“I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.”

“Save it for the troops, William.” He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade138 and the new red dot, slowly moving.

 

We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.

In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair-two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.

We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem-or they had copied the process from us in the first place-because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.

They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and

drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice. The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed

to take us back to Stargate.

I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.

I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.

Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?

 

Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light-hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.

One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-l38, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just

Joe Haldeman

stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.

Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for. “We could boobytrap the place.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “This place is booby-trapped, out to twenty-five klicks.”

“No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.” “Go on.”

“There are two nova bombs in that fighter.” He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. “We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then bide everybody in the stasis field and wait.”

In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision- making, leave everything up to chance. “I don’t think it would work, Charlie.”

He seemed hurt. “Sure it would.”

“No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off-but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs-”

“We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base.

Sorry.”

I shrugged. “It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.” I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.

I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.

“We could use another fighter. Or six.”
“Use up the drones,” I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.

“How far away is the other guy?” Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. “About six light-hours.” He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. “He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.”

“Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.” Need almost a month to slow down.

At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. “Shit.”

“Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?” “No . . . have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while

before we have a ground attack.” I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.

 

I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.

The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.

The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get

joe riaiaeman

worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low- temperature superconductors for their speed.

I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit

was, and it printed out TR  398-734-009-265, “Some  Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,”

which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of

automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some “critical temperature,” the

weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to

predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.

Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. “Sixteen this time.”

“Surprised?” One of the few  things we knew about Tauran psychology  was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.

“Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.” I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.

We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four-let alone sixteen-of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.

Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They

could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome-.you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.

Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.

“This is Major Mandella.” That still sounded like a bad joke.

I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well-not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nanosecond, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.

I chinned Charlie’s frequency. “You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.” “No, thanks,” be said slowly. “I’d just as soon. . . Hey, look at this.”

The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. “That’s curious.”

“Superstitious bastards,” he said without feeling.

It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds. . . And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.

But this time there  were  fifteen new holes on  the horizon-or closer!-and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur.

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The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.

We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire.

But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.

It glittered as it droppecLthe mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I beard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip-then its engne flared and it was suddenly gone.

“What the hell?” Charlie said, quietly. The porthole. “Maybe reconnaissance.”

“I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.”

“Unless the lasers recover.” Didn’t seem likely. “We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.”

He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. “No hurry. Let’s see what they do.”

We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees- just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose-and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.

“Here they come,” Charlie said. “Eight again.” I started for the display. “Guess we’ll-”

“Wait! They aren’t drones.” The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.

“Guess they want to take the base,” he said. “Intact.” That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques.

“It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.”

I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and

northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on the other half-circle.

“I wonder,” Charlie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.”

That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy underestimate our strength. “It’s an idea. . . There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.” Or 128 or 256. I wished

our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.

I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.

If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.

I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go;  he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line- of-sight.

We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women,  ordering  them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to setup the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.

There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.

The cat jumped up on my Lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. 1 reached up to pet him and he jumped away.

The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.

The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.

“Eight more carriers out,” Charlie said. “Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.”

So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander’s position? That wasn’t too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.

The first wave could be a  throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish  the job.  Or vice  versa:  the first group would have twenty minutes to get

entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot- breach the perimeter and overrun the base.

Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used

carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).

“Three minutes.” I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, Out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.

I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?

Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected  to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.

“Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?” “I don’t see why not, sir.”

I tossed down the pen and stood up. “Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could.

I’m going topside.”

“I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”

“Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.” “I’m nзt taking orders, I’m giv-”

“You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,” Charlie said. “I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.”

“Don’t you hear what I’m saying. They’ll kill you!”

“The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but-”

“You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?” No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. “They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.”

“Didn’t you, sir?” Hilleboe said.

“To punish them? No, of course not.” Not consciously. “They were just up there when I needed. . . Hasn’t Lieutenant Brili said anything to them?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Charlie said. “Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.” Or she agreed with them. “I’d better get-”

“There!” Hilleboe shouted. The first enemy ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base.

Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the southwest.  I relayed the information to Bnll.

But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling

out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.

In the first wave.

The other seven had landed without incident, and yes, there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.

They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top- heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.

When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.

Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.

The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered

down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.

The gigawaus weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of tune, and gave them wide berth. That turned  out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.

“What the hell?”

“What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.

“The ship, the cruiser-it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.

“Where did it go?” I asked inanely.

“Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,”

attacking the cruiser with only two drones.

But he had a little help from the laws of physics.

Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.

The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.

But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.

At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; joe naiaeman

fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.

Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.

Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.

When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.

Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.

On the general frequency: “Everybody-topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.

“What the hell, Will-” “Earthquake!” How long? “Move!”

Hilleboc and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.

“Safer in the ditches?” Charlie said

“I don’t know,” I said. “Never been in an earthquake.” Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.

I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.

An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all

decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.

There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When,they were safely in position, she ducked back down. “Is that you, Major?”

“That’s right,” I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.

“What’s this about an earthquake?”

She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.

“Nobody’s come out of the airlock,” she said. “Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.”

“Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.” Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I thinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.

The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.

With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.

Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.

A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.

I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.

Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.

I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.

The tremors died down and I found my way into a

“friendly” ditch-the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.

“Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.” “That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.”

1 got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. “Sir… there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.”

“They stayed behind?” Seemed like they’d had plenty of time. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totalled.” I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.

The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements. Hilleboe called back “I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.”

“All right. Have them sit tight until-” Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. “Get some rockers on those bastards!” Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular.  But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the band lasers to do any damage.

These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64-times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.

“Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.” I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. “We’re going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we’re scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for  a minute and give covering  fire while the first and third platoons,  and support, fall back.

“First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They’ll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.” I  shouldn’t have said “retreat”; that  word wasn’t in the  book. Retrograde action.

There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight.

Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.

The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor

would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.

A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.

Inside, I could see the rocket that had missed me drifting lazily through the gloom, rising slightly as it passed through to the other side of the dome. It would vaporize the instant it came out the other side, since all of the kinetic energy it had lost in abruptly slowing down to 16.3 meters per second would come back in the form of heat.

Nine people were lying dead, facedown just inside of the field’s edge. It wasn’t unexpected, though it wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to tell the troops.

Their fighting suits were intact-otherwise they wouldn’t have made it this far-but sometime during the past few minutes’ rough-and-tumble, they had damaged the coaling of special insulation that protected them from the stasis field. So as soon as they entered the field, all electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly. Also, since no molecule in their bodies could move faster than 16.3 meters per second, they instantly froze solid, their body temperature stabilized at a cool

0.426 degrees Absolute.

I decided not to turn any of them over to find out their names, not yet. We had to get some sort of defensive position worked out before the Taurans came through the dome. If they decided to slug it out rather than wait

With elaborate gestures, I managed to get everybody collected in the center of the field, under the fighter’s tail, where the weapons were racked.

There were plenty of weapons, since we had been prepared to outfit three times this number of people. After giving each person a shield and short-sword, I traced a question in the snow: GOOD ARCHERS? RAISE HANDS. (got five volunteers, then picked out three more so that all the bows would be in use. Twenty arrows per bow. They were the most effective long-range weapons we had; the

arrows were almost invisible in their slow ifight, heavily weighted and tipped with a deadly sliver of diamond-hard C-.

I arranged the archers in a circle around the fighter (its landing fins would give them partial protection from missiles coming in from behind) and between each pair of archers put four other people: two spear-throwers, one quarterstaff, and a person armed with battleax and a dozen throwing knives. This arrangement would theoretically take care of the enemy at any range, from the edge of the field

to hand-to-hand combat.

Actually, at some 600-to-42 odds, they could probably walk in with a rock in each hand, no shields or special weapons, and still beat the shit out of us.

Assuming they knew what the stasis field was. Their technology seemed up to date in all other respects.

For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die. No one to talk to, nothing to see but the unchanging gray dome, gray snow, gray spaceship and a few identically gray soldiers. Nothing to hear, taste or smell but yourself.

Those of us who still had any interest in the battle were keeping watch on the bottom edge of the dome, waiting for the first Taurans to come through. So it took us a second to realize what was going on when the attack did stait It came from above, a cloud of catapulted darts swarming in through the dome some thiity meters above the ground, headed straight for the center of the hemisphere.

The shields were big enough that you could hide most of your body behind them by crouching slightly; the people who saw the darts coming could protect themselves

easily. The ones who had their backs to the action, or were just asleep at the switch, had to rely on dumb luck for survival; there was no way to shout a warning, and it took only three seconds for a missile to get from the edge of the dome to its center.

We were lucky, losing only five. One of them was an archer, Shubik. I took over her bow and we waited, expecting a ground attack immediately.

It didn’t come. After a half-hour, I went around the circle and explained with gestures that the first thing you were supposed to do, if anything happened, was to touch the

person on your right. He’d do the same, and so on down the line.

That might have saved my life. The second dart attack, a couple of hours later, came from behind me. I felt the nudge, slapped the person on my tight, turned around and saw the cloud descending. I got the shield over my head, and they hit a split-second later.

I set down my bow to pluck three darts from the shield and the ground attack started.

It was a weird, impressive sight Some three hundred of them stepped into the field simultaneously, almost shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the dome. They advanced in step, each one holding a round shield barely large enough to hide his massive chest. They were throwing darts similar to the ones we had been barraged with.

I set up the shield in front of me-it had little extensions on the bottom to keep it upright-and with the first arrow I shot, I knew we had a chance. It struck one of them in the center of his shield, went straight through and penetrated his suit.

It was a one-sided massacre. The darts weren’t very effective without the element of surprise-but when one came sailing over my head from behind, it did give me a crawly feeling between the shoulder blades.

With twenty arrows I got twenty Taurans. They closed ranks every time one dropped; you didn’t even have to aim. After running out of arrows, I tried throwing their darts back at them. But their light shields were quite adequate against the small missiles.

We’d killed more than half of them with arrows and spears, long before they got into range of the hand-to-hand weapons. I drew my sword and waited. They still outnumbered us by better than three to one.

When they got within ten meters, the people with the chakram throwing knives had their own field day. Although the spinning disc was easy enough to see and took more

than a half-second to get from thrower to target, most of the Taurans reacted in the same ineffective way, raising up the shield to ward it off. The razor-sharp, tempered heavy blade cut through the light shield like a buzz-saw through cardboard.

The first hand-to-hand contact was with the quarter-staffs, which were metal rods two meters long that tapered at the ends to a double-edged, serrated knife blade. The Taurans had a cold-blooded–or valiant, if your mind works that way-method for dealing with them. They would simply grab the blade and die. While the human was trying to extricate his weapon from the frozen death-grip, a Tauran swordsman, with a scimitar over a meter long, would step in and kill him.

Besides the swords, they had a bob-like thing that was a length of elastic cord that ended with about ten centimeters of something like barbed wire, and a small weight to propel it. It was a dangerous weapon for all concerned; if they missed their target it would come snapping back unpredictably. But they hit their target pretty often, going under the shields and wrapping the thorny wire around ankles.

I stood back-to-back with Private Erikson, and with our swords we managed to stay alive for the next few minutes.

When the Taurans were down to a couple of dozen survivors, they just turned around and started marching out. We threw some darts after them, getting three, but we didn’t warn to chase after them. They might turn around and start hacking again.

There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.

They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.

We moved from body to body, pulling out arrows and spears, then took up places around the fighter again. Nobody bothered to retrieve the quarterstaffs. I counted noses:

Charlie and Diana were still alive (Hilleboe had been one of the quarterstaff victims), as well as two supporting officers. Wilber and Szydlowska. Rudkoski was still alive but Orban had taken a dart.

After a day of waiting, it looked as though the enemy

had decided on a war of attrition rather than repeating the

ground attack. Darts came in constantly, not in swarms anymore, but in twos and threes and tens. And from all different angles. We couldn’t stay alert forever; they’d get somebody every three or four hours.

We took turns sleeping, two at a time, on top of the stasis field generator. Sitting directly under the bulk of the fighter, it was the safest place in the dome.

Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left.

Sometimes we’d shoot an arrow at him, for practice.

The darts stopped falling after a couple of days. I supposed it was possible that they’d simply run out of them.

Or maybe they’d decided to stop when we were down to twenty survivors.

There was a more likely possibility. I took one of the quarterstaffs down to the edge of the field and poked it through, a centimeter or so. When I drew it back, the point was melted off. When 1 showed it to Charlie, he rocked back and forth (the only way you can nod in a suit); this sort of thing had happened before, one of the first times the stasis field hadn’t worked. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator. They were probably sitting in their ships playing the Tauran equivalent of pinochle.

I tried to think. It was hard to keep your mind on something for any length of time in that hostile environment, sense-deprived, looking over your shoulder every few seconds. Something Charlie had said. Only yesterday. I couldn’t track it down. It wouldn’t have worked then; that was all I could remember. Then finally it came to me.

I called everyone over and wrote in the snow:

GET NOVA BOMBS FROM SHIP. CARRY TO EDGE OF FIELD.

MOVE FIELD.

Joe Ilableman

Szydlowska knew where the proper tools would be aboard ship. Luckily, we had left all of the entrances open before turning on the stasis field; they were electronic and would have been frozen shut. We got an assortment of wrenches from the engine room and climbed up to the cockpit. He knew how to remove the access plate that exposed a crawl space into the bomb-bay. I followed him in through the meter-wide tube.

Normally, I supposed, it would have been pitch-black.

But the stasis field illuminated the bomb-bay with the same dim, shadowless light that prevailed outside. The bomb-bay was too small for both of us, so I stayed at the end of the crawl space and watched.

The bomb-bay doors had a “manual override” so they were easy; Szydlowska just turned a hand-crank and we were in business. Freeing the two nova bombs from their cradles was another thing. Finally, he went back down to the engine room and brought back a crowbar. He pried one loose and I got the other, and we rolled them out the bomb-bay.

Sergeant Anghebov was already working on them by the time we climbed back down. All you had to do to arm the bomb was to unscrew the fuse on the nose of it and poke something around in the fuse socket to wreck the delay mechanism and safety restraints.

We carried them quickly to the edge, six people per bomb, and set them down next to each other. Then we waved to the four people who were standing by at the field generator’s handles. They picked it up and walked ten paces in the opposite direction. The bombs disappeared as the edge of the field slid over them.

There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside, and even the stasis field took notice of the fact: about a third of the dome glowed a dull pink for a moment, then was gray again. There was a slight acceleration, like you would feel in a slow elevator. That meant we  were drifting down to the bottom of the crater. Would there be a solid bottom? Or would we sink down through molten rock to be trapped like a fly in amber-didn’t pay to even think about that. Perhaps if it happened, we could blast our way out with the fighter’s gigawatt laser. Twelve of us, anyhow.

HOW LONG? Charlie scraped in the snow at my feet.

That was a damned good question. About all I knew was the amount of energy two nova bombs released. I didn’t know how big a fireball they would make, which would determine the temperature at detonation and the size of the crater. I didn’t know the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, or its boiling point I wrote: ONE WEEK, SHRUG?

HAVE TO THINK.

The ship’s computer could have told me in a thousandth of a second, but it wasn’t talking. I started writing equations m the snow, trying to get a maximum and minimum figure for the length of time it would take for the outside to cool down to 500 degrees. Anghelov, whose physics was much more up-to-date, did his own calculations on the other side of the ship.

My answer said anywhere from six hours to six days (although for six hours, the surrounding rock would have to conduct heat like pure copper), and Anghelov got five hours to 41/2 days. I voted for six and nobody else got a vote.

We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played chess by scraping symbols in the snow; I was never able to hold the shifting positions of the pieces in my mind. I checked my figures several times and kept coming up with six days. I checked Anghelov’s computations~ too, and they seemed all right, but I stuck to my guns. It wouldn’t hurt us to stay in the suits an extra day and a half. We argued good-naturedly in terse shorthand.

There had been nineteen of us left the day we tossed the bombs outside. There were still nineteen, six days later, when I paused with my hand over the generator’s cutoff switch. What was waiting for us out there? Surely we had killed all the Taurans within several klicks of the explosion.

But there might have been a reserve force farther away, now waiting patiently on the crater’s lip. At least you could push a quarterstaff through the field and have it come back whole.

I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they night not get us with a single shot. Then, ready to turn it ,ack on immediately if anything went wrong, I pushed.

8

My radio was still tuned to the general frequency; after more than a week of silence my ears were suddenly assaulted with loud, happy babbling.

We stood in the center of a crater almost a kilometer wide and deep. Its sides were a shiny black crust shot through with red cracks, hot but no longer dangerous. The hemisphere of earth that we rested on had sunk a good forty meters into the floor of the crater, while it had still been molten, so now we stood on a kind of pedestal.

Not a Tauran in sight

We rushed to the ship, sealed it and filled it with cool air and popped our suits. I didn’t press seniority for the one shower; just sat back in an acceleration couch and took deep breaths of air that didn’t smell like recycled Mandella.

The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life support systems. I sent a repeating message to the other fighter, which was still over six weeks away, that we were in good shape and waiting to be picked up. 1 was reasonably certain he would have seven free berths, since the normal crew for a combat mission was only three.

It was good to walk around and talk again. I officially suspended all things military for the duration of our stay on the planet. Some of the people were survivors of Brill’s mutinous bunch, but they didn’t show any hostility toward mc.

We played a kind of nostalgia game, comparing the various eras we’d experienced on Earth, wondering what it would be like in the 700-years-future we were going back to. Nobody mentioned the fact that we would at best go back to a few months’ furlough and then be assigned to another strike force, another turn of the wheel.

Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what counhiy my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.

I got to kill a good half-hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were “hippies” (a kind of subculture in the late-twentieth- century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn’t be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man’s name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them-I narrowly missed having a much shorter name-and they settled on Mandala.

A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.

They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.

The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the preprogrammed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn’t.

We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.

We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from Looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.

There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn’t get any furlough at all.

I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn’t have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we’d started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.

We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they’d never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit)-and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We’d never managed to get one intact.

Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.

We went through an airlock under a “returnees” sign.

After the air cycled and we’d popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hail at the end of the corridor to our left.

The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I’d worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.

The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way-I knew she had; I’d been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.

Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.

We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.

The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.
I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle.

To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.

The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because.. . you’re free men and women. The war is over.”

Disbelieving silence.

“As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 A.D.

“You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.”

He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

“Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is  there such a thing as  an economy, in which to use these . .. things.”

“As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.

“I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.”

“I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.

“No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.

“There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it.

Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.”

Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.

“You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage.

Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let.. . they encourage. . . men and women to do the again? Together?”

The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. ‘1 only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.”

She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, “Never been seduced by a computer before,”

Charlie muttered.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?”

The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.

Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it.

They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history.

You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.

The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost.

The Taurans, the book explained, couldn’t communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth’s cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other.

The book stated this as a bald fact. lasked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn’t understand it. There were no words for it. and my brain wouldn’t be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words.

All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I’d accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.

Man was a pretty considerate entity. Just for us twentytwo, he went to the trouble of rejuvenating a little restaurant-tavern and staffing it at all hours (I never saw a Man eat or drink-guess they’d discovered a way around it). I was sitting in there one evening, drinking beer and reading their book, when Charlie came in and sat down next to me. Without preamble, he said, “I’m going to give it a try.” “Give what a try?”

“Women. Hetero.” He shuddered. “No offense. .. it’s not really very appealing.” He patted my hand, looking distracted. “But the alternative.. . have you tried it?”

“Well. . . no, I haven’t.” Female Man was a visual treat, but only in the same sense as a painting or a piece of sculpture. I just couldn’t see them as human beings.

“Don’t.” He didn’t elaborate. “Besides, they say-he says, she says, it says-that they can change me back just as easily. If I don’t like it.”

“You’ll like it, Charlie.”

“Sure that’s what they say.”  He ordered a stiff drink. “Just  seems unnatural. Anyway, since, uh, I’m going to make the switch, do you mind if. . . why don’t we plan on going to the same planet?”

“Sure, Charlie, that’d be great.” I meant it. “You know where you’re going?” “Hell, I don’t care. Just away from here.”

“I wonder if Heaven’s still as nice-”

“No.” Charlie jerked a thumb at the bartender. “He lives there.” “I don’t know. I guess there’s a list.”

A man came into the tavern, pushing a cart piled high with folders. “Major Mandella? Captain Moore?”

“That’s us,” Charlie said.

“These are your military records. I hope you find them of interest. They were transferred to paper when your strike force was the only one outstanding, because it would have been impractical to keep the normal data retrieval networks running to preserve so few data.”

They always anticipated your questions, even when you didn’t have any.

My folder was easily live times as thick as Charlie’s. Probably thicker than any other, since I  seemed to be the only trooper  who’d made it through the whole duration. Poor Marygay. “Wonder what kind of report old Stott filed about me.” I flipped to the front of the folder.

Stapled to the front page was a small square of paper.

All the other pages were pristine white, but this one was tan with age and crumbling around the edges.

The handwriting was familiar, too familiar even after so long. The date was over 250 years old.

I winced and was blinded by sudden tears. I’d had no reason to suspect that she might be alive. But I hadn’t really known she was dead, not until I saw that date.

“William? What’s-”

“Leave me be, Charlie. Just for a minute.” I wiped my eyes and closed the folder. I shouldn’t even read the damned note. Going to a new life, I should leave the old ghosts behind.

But even a message from the grave was contact of a sort. I opened the folder again.

11 Oct 2878

William- All this is in your personnel file. But knowing you, you might just chuck it. So 1 made sure you’d get this note.

Obviously, I Live. Maybe you will, too. Join me.

I know from the records that you’re out at Sade138 and won’t be back for a couple of centuries. No problem.

I’m going to a planet they call Middle Finger, the fifth plane: out from Mizar. It’s two collapsar jumps, ten months subjective. Middle Finger is a kind of Coventry for heterosexuals. They call it a “eugenic control baseline.”

No matter. it took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine.

So i’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you ‘re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here. Hurry!

I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. if I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.

-Marygay.

“Say, bartender.” “Yes, Major?”

“Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?”

“Of course it is. Where else would it be?” Reasonable question. “A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don’t think it’s exciting enough.”

“What’s this all about?” Charlie said.

I handed the bartender my empty glass. “I just found out where we’re going.”

EPILOGUE

From The New Voice, Paxton, Middle Finger 24-6 14/2/3143

OLD-TIMER HAS FIRST BOY

Mazygay Potter-Mandella (24 Post Road, Paxton) gave birth Friday to a  fine baby boy, 3.1 kilos.

Maiygay lays claim to being the seoond-“oldeet” resident of Middle Finger, having been born In 1977. She fought through most of the Forever War and then waited for her mate on the time shuttle, 261 years.

The baby, not yet iwned, was delivered at home with the help of a friend of the family, Dr. Diana Aleever-Moore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe Haldeman was born in the USA ifl 1943. At college he studied physics and astronomy He then served as a combat engineer in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. He was severely wounded during the war and received a Purple Heart. Haldeman’s first SF story was ‘Out of Phase’, published in 1969. The Forever War was published in 1974 and became a huge success, winning both a Nebula award in 1975 and a Hugo in 1976. He wrote two other novels in the 1970s, Mindbridge and All My Sins Remembered, before starting the Worlds sequence in 1981. A novella version of The Hemingway Hoax (1990) won both Nebula and Hugo awards ifl ’90 and ‘9! respectively More recent titles include J’fone So Blind and 1968. Haldeman now combines his writing career with a position as adjunct professor teaching writing at MIT His latest novel, Forever Peace, won the igg8 Hugo award, and will be published in ~ by Millennium. He is presently working on a sequel to The Forever War, entitled Forever Free.

The End

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A collection of opinions from outside of America regarding the American behavior at the China and USA meeting in Alaska 19MAR21

In the first 100 days of the Biden Presidency, the international world awaited to see how the new administration would handle itself. Many remained hopeful. Certainly Mr. Biden, a seasoned diplomat, and a member of the “dove” (political) party would soften the anti-China attacks, and reach-out to China and the world. The Alaska meeting, would thus lay out a foundation of what the international community would be able to expect in United States and China affairs in the next few years.

This is what China was expecting…

"We hope that through the dialogue, the two sides can focus on cooperation, manage differences and promote the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations in accordance with the spirit of the conversation between the two heads of state."

And the actual meeting was stunning.

It really was.

When the meeting opened up, the American “negotiation” team came out with fists slinging making all sorts of demands. No time for pleasantries. The American team immediately began telling China how to handle it’s internal domestic matters, manage it’s territories, and govern it’s cities.  It told them that it must obey the “US-Led rule of law” instead of UN conventions. It did not offer help, assistance, or propose ideas of joint cooperation. The opening statements made by the American delegation were a long list of demands, complaints, and accusations.

Then after that first volley was fired, A delegation member added…

“Of course, we only want peace, no one wants war”.

Which in "bully speak" is actually translated as...
"Obey our demands or we will plummet you into a bloody pulp".

Then when it was time for the Chinese to respond, they politely told the American delegation to go to Hell.

When the Chinese delegation arrived in Alaska, their hearts were chilled by the biting cold, but even more by the reception from their American hosts. Blinken and his State Department may felt quite proud of their efforts to isolate and embarrass China ahead of the meeting in Anchorage. 

But after facing insult after insult, the Chinese delegation stood up and said "No!" to Western condescension and bullying.

The U.S. had better get used to it.

-CGTN

American reporting

Of course, the United States media is a little confused by this. The Conservative Hard-Right and neocon websites are all so proud that “America is staying tough on China”, and the mainstream media is reporting that the meeting did not go well, but that is expected as the Chinese were so demanding…

Here’s a pro-America article that is accusing China of being arrogant. When the obvious arrogance comes from the United States.

  • No lunch. Cold instant noodles for lunch.
  • Demanding China allow American NGO’s in Xinjiang.
  • Demanding that the US dictate how Hong Kong be governed.
  • Demanding how China handles it’s state of Taiwan.
  • Demanding how China handles it’s state of Tibet.
  • Demanding how, who, and what China does on the international scene.

While the title is spot-on, the content must have been written before the meeting. It seemed like some kind of “boiler plate” text, and did not match up with the title nor the actual events which transpired.

The article is certainly pro-America with statements such as…

“They (the Chinese) came to dictate.

China’s arrogant and insecure leaders are at their most dangerous. 

Deterrence is failing. 

Biden’s most urgent task is to reestablish it.”

Which is nonsense.

China told them to FUCK OFF and mind their own business. China follows the International rule of law as determined by the UN, not the biggest thug on the block. And that they were aghast at the rudeness, the arrogance, and the sheer demanding tone set forth by the American delegation.

This article was so brief and devoid of facts, I have more characters on my mail box address than the content of this “article“.

Here’s some links to more American based articles all parroting the idea that the negotiations were “contentious and rocky”. All the articles in the American media parrot this predetermined narrative…

Conservative Media

Mainstream Media

It’s not just this, but this same week Biden directly insulted the President of Russia a “Killer”. And thus, within the span of one week, the United States has collectively and intentionally insulted the two other major nations. This does not bode well.

I can tell you that the rest of the world is actually horrified, and if you read what they have to say, you will get a better idea about what is actually going on. Lord help us.

Comments from the rest of the world

These comments are very insightful.

They provide a vision of how America is viewed in the world today, and what people (outside of the American media echo chamber) think. If for anything else, it will give you, the MM reader, and idea of the size and scope of the monster that America has turned into.

Here’s the comments…

The Chinese emphasis on most of the world rejecting a US-directed 'rules-based order' ...

...instead of honoring the UN Charter and settled international law ...

...is of supreme importance and must be re-emphasized ad nauseum.

Posted by: chet380 | Mar 19 2021 19:16 utc | 1

I'm glad China says what every country should have been saying for the last 40 years. 

The US is a liar and always has been.

Posted by: Jezabeel | Mar 19 2021 19:17 utc | 2

What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots. 

It was an exhibition of a total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium. 

The Chinese's confident offensive resulted in a rapid emotional dive from a state of megalomaniac bravado to shaky self-confidence. 

In comparison they made even Trump look like a cultivated gentleman.

Posted by: Sadde | Mar 19 2021 19:22 utc | 3

To translate from Orwellian Western Newspeak to English:

'Rules-based order' means 
'Our rules for you, 
that we don't have to follow, 
and can change anytime we like.'

'International order' means 
'Western-ruled-world order.'

'International community' means 
the US-led Western community and vassal states. 
(The Western media spouts this all the time.)

'Rules-based' is the modern day incarnation of Americans/British throwing around the phrase 'treaty', 'treaty-based' in colonial days. 

Different words, same con.

And of course the Chinese have a few things to say…

Such as

From surrendering to Western powers in 1901, to telling the US in 2021 it doesn't have the qualification to speak to China “from a position of strength”

China needs to convey in a language that US understands.

Straight Forward, Up to the Point, Right at their Faces.

The construct of their brains cannot understand any other ways, Least Not the Diplomatic 'Soft' & Amicable Styles of Communications.

They perceive those to be Weak.

And then we have more Western comments…

USA provided a transcript of both US Govt & China Govt speakers.

I thought this a little unusual, as foreign miminstries like to publish their own transcripts so that they control the authentic translation of their words, free from the opposing parties editing or mis-translation.

"cutthroat competition" may be an arguably alternative translation of "strangle" in the China readout "those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end."

I was waiting for the China verbatim translation to check the fidelity of the USA translation.

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/t1862641.shtml
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/t1862643.shtml

But there is only an unquoted report, which is the meeting, but without quotation marks to distinguish between the authors voice and the Officials voice.

Verbatim would be better.

Maybe the USA had reciprocal concerns about the verbatim accuracy of the China transcript.

But its on video anyway, so???

Posted by: powerandpeople | Mar 19 2021 19:37 utc | 7

Toothless sabre rattling is about all the USA has left. 

A bunch of old men with a world view from the 1950s whose own virility is long gone is not going to come to an epiphany about their encroaching impotence. The Establishment has no other choice, absent common sense and critical thinking, but to double-down on arrogant self-righteousness bred by sophomoric jingoism that defines 'shallow.'

Empire is crumbling before our eyes. The question is will it take the rest of the world with it as it falls into its own footprint.

Posted by: gottlieb | Mar 19 2021 19:39 utc | 9

And we have this…

 Footage of China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi lashing out at U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Anchorage, Alaska, was played repeatedly by China’s state-backed media at home.

“China has Chinese-style democracy,” Yang said, not mincing words in his first encounter with the U.S. President Joe Biden’s team.

“Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States.”

The Communist Party Politburo member assailed the U.S., feeding fiery words to the news corps of both countries.

And I really love this next comment. It pretty much sums up my thinking…

Perhaps one of the more predictable mistakes the US will commit next, is misinterpret the stern warnings of the past few days by Russia, China and even NK, as evidence the new Biden/Blinken regime is less feared or respected than the Trump/Pompeo one.

I suspect a more accurate interpretation would be...

"ok, you had the crazy guy for 4 years and we cut you some slack, hoping once the grown ups were back we could reason as adults, but if you're gonna carry on with the same attitude, basically, Democrat or Republican, you can all summarily go fuck yourselves".

Particularly at the end of the term, the Obama regime was already being met by a very hostile China and Russia, well before Trump took over with his less than diplomatic style (or lack thereof). Anyone recall the airport security debacle with China during Obama's last weeks?

Posted by: Et Tu | Mar 19 2021 19:51 utc | 12

Who will fill the empty shoes of the lost and vanished Homo sapiens sapiens?

Posted by: Copeland | Mar 19 2021 19:55 utc | 13

And this…

.

Which compares the Alaskan meeting of 2021 with the meeting of 1901 which allowed the Western nations to rape, pillage, and destroy China for decades. Perhaps this picture might be a better illustration…

And FOX news reported on the event

It was of course very pro-America. Leading to this comment…

How our interaction w/China was reported FOX did a full throated, fake narrative just to suit their pro-Trump agenda. When they quoted, 'you cannot talk to us from a position of strength' they made is sound like the Chinese were scoffing at Blinken's weakness rather than his moral turpitude. They made it sound like Blinken surrendering to his Chinese overlords, squandering the strong hand the Trump gave him.

In FOX land, all that matters is that you come up with a great sounding argument. The truthfulness of that arguments is not relevant.

Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Mar 19 2021 19:55 utc | 14

This is how things look to the rest of the world…

The USA's situation is very dire indeed. The Americans are resorting more and more to "Hail Mary" moves to keep their hegemonic position.

And even then they're blundering. 

I would not be surprised at all if they start to straight out have to falsify diplomatic transcripts in order to try to create something favorable to them.

Posted by: vk | Mar 19 2021 20:05 utc | 17

Related to US-China tensions, if anyone likes documentary shows, CNA (Channel News Asia, a broadcaster out of Singapore) has a good four-part documentary released in January 2021 called "When Titans Clash", about the US-China trade/tech tensions, that I would recommend. (I watched the first two yesterday and will watch the other two this weekend.)

Each of the 4 parts is about 48 minutes long and available for watching on YouTube and CNA's website too.

When Titans Clash - part 1 of 4 - Pride & Shame - The Roots of US-China Tensions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL2gBUxblO8

When Titans Clash - part 2 of 4 - The Real Losers of the US-China Trade War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mYrWYSTW28

When Titans Clash - part 3 of 4 - A US-China Tech War - The True Costs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8XnLW26bmg

When Titans Clash - part 4 of 4 - US or China - Will Southeast Asia Have to Pick a Side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8A5jiGICM

Touches on some of the things ak74 mentioned in his comment on the other thread: outsourcing, deindustrialization, the US dollar as reserve currency, etc.

It's from Pearl Forss who was also involved in CNA's 2015-2019 series "The New Silk Road", about China's BRI, that I can recommend as well.

Posted by: Canadian Cents | Mar 19 2021 20:07 utc | 19

And Scott Addams has a thing to say…

And from Northern Europe…

The world appreciates that Russia and China give the US Regime a sublime verbal spanking.

Posted by: Norwegian | Mar 19 2021 20:14 utc | 23

Blinken is Secretary of State for USA, head of the US State Department.

He mentioned in his nomination hearing, & makes allusion in this meeting with China, to a genocide in Xinjiang.

Foreign Affairs magazine article reports US State Department legal office saying they have no evidence for a genocide in Xinjiang.

Is Blinken in touch with his department?

Posted by: dave constable | Mar 19 2021 20:22 utc | 27

same deal as @ 26 dave constable notes too... accusing others of genocide when you have been the main merchant of death on the planet the past 40 or more years doesn't stand.. if anyone is the killer here it is the usa, so the irony isn't lost on everyone..

Posted by: james | Mar 19 2021 20:38 utc | 31

In my opinion, the Chinese representatives gave a good answer to the American side, although this answer will obviously not be heard.

The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about?

A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.

Posted by: alaff | Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 33

b Posted:

“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world,” Blinken said.

The 'rules based order' means 'do what we say' and is of course unacceptable. Here is how the Chinese replied:

What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called “rules-based” international order.

Say it to uncle Sam. Say it every time they meet. The bankruptcy of the "rules based order" gang of five or six is a failure.

For all its appalling faults the UN and established international courts are the place to go. Suck it up uncle Sam.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Mar 19 2021 20:59 utc | 35

And from my email

I am so happy 😊 China tell the oppressor to piss off.
Attached short video with English translation: China tell US you are not qualify to tell us you want to talk to us with strength. 20 to 30 years ago, you already not qualify…

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/US-China-tensions/How-it-happened-Transcript-of-the-US-China-opening-remarks-in-Alaska

More comments…

“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world,” Blinken said.

LOL.

You really have to wonder if the Americans believe their own bullshit about their hollowed "Rules Based International Order"?

The violent and unstable world is ALREADY here thanks to ... this very same American "Rules" Based Order.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Somalia--these are just a few of the countries America has either invaded, bombed, or supported moderate jihadi Head-Choppers against to destabilize in the past generation.

Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/cost-s09.html?view=print

Posted by: ak74 | Mar 19 2021 21:31 utc | 40

This is interesting. 

Apparently both the Russians and the Chinese have concluded that Biden intends to use "CornPop" faux-macho posturing as his foreign policy, and they have both decided that "fuck that, let's nip this in the bud".

Because it looks like they have decided they have had a gut-full of US "exceptionalism" and are quite determined to say so. 

To anyone, but especially to the Americans.

Going to be a lot of very confused people at Foggy Bottom. They may never have experienced this degree of contempt before.

Posted by: Yeah, Right | Mar 19 2021 22:08 utc | 46

I about fell on the floor when I read Blinken's words, my first thought being "this klutz has zero knowledge of history since 1588 and just admitted as much. 

In China, Blinken would never achieve any position of power.

The decadence of the Outlaw US Empire's government is like so many prions turning brain tissue into a swiss-cheese-like mass and then boasting about how finely tuned are its cognitive abilities. And when Harris is installed, we'll have a genuine novice in charge--The Blind leading the Blind.

It's no wonder the Chinese sought an audience with Lavrov ASAP.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 19 2021 22:10 utc | 47

Yes. The meeting went so bad that the already tight China-Russia relationship was strengthened. I am sure that certain actions, policies and activities were on hold pending he result of these “talks”. But the American actions were so appalling that China and Russia have decided that more forceful means of persuasion are necessary.

Contrived moulded whatever the case I leave this excerpt. I feel it hits the head.

Here's what journalist Joe Bageant wrote in 2007:

Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. 

It is about making sure that they—and we—refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom." 

Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American empire. 

("American Empire! I like the sound of that!" they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.) 

"The people" doing our hardest work and fighting our wars are not altruistic and probably never were. 

They don't give a rat's bunghole about the world's poor or the planet or animals or anything else. Not really. 

"The people" like cheap gas. 

They like chasing post-Thanksgiving Day Christmas sales. 

And if fascism comes, they will like that too if the cost of gas isn't too high and Comcast comes through with a twenty-four-hour NFL channel.

That is the American hologram. 

That is the peculiar illusion we live within, the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique. 

And it will remain in force until the whole shiteree comes down around our heads. 

Working people do not deny reality. 

They create it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction. 

Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. 

That's what they voted for—an armed and moral republic. 

And that's what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.
Genuine moral values have jack to do with politics. 

But in an obsessively religious nation, values remain the most effective smoke screen for larceny by the rich and hatred and fear by the rest. 

What Christians and so many quiet, ordinary Americans were voting for in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 was fear of human beings culturally unlike themselves, particularly gays and lesbians and Muslims and other non-Christians. 

That's why in eleven states Republicans got constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage on the ballot. 

In nine of them the bill passed easily. 

It was always about fearing and, in the worst cases, hating "the other."
Being a southerner, I have hated in my lifetime. 

I can remember schoolyard discussions of supposed "nigger knifing" of white boys at night and such. 

And like most people over fifty, it shows in my face, because by that age we have the faces we deserve. 

Likewise I have seen hate in others and know it when I see it. 

I am seeing more of it now than ever before in my lifetime, which is saying something considering that I grew up down here during the Jim Crow era. 

Fanned and nurtured by neoconservative elements, the hate is every bit equal to the kind I saw in my people during those violent years.

Irrational. Deeply rooted. Based on inchoate fears.

The fear is particularly prevalent in the middle and upper-middle classes here, the very ones most openly vehement about being against using the words nigger and fuck. 

They are what passes for educated people in a place like Winchester. 

You can smell their fear. 

Fear of losing their advantages and money. 

Fear there won't be enough time to grab and stash enough geet to keep themselves and their offspring in Chardonnay and farting through silk for the next fifty years. 

So they keep the lie machinery and the smoke generators cranking full blast as long as possible, hoping to elect another one of their own kind to the White House—Democratic or Republican, it doesn't matter so long as they keep the scam going. 

The Laurita Barrs speak in knowing, authoritative tones, and the inwardly fearful house painter and single-mom forklift driver listen and nod. 

Why take a chance on voting for a party that would let homos be scout masters?
(Dear Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, chapter 2)

Posted by: ld | Mar 19 2021 22:20 utc | 48

How shameful to have insults thrown by US leadership at both China and Russia in less than a week! Is that a record?

Posted by: juliania | Mar 19 2021 22:28 utc | 51

Well, the US is obviously in a deep crisis: riots all over the place, the southern border is a mess, and the government even needs the national guard to protect itself from the people.

Under the circumstances, one should expect the establishment to act hysterically. It's just a symptom.

Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Mar 19 2021 22:32 utc | 53

The madness of the Outlaw Empire is not about to shrink from bringing down the curtain on the human race, if that's what it takes to see their power of command obeyed. 

The US, as it is today, doesn't respect any nation's sovereignty and is mostly indifferent to allies and foes alike. 

The regime considers itself the only sovereign worthy of such title on earth; and expects to be allowed to run the table at its pleasure, or else it will supervise the burning down of the house.

Biden meanders about, not even possessed of his right mind, holding on to the delusions and lies of several presidents who lately came before him; and he is just the man to keep all the fires of destruction burning, while the torture of innocence is unceasing, and as the arrogant demands made against other countries become more absurd. What else is more obvious? 

These are the things we have seen foreshadowed before and after 9/11.

As long ago as the 80s Reagan was told about the reality of nuclear winter. 

In A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut described how scientists explained to G.W. Bush that a nuclear exchange of even a moderate duration and size, could still depopulate the earth of most of its people. 

The Bush Administration, toying with the idea of deploying baby nukes, for strategic exigency, short of total war, went with "guesswork" rather than prudent scientific advice. 

It was their best guess that the circumspect, abbreviated use of nukes wouldn't destroy humanity itself, or cause ice age conditions, or bring about global starvation.

Posted by: Copeland | Mar 19 2021 22:37 utc | 54

Re Sadde @3 "What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots. It was an exhibition of a total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium."

Seems like just the other day I was reading the same description about Pompeo lol. And yet somehow this is much worse, as we have a clearly demented, recently installed "president" who can't make it up a flight of stairs or give a press conference, who has the nuclear football following him around 24/.7.

Been nice knowing y'all.

Posted by: Perimetr | Mar 19 2021 22:55 utc | 55

This next comment is also pretty good…

Well Russia has been very seriously preparing for total war for some years now, and China too has caught that drift and begun to do the same. 

By comparison, the US is ready for aggravation, but nothing beyond that. 

The US has no capability for war.

How then, for the free nations of the world to defeat the US? 

One could surmise that the best way would be to force the US to accept defeat. 

Iran already showed the way. 

The lesson is not that hard to understand, although the tactics are obviously more complex. 

Who will punch the bully? 

Because we all know that this is what causes the bully to slink away, and to behave a little better.

It begins with words, because that's what the US likes to fight with, treating then merely as weapons, treating them with contempt. 

And now words of contempt itself, as Yeah Right @45 points out, are being driven forward like a moving wall against the US.

First come the words. Next will come...

...whatever will come, but it is a certainty that the Russia/China team has every contingency war-gamed.

As Piotr Berman points out in the previous thread, the US neurotic dynamic is to escalate blindly until it achieves control. 

This is the dynamic that must be defeated. 

Obviously, this will involve situations in which the US has nothing left to escalate with (situations that don't allow the nuke specter)...

...at which point, the US has to slink away - under cover of words of bluster, to be sure, to salve the ego, but slink away even so.

And a few more of these lessons of defeat will re-train that ego, over time, lessons carefully administered, and all watched over by armies of loving grace.

Posted by: Grieved | Mar 19 2021 23:05 utc | 56

This is also a pretty good comment…

Blenkin and co just got thoroughly washed in a Chinese laundry, washed clean dried and starched, ready to put on their fully cleaned washed self's for taste of some Russian pastries. 

Soon after on the coming Iranian 13th day of the new year (thirteenth out) they can go for an Iranian picnic for taste of gourmet delicious Persian soup (Ash). 

I really enjoyed the Chinese exchange with shining city on hill guys, Happy Iranian new year and New century (1400) to you all, MOA and b.

Posted by: kooshy | Mar 19 2021 23:10 utc | 58

Suffice it to say, I love the Chinese (and they highly cultured ways etc) when they talk and act like this to the barbarians aka the Americans.

Everything the Chinese FM said was correct, and spot on.

Blinken and Bush are as boorish and rude, perhaps even more condescending than Pompeo and Trump - But it is hard to choose between the lesser of two American evils

Posted by: michaelj72 | Mar 19 2021 23:14 utc | 60

The editors at Strategic-Culture see it this way:

"In a desperate bid to thwart the strategic partnership between Russia and Europe, Washington is resorting to ever-more frantic threats of sanctions and other disruptive measures. 

Biden is playing the personal insult card in a gambit for blowing up bilateral relations with Russia as a way to sabotage Nord Stream 2.

"It’s a pathetic move, one that actually speaks more of America’s historic enfeeblement rather than pretensions of power. Russia would do well to stay calm and let the Americans make fools of themselves."

It seems Russia's doing just that--attending to the vital business of developing its nation and peoples. Russia's geared for numerous patriotic celebrations throughout the year, and Biden's comments were made on the eve of Crimean reunification with Russia, which only served to cement Russians closer and hold Putin in even greater esteem. Talk about an Own Goal!

Outlaw US Empire Nord Stream policy is close to being the same as literally torpedoing it, making it an act of war against the EU and Russia. Somehow, I don't think Blinken understands that fundamental fact.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 19 2021 23:15 utc | 61

The fact that Blinken has to read what he supposedly thinks, compared with the Chinese representatives and diplomats like Lavrov, Zakarov, and even Putin who know their thoughts without someone else writing their script.

Same as all the MSM. They all appear to get their news sent to them in writing and maybe a few fluff up the news but they know what the agenda is.

Posted by: arby | Mar 19 2021 23:20 utc | 62

So in just a matter of weeks, the US just antagonized both Russia and China.

This seems a surprise to me, US is getting very bold, I thought they would be more active but subversive, but this is just straight up insulting your opponents.

Posted by: Smith | Mar 19 2021 23:23 utc | 63

I'm in the middle of Armstrong's essay and am at the first reference to Kagan's vision:

"What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire,' the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America’s security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.'

It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire; for aside from "advancing its interests," the Parasites have zero motivation to do any of that.

As their sole ambition/goal is to vacuum up all the wealth they can and leave a shell just as they planned and failed with Russia, but have succeeded elsewhere. 

And as for principles, the reality is it has none, nor does it have any friends, just vassals and victims. 

This analogy by Armstrong's excellent:

"The U.S. is sitting on a dragon and it daren’t get off or the dragon will kill it. But because it can’t kill the dragon, it must sit on it forever: no escape. And dragon’s eggs are hatching out all around: think how much bigger the Russian, Chinese and Iranian dragons are today than they were a quarter-century ago when Kagan & Co so confidently started PNAC; think how bigger they’ll be in another....

"But the more sanctions, the stronger Russia gets: as an analogy, think of sanctions on Russia as similar to the over-use of antibiotics – Russia is becoming immune."

And tying it all up is this excellent summation:

"Has there ever been a subject on which people have been so wrong for so long as Russia? How many times have they said Putin’s finished? Remember when cheese was going to bring him down? Always a terminal economic crisis. A year ago they were sure COVID would do it. A U.S. general is in Ukraine and Kiev’s heavy weapons are moving east but, no, it’s Putin who, for ego reasons – and his “failing” economy – wants the war. Why do they keep doing it? Well, it’s easy money – Putin (did we tell you he was in the KGB?) wants to expand Russia and rule forever; therefore, he’s about to invade somebody. He doesn’t, no problem, our timely warning scared him off; we’ll change the date and regurgitate it next year. In the meantime his despotic rule trembles because of some-triviality-of-the-moment. These pieces write themselves: the anti-Russia business is the easiest scam ever. And there’s the difficulty of admitting you’re wrong: how can somebody like Kagan, such a triumphantasiser back then, admit that it’s all turned to dust and worse, turned to dust because they took his advice? Much better to press on – it’s not as if anybody in the lügenpresse will call him out or deny him space. Finally, these people are locked in psychological projection: because they can only envisage military expansion, they assume the other guy is equally obsessed and so they must expand to counter his expansion. They suspect everybody of suspecting them. Their hostility sees hostility everywhere. Their belligerence finds belligerence. The hyperpower is forever compelled to respond to lesser powers. They look outside, see themselves and fear; in their mental universe the USA is arrogantly strong and fearfully weak at the same time."

The Walking Dead is finally becoming a metaphor for the Outlaw US Empire, its policies, and what it terms values--which aren't values but vices. But TWD was fiction and was thus capable of reforming itself. The Empire's goals and polices are essentially the same as in 1940 and even further back to 1913, and haven't changed very much, being just as illegal and immoral then as now. What's different are the "Dragons" which didn't exist in 1918 or 1944, and the Parasites have almost total control that's finally seeing domestic pushback.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 20 2021 0:11 utc | 68

Here's Sputnik's initial report on the Alaska meet. Not much reference to commerce. Here's an excerpt:

"Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who accompanied Yang to the talks, told CGTN that their side had made clear to the Americans that China takes its sovereignty very seriously and warned them not to 'underestimate China's determination to defend its territory, to defend its people, and maintain its righteous interests.'

"Washington has criticized China's security policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, where Western-backed separatist forces have created chronic unrest, as well as its longstanding claim to rule Taiwan, an autonomous island ruled by the Republic of China that lost the civil war in mainland China in 1949, when the socialist People's Republic of China was formed. 

The US technically recognizes Beijing's claim to be the sole legitimate representative of China, but in reality is the primary backer of the Taiwanese government. 

Beijing says all of these are internal matters and not of Washington's concern."

Very little's reported of the Outlaw US Empire's response. This little bit doesn't bode well:

"US State Department officials noted they did not see the Alaska summit as the beginning of a new mechanism or dialogue."

I see that as a confession that they aren't agreement capable since they can't even continue a dialogue.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 20 2021 0:30 utc | 74

i've been a reader of moa for quite a few years now, but never contributed to the forum. mostly because after a while i found what i wanted to say anyway, and why pile on? 

i really enjoy the civility of the forum, and it's internationality. 

And of course b's insights. as a german myself I share many points of view with him in matters i have knowledge in, or think that i do. for example i think that trump sure might be seen as a desaster by many, but it was a gift to europe, and germany in particular, because he openend the eyes of many, many people here who for decades thought murrica is our friend, our big brother, who will always protect us from the evil of the world - namely communism, russia and lately china. 

a majority of the people here, as well as in the rest of the so called "western world" have been brainwashed for about 7 decades to think that way, even when america committed the most obvious, heinous, horrible crimes against humanity and our civilization as a whole. there was always a spin, "human rights", "democracy", "free trade" and so on, values that had to be "defended" - when in reality it was always an offensive aggression or even a "pre-emptive strike". 

people just swallowed what the media fed them and went on with their daily chores.

trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible, and i will always be grateful for that. because now it cannot be hidden anymore. 

it wasn't just the unruly behaviour of a "new rich" and uneducated bully who accidentally became president. politically, the general attitude was always the same, trump only worded it much more obvious, making it harder for politicians and media to spin. 

that's why our politicians and media (for the most part fed by trans-atlantic "think tanks") hated him almost more than americans themselves - he made their lies obvious and transparent. 

if it wasn't so sad, it sometimes was almost funny to see them squirm, having to explain why our friend and protector suddenly became so selfish and hostile.

All of them welcomed of course the new harris administration, being so progressive, just and friendly again - only to witness a change of paradigm they probably didn't even think trump was capable of, or willing to: i think in later years, this week will mark the "official" beginning of the new cold war era. 

This behaviour against Russia and China was not a slap, but a punch in the face and will NEVER be forgiven nor forgotten. 

The only question for europe is: does it finally have the balls to emancipate and stand up against the bully? or will it submit and become a collateral damage of it's downfall? 

in form of a nuclear wasteland maybe? i think that nord stream II is a turning point. 

if Germany caves in here, there's little hope to get rid of the leash for it and the whole of Europe. if it stands tall, Europe might become a buffer instead of a frontline. knowing and seeing our politicians, i'd say it doesn't look good.

Posted by: xototox | Mar 20 2021 0:34 utc | 75

@Posted by: Grieved | Mar 19 2021 23:05 utc | 55:

...., the US neurotic dynamic is to escalate blindly until it achieves control. This is the dynamic that must be defeated.

Yes that's problem all right, but can you ever defeat that dynamic given that the gorilla owns 10,000 nukes and has no moral qualms whatsoever of using them? Until a near perfect anti-nuke defense system is developed I surmise the world would just have to live with, and get used to, the juvenile antics of King Kong because it has stated time and again it would escalate all the way up to using its nukes, because that's what they are for according to a former Sec. of State.

I'm a pessimist on this issue. I'm afraid we'll just have to endure and live with a wild beast for a while to come.

Posted by: Oriental Voice | Mar 20 2021 0:35 utc | 76

The Alaska talks have ended and the Global Times Editor writes:

"China and the US are two major world powers. No matter how many disputes they have, the two countries should not impulsively break their relations. Coexistence and cooperation are the only options for China and the US. Whether we like it or not, the two countries should learn to patiently explore mutual compromises and pursue strategic win-win cooperation." [My Emphasis]

The big question: Does the Outlaw US Empire possess enough wisdom to act in that manner.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 20 2021 0:44 utc | 77

Russia is a classical construct with more than 1000 years of history and culture. These are part and parcel of what Russia is and who her people are....

The USA on the other hand, has never coalesced into a cultural entity.... Most of US culture was created by advertizers during the post WWII period..... The rock & roll generation... hippies.... etc.

A state based upon a covenant between itself and God... mediated by orthodox christianity... is totally foreign to Steve and most US denizens...

But it exists.... Ditto for China... now 5000 years young.... the embodiment of confucianism... meritocracy...

All foreign to Steve and Blinken and Biden....

INDY

Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Mar 20 2021 0:47 utc | 78

so here is the white house press briefing for today on this thread topic - Department Press Briefing – March 19, 2021

here is the segment on china-usa meeting.. interestingly our prime minister trudeau mention the issue of the 2 michaels held in china and the phrase something to the effect "china must adhere to the 'rule based law' b.s. was at the top of his words in the radio when i was in the car earlier..

"QUESTION: (Inaudible) Alaska, if you’re able to talk about that. Obviously, there’s been a lot of reporting since yesterday about how sort of tense the initial encounter was. And there’s been discussions of – I think both sides have accused the other of breaking protocol in those initial exchanges. But I wonder if – does the State Department – based on the tone of that first meeting, does that give you any concern for the future of the relationship with China and the possibility of reaching some agreements or getting some achievables out of these meetings? Thank you.

MS PORTER: Thank you for your question, Simon, and just as a response to that, of course, as you know, Secretary Blinken and NSA Sullivan had their first meetings with Director Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi, and of course, are in sessions this morning. And these were serious discussions. Again, I’ll just reiterate something that NSA Sullivan said. And of course, to your point about it, the – being contentious or not, again, we – he said we don’t see conflict, but of course, welcome stiff competition.

Again, this was a single meeting, and again, we know that sometimes these diplomatic presentations can be exaggerated or maybe even aimed at a domestic audience, but we’re not letting the theatrics from the other side stop us from doing what we were intending to do in Alaska, which is lay out our principles as well as our expectations and have these tough conversations early that we need to have with the PRC.

Let’s go to the line of Edward Keenan.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) of the Alaska meetings, the two Michaels, Kovrig and – the two Canadian Michaels who are being held as political prisoners in China, widely perceived as leverage against the United States, who are going to trial now as these meetings take place. Secretary Blinken and President Biden expressed their desire to see those two Michaels released when they met with the Canadian prime minister recently. I wonder to what extent those cases are up for discussion in Alaska right now, and if so, like, to what extent and how?

MS PORTER: Well, let me start off by saying that the United States continues to publicly call on the PRC to end the arbitrary and unacceptable detentions of the Canadians citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. And again, the United States is deeply concerned by the PRC’s decision to hold a closed-court hearing with the Canadian citizens. Obviously, no one from – no diplomat from Canada or the U.S. were involved in that. And we’re also deeply alarmed by a report that the PRC will commence the trial of Canadian citizen Michael Kovrig on March 22nd and we renew our call for PRC authorities to attend this trial.

We’ll always just reiterate that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Canada in calling for their immediate release, and we also continue to condemn their lack of minimum procedural protections during their two-year arbitrary detention."

Posted by: james | Mar 20 2021 0:56 utc | 79

The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about? A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.

alaff | Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 32:

And Bio-weapons.

Posted by: Ian2 | Mar 20 2021 1:53 utc | 85

Another Comment from China…

Another comment from Europe…

I suspect Blinken/Sullivan/Biden need to show that they are "tough" to the Chinese in public because otherwise, they will be roasted by the 78 millions Trump supporters for being "weak" to China compared with Trump. Behind the close door, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi characterized the talks to be NOT "very tense." I believe Biden actually is quite keen to get some "achievements" from the Chinese side, probably not realistically in this meeting, but hopefully in the near future.

Ha, but the weather is cold, the hotel is shoddy, and the Chinese delegate had to have instant noodle for lunch - that sounds like a very low budget “Hongmen Banquet” by the Americans. Maybe they are still waiting for their 1.9 trillion stimulus check?

Posted by: d dan | Mar 20 2021 2:12 utc | 86

trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible

I've heard this about Trump a lot, but I've always wondered why Trump was the ultimate catalyst for this epiphany. You would think that the Iraq War should have been that watershed moment, or even Libya (and perhaps they were for many, like me). I suppose from the perspective of inter-imperialist relations in the first world, a lack of decorum of the level of Trump's is more anomalous and egregious than the imposition of death and destruction of people in the global south.

Posted by: Kapusta | Mar 20 2021 2:37 utc |

89

Mr. Id

Truly dreadful but very likely true portrait of America and not only the South; of which not much has remained after the mass migrations from the North in these past 40 years.

My personal observations have been consistent with your in the interior of the United States, the Judeo-Christians have become meaner and more bigoted and more racist. They are aggressive with an in-your-face attitude. They hate, and they hate Catholics, Muslims, and especially Iranians.

A wealthy preacher was recently asked why always flew in a private jet. He answered that he saw so much hatred on the face of fellow passengers that he could no longer endure it. Others laughed at him, but I believed him.

The late Carl Gustav Jung once observed that he knew World War II was coming because he could see Wotan in every German.

As I wrote to Mr. Kooshy, America could have been the Love of all nations of the world, their second home. But the leaders of Judeo-Christian, such as the late John Hay or the late Theodore Roosvelt, went after Imperial America chimera and their folksy plebs after Second Coming and Palestine. This project of 150 years has now failed.

Posted by: Fyi | Mar 20 2021 3:03 utc | 91

I think that the presidency of Mr. Trump revealed the ugly side of the United States; suddenly the gilded papier marche of America, carefully created by the best propaganda techniques over 70 years, was shredded and USA was revealed to be a country just like so many others.

It is up to American people, Judeo-Christians as well as others, to address the deep deep social problems of the United States.

Posted by: Fyi | Mar 20 2021 3:13 utc | 92

Rape camps in Yugo, rape camps in Libya, rape camps in Xinjiang.....

Somebody sure have certain fetishism for sex and violence.

One from the archive,
That 'humanitarian intervention in Sudan'

Indeed, the Darfur crisis is following a pattern which is so well-worn now that it has almost become routine. Saturation reporting from a crisis region; emergency calls for help broadcast on the electronic media (such as the one recently on the BBC Radio 4 flagship ‘Today’ programme); televised pictures of refugees; lurid stories of “mass rapes”, which are surely designed to titillate as much to provoke outrage; reproachful evocations of the Rwandan genocide; demands that something must be done (”How can we stand idly by?”, etc.); editorials in the Daily Telegraph calling for a return to the days of Rudyard Kipling's benevolent imperialism[6]; and, finally, the announcement that plans are indeed being drawn up for an intervention.

……………..

Intervention will allow Western forces to control an oil rich region, and perhaps to expel the present holders of concessions. The fact that the biggest of these is China, and that America’s other foreign adventures also seem to have as their goal the control of energy supplies to that strategic rival, only adds further piquancy to what is, otherwise, an all too banal case of modern imperialistic meddling.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27e/764.html

Posted by: denk | Mar 20 2021 5:13 utc | 97

This is just great…

Many great observations tonight, but all, beg the question; How do we change a nation state that has so thoroughly morphed into an advertising and marketing phony, aided and abetted by so many deluded morons?

Posted by: vetinLA | Mar 20 2021 5:24 utc | 98

And then we have this…

I don’t know if the title will match up with the content. I cannot access the content here. But the truth remains everyone should have humility when entering in diplomatic negotiations. Arrogance has no place there.

.

And this…

All this nonsense about Xinjiang is being exposed for what it actually is… a convenient fiction.

.

And this…

Of course, the USA “media” will translate this as arrogance. But what is China supposed to do after a seven minute tirade demanding China to do certain things or else experience a hot war…

.

And he is correct.

On the global scene, America is the weak nation.

And this…

Yeah, after the terrible behavior of the United States “diplomats” we have a major “pile on” against America…

…the American narrative is that the BRI is bad and will result in a “debt trap”. So says the 20 trillion dollar debt nation.

.

Roderrick

Here’s a post from Roderick…

US took to Alaska the same attitude as it has had for 250 years.

That must change.

We imposed democracy and capitalism on other nations, only to learn that many cultures simply could not find those a successful replacement for what they had for centuries. Even following the USSR, people wanted the old ways back, feeling their safety net had been taken from them and billionaire oligarchs had looted state assets.

We have corrupted democracy and capitalism, both have become ugly in the rebellion and corruption that have permeated our nation like cancer. Consequently we no longer have anything worthwhile to ‘sell’ or impose.

But more importantly, our self-assigned charter as the world policeman, only creating more problems by every war since WWII, has created a world that reviles us, indeed more and more nations view us as their enemy, even as they are getting stronger by the day.

Humility rather than hubris. That is the only means for America to survive long-term. Get along, stop invading, stop threatening, stop harming other nations economically. If we cannot change, a global coalition will finally have had enough of their increasingly common enemy.

And within China…

Well the response to the Alaskan negotiations and the arrogance of the American delegation was quick. Already there are tee-shirts, and iPhone cases being made.

And here’s some more pictures. It’s all over China, now.

And here…

And here…

Some comments by 周齐汉 (Qi Han Zhou)

从国社通稿来看，此次重启对话还是具有一定效果。比如，美方重申坚持一个中国原则。比如，商议对等便利双方外交机构人员和媒体记者的活动。我方阐明了红线和底线。红线，中共的执政地位和制度安全不容损害。底线，台湾是中国领土，不容分裂，没有任何余地。还是那句话，谈大门打开，打奉陪到底。
Judging from the draft of the State News Agency, the resumption of the dialogue still has some effect.
For example, the U.S. side reiterated its adherence to the one-China principle.
For example, it is easier to discuss re-equivalent facilities for the activities of diplomatic personnel and media journalists on both sides.
We set out the red line and the bottom line.
Red line, the ruling position of the Communist Party of China and institutional security should not be compromised.
Bottom line, Taiwan is China’s territory and cannot be divided, and there is no room for maneuver.
Or that sentence, talk about the door open, play with the end.

And some comments by Josef Gregory Mahoney

Was asked by Maria Siow at #scmp for his take on the Alaska meetings. His responses: 

Genuine frustration and posturing by both sides... both countries have compelling reasons to improve relations... We won’t see a lot of movement on more contentious issues in in the next few weeks, but the groundwork will be laid in this meeting, quietly, for resolving the trade war, drawing clearer lines on tech competition, and a mutual understanding if not respect for each others redlines... Don’t be too distracted by the tough talk. China’s two top foreign policy officials wouldn’t be in Alaska if positive prospects were unlikely. They don’t walk into traps. 

Biden appears to have confirmed what many already suspected: that Allies have some key concerns with China, all hope the US can help resolve these and provide security guarantees, but none want to see relations worsen or follow Washington into an aggressive containment strategy. I’m optimistic that we’ll see tensions relax on multiple fronts, but it will depend in part on whether Washington will better discipline itself on Taiwan and likewise better discipline Taiwan, as was often the case before Trump, and whether Beijing will find an acceptable way forward through this as well. Taiwan is really the stickiest issue to work through.

From CTGN

The Chinese “red lines”. From the article “China says no compromise on sovereignty issues after talks with U.S. conclude“.

China pretty much stated that the USA has no say what so ever on how China deals with it’s domestic issues, and to FUCK OFF regarding them. If the USA pushes on these issues they will cross a “red line” which is very dangerous…

China will not change it’s government structure.

The U.S. brags about its democracy, even though its policy is most frequently dictated by the bureaucrats and the bureaucratic system. Congress struggles with basic tasks such as keeping the government funded and running. The U.S. is in a new gilded age, where selling digital kittens for millions of dollars is mistaken for innovation. Its politics are stalemated, its institutions are brittle, and its wealth is funneled to a small circle of elites.

-CGTN

Stop demanding that China adopt the American way of governance. American government, and leadership is an abject failure. It is insanity to expect a prosperous, growing, and successful nation to adopt the failed policies that characterize America.

In the statement, the Chinese side emphasized that the ruling position of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a choice of history and the people's choice, and the development of China is inseparable from CPC's leadership.

The ruling position of the CPC and the security of the system is "an intangible red line" and "must not be compromised," the statement highlighted.

It added that the socialist system with Chinese characteristics is the system most in line with China's national conditions and the "code" for China's development, and stated that China's development goal is to achieve the "two centenary" goals and the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation through hard work.

And this translation from the Chinese is most certainly a “bitch slap”…

China's reply to US at Alaska meeting:

You have your type of democracy. we have our type of democracy.

We lifted millions if not all of our population out of poverty. You created millions of unemployed and homeless.

We controlled and eradicated Covid. You let Covid devastate you.

Your infrastructures are at least 30 to 40 years old.

We build and provide cheap and affordable housing for the people. You build houses but the economic situation that you are in now resulted in more foreclosures (people giving up) than people buying.

We don't have homeless people sleeping in the street. You have plenty sleeping all over the place.

Our people have sufficient good food to eat. You too have food but the people have no money to buy food and have to rely on Govt Food stamps to pay for their food.

We have very little crime rate. You have one of the highest crime rate in the world which keeps your police very busy.

We have affordable health insurance and health care. Your health care is so out of reach such that the average household could not afford to fall sick.

Our people are united behind us. Your people are divided behind you.

Our democratic systems are quite different. Ours can deliver the goods. Yours make you indebted.

Why must you make us follow your way of running the country?

China’s human rights, not an excuse for interference

Using the excuse of “human rights” has long been the methodology for interference in the affairs of other nations. China will not allow it, nor tolerate it.

"China will not impose its democratic system and values ​​on other countries, while firmly safeguarding its own political system and values, and opposes accusing and discrediting China and interfering in China's internal affairs under the guise of human rights issues," according to the statement.

China also pointed out that it has no intention to interfere in America's political system or to challenge and replace U.S. position and its influence. It called on the U.S. side to properly view China's political system, its development path, national strategies as well as its influence worldwide.

Commitment to independent foreign policy of peace

Both America and China said that they were committed to “peace”. But how and when they said it differed.

The American delegation produced a long line of demands on China’s internal affairs, and followed up with the demand that China obey “the US-Led rule-of-law” instead of the UN charter. Then immediately afterwards, said “of course the US is committed to peace and wants to avoid war”.

China stated…

In the statement, the Chinese side reiterated that its commitment to an independent foreign policy of peace, insist on independence, uphold peaceful development, uphold win-win cooperation, uphold multilateralism, uphold fairness and justice, and continue to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind

"We firmly defend national sovereignty and national dignity, and we firmly oppose other countries' accusations on China's internal affairs," it claimed, reiterating that China adheres to the path of peaceful development.

Support for ‘true multilateralism’

America wants to ignore the UN. Instead it has a “US-Led Rule-of-law” that they expect China to obey.

China and the world follows the dictates of the UN. America wants to have a US-Led “rules-based” order upon the rules that the United States make. This is not acceptable to China, (and Russia).

China also highlighted multilateralism in the statement by regarding it as an "important cornerstone of the current international system."

According to China, true multilateralism should adhere to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, respect the basic norms of international relations, respect the sovereignty of all countries in the world, respect the diversity of civilizations, and work for the democratization of international relations.

"We are willing to work with the United States to maintain true multilateralism in the multilateral mechanism such as the United Nations and provide the international community with more and better international public products," said the statement.

China, U.S. need cooperation not confrontation

America came into the negotiations on a strategy of “zero sum”, meaning do things as I dictate, or face the consequences. While China was looking forward to a “win – win” outcome.

Regarding relationship between China and the U.S., the Chinese side stated that the essence of Sino-U.S. relations is mutual benefit and win-win, rather than a zero-sum game.

"Neither China nor the United States can bear the consequences of conflict and confrontation," the statement warned, calling on the two sides to "trust each other instead of suspicion, understand each other instead of accusing each other, and cooperate with each other instead of dismantling, so as to ensure that both sides focus on handling their domestic priorities and achieving their respective development goals."

The statement stressed that China's policy on U.S., with a high degree of stability and continuity, is committed to "achieving non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation with the U.S."

It called on the two sides to keep communication channels open, resume normal dialogue and exchange mechanisms, carry out mutually beneficial cooperation, so as to properly manage differences, and avoid misunderstandings and misjudgments.

No compromise on Taiwan question

This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.

Calling the Taiwan question core to China's interests and a matter of China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, China reiterated that there is no compromise in this regard.

No rights to interfere in China’s Hong Kong affairs

How can one engage in cooperation for example, if America is obsessed with interfering in China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity? 

Sure the U.S. has its "principles" - but this must be done in a fair, pragmatic and reconciliatory way as opposed to, for example, whipping up unrest in Hong Kong, clinging onto the "genocide" rhetoric on Xinjiang, or promoting tensions in the Taiwan Straits. 

How China conducts its internal policies is its business, nobody else's.

-CGTN

This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.

Regarding the recent decisions made by China's top legislature, the National People's Congress, on the improvement of electoral system in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the Chinese delegation said the U.S. should respect the decision and follow the international law and basic norms of international relations.

"It is the central government's task to improve the electoral system of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. How to design, develop and improve the electoral system is China's internal affairs. No foreign government, organization or individual has the right to interfere," read the statement.

‘Xinjiang genocide’ claim: ‘Biggest lie of the century’

America needs to interrupt the BRI. And key to that is Xinjiang. China says that this lie of “concentration camps” and ‘Genocide” is simply not true and must end. But it will not. America is planning on military intervention into the Chinese territory and are moving forces in Afghanistan concurrently.

China also dismissed the claim that there is genocide in China's Xinjiang, calling it "the biggest lie of the century."

The delegation said the door of Xinjiang is wide open to the world. It welcomed exchanges with the U.S. side on the basis of mutual respect while stressed that China will not accept any investigation in Xinjiang based on the presumption of guilt by those who are biased, condescending and want to lecture China.

It is hoped that the U.S. side can respect facts, call off attacks against and smearing of China's Xinjiang policy, and abandon double standards on anti-terrorism, it added.

Tibet ‘part of China,’ ‘Dalai Lama has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities’

Again. This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.

China also pointed out that the 14th Dalai Lama is a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion.

"It is hoped that the U.S. will abide by its commitment to recognize Tibet as part of China and not support 'Tibet independence,' handle Tibet-related issues carefully and properly, lift sanctions on relevant Chinese officials, and stop using Tibet-related issues to interfere in China's internal affairs," it stated.

 

On a positive note. From the article “Why China and U.S. can seek a reset after Anchorage”…

It's a strange truth that during the two-day sit-down, the director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi did just that. They wasted no time in highlighting the importance of "mutual respect" and the avoidance of harmful extremes in addressing bilateral relations and structural disparities.

Perhaps the Chinese diplomats did not want to be disrespected and misunderstood. But they soon found out their U.S. counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, were from another universe with their own brands of isolation. They seemed out of touch with reality to acknowledge the existence of differences, and to find the safety of the middle ground to resolve them amicably, rather than go for the imbalance of the extremes in the hope to validate America's shell games in East Asia and the Western Pacific.

The senior American diplomats walked into the meeting ostensibly from a position of self-righteousness and strength, absolutely unprepared and reluctant to drop the interventionist claims and instincts, to discuss the delicate process of resetting the pivotal relationship, and to compartmentalize and contain the structural differences.

From this perspective, the downfall of their hopeless quest to enforce their interventionist worldview in the testy exchange is found in this...

...in the wrong message that China ought to be confronted and contained, and that accommodation, mutual coexistence, or even extensive cooperation on matters of mutual interest must be ruled out...

... (that is) until China respects "the U.S.-led rules-based international order."

Strategic Culture Foundation chimes in…

The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy.

After the four-year interregnum of Donald Trump’s “Cirque du Stupide,” America’s foreign diplomacy should be undergoing a total facelift.

Returning to the stodgy “business as usual” foreign policy of the past is not the answer.

As the Biden administration began to nestle into office, there was a familiar refrain in press releases from the Department of State, otherwise known as “Foggy Bottom.”

These included such old ditties as “The Secretary and the Foreign Minister discussed ways to strengthen cooperation with allies and partners to address the [blah . . . blah . . . blah].”

…

The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy.

It should be remembered that Biden’s Senate career began when Mao Zedong was still in charge in China, a war with the U.S. as a main participant continued to rage in Southeast Asia, a country called the United Arab Republic was the center of political activity in the Middle East, white rule and apartheid was the name of the game in southern Africa, and right-wing dictatorships ruled throughout Latin America.

Those who live in the past will never be prepared to face the future.

 

The Spectator has some thoughts…

“Very frank. It was the first high-level meeting between members of the Biden administration and their Chinese counterparts. To say that it was a public relations disaster for the US is to understate the case.”

“Blinken and his sidekick, Jake Sullivan, a Hillary Clinton factotum who is now national security adviser, sat down to read China the riot act. It was not a success.”

“The United States, said Yang, in one of the most dismissive diplomatic rejoinders I have ever heard, does not have the ‘qualifications’ to address China ‘from a position of strength’. F, my dear Blinken, you.”

“Joe Biden has been in office for just two months. Has any US president had such a disastrous opening chapter on the world stage? None that I can recall.”

Some great articles…

US can’t accept painful fact that China is now its equal: Martin Jacques

We learnt two things from the China-US high-level dialogue held in Alaska last week.

The first was from the session at the beginning when the media were present. This would normally be conducted in a polite and somewhat anodyne fashion dressed up in diplomatic nicety. It could not have been more different. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan commenced the proceedings and made some sharp criticisms of China. In response, Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Foreign Affairs, gave a bravura performance. Far from pulling his punches or couching his words in diplomatic language, he let his American counterparts have it with both barrels, challenging not just the US position but its very legitimacy. And all this before the world's media.

Let me quote some of his choice barbs: "When I entered this room, I should have reminded the US side of paying attention to its tone." "The US is not qualified to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength." "China and the international community…uphold the UN-centered international order…not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called 'rules-based' international order." "On human rights, we do hope the US will do better on human rights. The challenges facing the US in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter." "On cyber-attacks, let me say that whether it's the ability to launch cyber-attacks or the technologies that could be deployed, the US is the champion." "The US does not represent international opinion and neither does the Western world."

While delivering these shots, Yang spoke with passion but never raised his voice. There were no cheap jibes. He occupied the high ground in the argument and left the Americans bewildered and belittled.

This is not normally the Chinese manner on such occasions. It is a sign that something has changed. There is a new sense of confidence on the part of the Chinese. That they are - or can - win the argument. That they are at least the equals of America. That they speak from a position of strength and America from a position of weakness. That history is on their side. It feels like the diplomatic equivalent of moving from "keeping a low profile" to "striving for achievement," or from being a relative spectator in the global system to becoming a major architect. The Americans have hitherto always thought of themselves as running the show; the shock visible in the body language of Blinken and Sullivan was the realization, conscious or unconscious, that this was no longer the case. The same was apparent in the Western media. The BBC, for example, invariably critical of China, reported it with an unfamiliar neutrality, as if stunned by the role reversal.

The second thing we found out from the dialogue (albeit already evident from the signals emanating from the White House), was that there will be no return to the status quo ante. That Biden is desperately anxious to appear as hostile to China as Trump was before him. The underlying forces at work here are very deep. America is in the process of coming to the painful realization that China is now its equal. But it cannot bring itself to accept or acquiesce in what is already an historical reality. That is why there can be no return to 1972 (Mao-Nixon Accord) or 1979 (US recognition of China). The relationship that prevailed then between China and the US was entirely different: the US was the giant, China a minnow. That was the basis of the US-China relationship for 45 years from 1972 until Trump torpedoed it in 2017, even though, of course, by the end China's rise was already undermining America's assumptions about the relationship. The realization that China was on the verge of overtaking the US economically, that China enjoyed a huge global presence, that it was already in effect its equal, came as an enormous shock to the American psyche and body politic.

Addicted to its hubris, it failed to see the blatantly obvious coming. As there can be no return to the past, the China-US relationship, so crucial to both and to the whole world, will have to be rethought on an entirely new basis, namely one of mutuality and equality. The problem is that the US is very far from thinking like this. How America needs for these times a giant like Henry Kissinger: someone who understands - and admires - China in a very profound way.

For the time being we must think in more mundane ways. Cooperation will be confined to the foothills, it will be a case of issue by issue, a bit here and a bit there, rebuilding contacts and communications between the two countries, ending as best can be done the toxicity and wanton destruction wrought by Donald Trump. Even this will not be easy but it ought, at a pinch, to be possible, with climate change offering the most important challenge and opportunity. For without cooperation between the two countries, climate change will imperil the very future of the planet and humanity.

China puts the Anglo-Americans in their place, and the cowardly EU, too, for good measure

China's representatives easily demolish the mountains of lies built by the US and its vassals, as part of their hybrid war on all independent nations, but now chiefly aimed at China and Russia, designated by the US hegemon, behind the pretext of "national security",  as America's chief global "rivals". Truth weakens and eventually destroys imperialism, that's why it is now completely banned throughout the Western establishment media. Observe the barely repressed tone of exasperation in China's spokesperson. It's clear Beijing and Moscow have had just about enough of Western harassment, imperialist hostility, bad faith and hypocrisy. March 2021 clearly marks a turning point in international relations.

...

"China's position on the Meng Wanzhou case is very clear. This is nothing short of a political incident in which Canada played a very disgraceful role as an accomplice. We urge the Canadian side to immediately release Ms. Meng Wanzhou, who has been arbitrarily and unreasonably detained by the Canadian side, and ensure her early and safe return to China..."

Leaders, politicians and diplomats that have wisdom and serve their people will not pursue the so-called “alliance of democracies”. Many countries in the region want to see a sound and steady China-US relationship. Working together for a better life is democracy in real sense.

According to #US media, in 2016, a #Uyghur couple went to Italy with 3 children, leaving another 4 in #Xinjiang. If there's "forced sterilization" and "genocide" in Xinjiang as some in the west claim, how come this Uyghur couple have 7 children?

The #US, #UK and #Canada together account for only 5.7% of the world's population. Even if #EU is added, that will be about 11%. They cannot represent the international community.

#Democracy comes about when power belongs to people. There is no unified model for democracy. Sovereign states should be respected in their independent choose of development path. No one has the right to meddle in their internal affairs under the guise of "democracy".

I wonder in what way the west's democracy is superior. Amid #COVID19, the world's richest nations watch hundreds of thousands of their people die. Is this #democracy? While western politicians are busy wooing their party voters, the Chinese government serves all wholeheartedly.
In Guilin, FM Wang Yi & FM #Lavrov issued a joint statement that shed light on what is real human rights, democracy, international order & multilateralism. #China & #Russia will jointly and resolutely defend international justice & fairness.

China & Russia, with great sense of commitment & responsibility as major countries in the world & permanent members of the #UNSC, will give strong backing to each other on issues of core interests as important partners & play an underpinning role in international affairs. 


In 40 years, the #Uyghur population has grown from 5.5 million to 12.8 million. The fact that #Xinjiang residents of various ethnic groups enjoy stability, security, development and progress, makes it one of the most successful human rights stories.
Some in the #US, #UK, #Canada and #EU clearly don't want to acknowledge the real facts about #Xinjiang & don't care about the truth, but hold on to accusations based on lies & false information. They just do not want to see #China's success, development and better livelihood.
What the #US, #UK, #Canada and #EU have done is utter denigration and offense to the reputation and dignity of the #Chinese people, blatant interference of China's internal affairs, and grave violation of China's sovereignty and security interests.
The #US and #UK used some test tube of washing powder and a staged video as evidence to launch wars against sovereign countries such as #Iraq and #Syria, leaving numerous death and displacement. Shouldn't they be sanctioned?
#France, #UK and #EU launched a war in #Libya, leading to regional turbulence & grave migrant and refugee issues. Shouldn't they be held accountable?
Tens of hundreds of people died of #COVID19 because these most developed countries are indifferent to their people's rights to life and health. They hoard #vaccines far in excess of their population's needs, leaving developing countries struggling with insufficient vaccines.
How can people enjoy rights if they lost their lives? Some in the west talk a lot about #humanrights, but who and what right on earth are they protecting? In what way are they respecting and protecting human rights.
#China is not what it was 120 years ago, when foreign powers could force open its door with guns. Certain colluding individuals in politics, academics and media should think twice if they think they could make wanton smears with impunity.
The west shall entertain no illusion as regards #China's firm determination to defend national interests and dignity. It's a courtesy to reciprocate what we receive. They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance.

Chinese Government Statement

#China deplores and rejects the unilateral sanctions by #EU citing so-called #HumanRights issues in #Xinjiang. 

This move is based on nothing but lies and disinformation, and will inevitably undermine China-EU relations. 

To safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interest, #China will sanction #EU individuals and entities that have been spreading lies and disinformation at the cost of China's interests...

The #EU must drop its hypocritical double standards, and stop going further down the wrong path. Otherwise, it will be met with further resolute reactions. 

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/.../s2510_665401/t1863106.shtml

MM Comments

I had high hopes for the meeting. I was wrong.

Rather than improve relationships between the United States and China, the Alaskan meeting pretty much depicted America as an out of control bully that stated that it did not need to follow the UN and global governance standards. Instead it was the biggest, meanest and baddest thug on the block and laid out it’d demands on China.

It told China that “you will obey what we say or risk a hot war with us and our very powerful allies”.

While I am sure that most Americans would welcome this attitude, I found this arrogant, and very upsetting.

Reports are that immediately afterwards, China and Russia set up and held meetings.

I wonder what they are talking about…

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The Man by Ray Bradbury (Full Text)

The main theme in this story is the role of faith in gaining redemption. 

The Man is what the Judeo-Christian faiths would term the Messiah or Savior, but Bradbury opts to make this a broader, explicitly stating that this figure exists in many cultures and goes by many names. 

What the Man brings, however, is a sense of peace and happiness that is akin to what the Judeo-Christian faiths would call redemption - that is, a forgiveness of sins and a more enlightened way of life.

The Man

By Ray Bradbury

CAPTAIN HART stood in the door of the rocket. ‘Why don’t they come?’ he said.
‘Who knows?’ said Martin, his lieutenant. ‘Do I know, Captain?’
‘What kind of a place is this, anyway?’ The captain lighted a cigar. He tossed
the match out into the glittering meadow. The grass started to burn.
Martin moved to stamp it out with his boot.
‘No,’ ordered Captain Hart, ‘let it burn. Maybe they’ll come see what’s
happening then, the ignorant fools.’
Martin shrugged and withdrew his foot from the spreading fire.
Captain Hart examined his watch. ‘An hour ago we landed here, and does the
welcoming committee rush out with a brass band to shake our hands? No indeed!
Here we ride millions of miles through space and the fine citizens of some silly
town on some unknown planet ignore us!’ He snorted, tapping his watch. ‘Well,
I’ll just give them five more minutes, and then”’
‘And then what?’ asked Martin, ever so politely, watching the captain’s jowls
shake.
‘We’ll fly over their damned city again and scare hell out of them.’ His voice
grew quieter. ‘Do you think, Martin, maybe they didn’t see us land?’
‘They saw us. They looked up as we flew over.
‘Then why aren’t they running across the field? Are they hiding? Are they
yellow?’
Martin shook his head. ‘No. Take these binoculars, sir. See for yourself.
Everybody’s walking around. They’re not frightened. They’well, they just don’t
seem to care.
Captain Hart placed the binoculars to his tired eyes. Martin looked up and had
time to observe the lines and the grooves of irritation, tiredness, nervousness
there. Hart looked a million years old; he never slept, he ate little, and drove
himself on, on. Now his mouth moved, aged and drear, but sharp, under the held
binoculars.
‘Really, Martin, I don’t know why we bother. We build rockets, we go to all the
trouble of crossing space, searching for them, and this is what we get. Neglect.
Look at those idiots wander about in there. Don’t they realize how big this is?
The first space flight to touch their provincial land. How many times does that
happen? Are they that blas’?’
Martin didn’t know.
Captain Hart gave him back the binoculars wearily. ‘Why do we do it, Martin?
This space travel, I mean. Always on the go. Always searching. Our insides
always tight, never any rest.’
‘Maybe we’re looking for peace and quiet. Certainly there’s none on Earth,’ said
Martin.
‘No, there’s not, is there?’ Captain Hart was thoughtful, the fire damped down.
‘Not since Darwin, eh? Not since everything went by the board, everything we
used to believe in, eh? Divine power and all that. And so you think maybe that’s
why we’re going out to the stars, eh, Martin? Looking for our lost souls, is
that it? Trying to get away from our evil planet to a good one?’
‘Perhaps, sir. Certainly we’re looking for something.’
Captain Hart cleared his throat and tightened back into sharpness. ‘Well, right
now we’re looking for the mayor of that city there. Run in, tell them who we
are, the first rocket expedition to Planet Forty-three in Star System Three.
Captain Hart sends his salutations and desires to meet the mayor. On the
double!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Martin walked slowly across the meadow.
‘Hurry!’ snapped the captain.
‘Yes, sir!’ Martin trotted away. Then he walked again, smiling to himself.
The captain had smoked two cigars before Martin returned. Martin stopped and
looked up into the door of the rocket, swaying, seemingly unable to focus his
eyes or think.
‘Well?’ snapped Hart. ‘What happened? Are they coming to welcome us?’
‘No.’ Martin had to lean dizzily against the ship.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not important,’ said Martin. ‘Give me a cigarette, please, Captain.’ His
fingers groped blindly at the rising pack, for he was looking at the golden city
and blinking. He lighted one and smoked quietly for a long time.
‘Say something!’ cried the captain. ‘Aren’t they interested in our rocket?’
Martin said, ‘What? Oh. The rocket?’ He inspected his cigarette. ‘No, they’re
not interested. Seems we came at an inopportune time.’
‘Inopportune time!’
Martin was patient. ‘Captain, listen. Something big happened yesterday in that
city. It’s so big, so important that we’re second-rate’second fiddle. I’ve got
to sit down.’ He lost his balance and sat heavily, gasping for air.
The captain chewed his cigar angrily. “What happened?’ Martin lifted his head,
smoke from the burning cigarette in his fingers, blowing in the wind. ‘Sir,
yesterday, in that city, a remarkable man appeared’good, intelligent,
compassionate, and infinitely wise!’
The captain glared at his lieutenant. ‘What’s that to do with us?’
‘It’s hard to explain. But he was a man for whom they’d waited a long time’a
million years maybe. And yesterday he walked into their city. That’s why today,
sir, our rocket landing means nothing.’
The captain sat down violently. ‘Who was it? Not Ashley? He didn’t arrive in his
rocket before us and steal my glory, did he?’ He seized Martin’s arm. His face
was pale and dismayed.
‘Not Ashley, sir.’
‘Then it was Burton! I knew it. Burton stole in ahead of us and ruined my
landing! You can’t trust anyone any more.’
‘Not Burton, either, sir,’ said Martin quietly.
The captain was incredulous. ‘There were only three rockets. We were in the
lead. This man who got here ahead of us? What was his name!’
‘He didn’t have a name. He doesn’t need one. It would be different on every
planet, sir.’
The captain stared at his lieutenant with hard, cynical eyes. ‘Well, what did he
do that was so wonderful that nobody even looks at our ship?’
‘For one thing,’ said Martin steadily, ‘he healed the sick and comforted the
poor. He fought hypocrisy and dirty politics and sat among the people, talking,
through the day.’
‘Is that so wonderful?’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘I don’t get this.’ The captain confronted Martin, peered into his face and
eyes. ‘You been drinking, eh?’ He was suspicious. He backed away. ‘I don’t
understand.’
Martin looked at the city. ‘Captain, if you don’t understand, there’s no way of
telling you.’
The captain followed his gaze. The city was quiet and beautiful and a great
peace lay over it. The captain stepped forward, taking his cigar from his lips.
He squinted first at Martin, then at the golden spires of the buildings.
‘You don’t mean’you can’t mean’ That man you’re talking about couldn’t be”’
Martin nodded. ‘That’s what I mean, sir.
The captain stood silently, not moving. He drew himself up.
‘I don’t believe it,’ he said at last.
At high noon Captain Hart walked briskly into the city, accompanied by
Lieutenant Martin and an assistant who was carrying some electrical equipment.
Every once in a while the captain laughed loudly, put his hands on his hips and
shook his head.
The mayor of the town confronted him. Martin set up a tripod, screwed a box onto
it, and switched on the batteries.
‘Are you the mayor?’ The captain jabbed a finger out.
‘I am,’ said the mayor.
The delicate apparatus stood between them, controlled and adjusted by Martin and
the assistant. Instantaneous translations from any language were made by the
box. The words sounded crisply on the mild air of the city.
‘About this occurrence yesterday,’ said the captain. ‘It occurred?’
‘It did.’
‘You have witnesses?’
‘We have.’
‘May we talk to them?’
‘Talk to any of us,’ said the mayor. ‘We are all witnesses.’
In an aside to Martin the captain said, ‘Mass hallucination.’ To the mayor,
‘What did this man’this stranger’look like?’
‘That would be hard to say,’ said the mayor, smiling a little.
‘Why would it?’
‘Opinions might differ slightly.’
‘I’d like your opinion, sir, anyway,’ said the captain. ‘Record this,’ he
snapped to Martin over his shoulder. The lieutenant pressed the button of a hand
recorder.
‘Well,’ said the mayor of the city, ‘he was a very gentle and kind man. He was
of a great and knowing intelligence.’
‘Yes’yes, I know, I know.’ The captain waved his fingers. ‘Generalizations. I
want something specific. What did he look like?’
‘I don’t believe that is important,’ replied the mayor.
‘It’s very important,’ said the captain sternly. ‘I want a description of this
fellow. If I can’t get it from you, I’ll get it from others.’ To Martin, ‘I’m
sure it must have been Burton, pulling one of his practical jokes.’
Martin would not look him in the face. Martin was coldly silent.
The captain snapped his fingers. ‘There was something or other’a healing?’
‘Many healings,’ said the mayor.
‘May I see one?’
‘You may,’ said the mayor. ‘My son.’ He nodded at a small boy who stepped
forward. ‘He was afflicted with a withered arm. Now, look upon it.’
At this the captain laughed tolerantly. ‘Yes, yes. This isn’t even
circumstantial evidence, you know. I didn’t see the boy’s withered arm. I see
only his arm whole and well. That’s no proof. What proof have you that the boy’s
arm was withered yesterday and today is well?’
‘My word is my proof,’ said the mayor simply.
‘My dear man!’ cried the captain. ‘You don’t expect me to go on hearsay, do you?
Oh no!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the mayor, looking upon the captain with what appeared to be
curiosity and pity.
‘Do you have any pictures of the boy before today?’ asked the captain.
After a moment a large oil portrait was carried forth, showing the son with a
withered arm.
‘My dear fellow!’ The captain waved it away. ‘Anybody can paint a picture.
Paintings lie. I want a photograph of the boy.’
There was no photograph. Photography was not a known art in their society.
‘Well,’ sighed the captain, face twitching, ‘let me talk to a few other
citizens. We’re getting nowhere.’ He pointed at a woman. ‘You.’ She hesitated.
‘Yes, you; come here,’ ordered the captain. ‘Tell me about this wonderful man
you saw yesterday.’
The woman looked steadily at the captain. ‘He walked among us and was very fine
and good.’
‘What color were his eyes?’
‘The color of the sun, the color of the sea, the color of a flower, the color of
the mountains, the color of the night.’
‘That’ll do.’ The captain threw up his hands. ‘See, Martin? Absolutely nothing.
Some charlatan wanders through whispering sweet nothings in their ears and”’
‘Please, stop it,’ said Martin.
The captain stepped back. ‘What?’
‘You heard what I said,’ said Martin. ‘I like these people. I believe what they
say. You’re entitled to your opinion, but keep it to yourself, sir.’
‘You can’t talk to me this way,’ shouted the captain.
‘I’ve had enough of your highhandedness,’ replied Martin. ‘Leave these people
alone. They’ve got something good and decent, and you come and foul up the nest
and sneer at it. Well, I’ve talked to them too. I’ve gone through the city and
seen their faces, and they’ve got something you’ll never have’a little simple
faith, and they’ll move mountains with it. You, you’re boiled because someone
stole your act, got here ahead and made you unimportant!’
‘I’ll give you five seconds to finish,’ remarked the captain. ‘I understand.
You’ve been under a strain, Martin. Months of traveling in space, nostalgia,
loneliness. And now, with this thing happening, I sympathize, Martin. I overlook
your petty insubordination.’
‘I don’t overlook your petty tyranny,’ replied Martin. ‘I’m stepping out. I’m
staying here.’
‘You can’t do that!’
‘Can’t I? Try and stop me. This is what I came looking for. I didn’t know it,
but this is it. This is for me. Take your filth somewhere else and foul up other
nests with your doubt and your’scientific method!’ He looked swiftly about.
‘These people have had an experience, and you can’t seem to get it through your
head that it’s really happened and we were lucky enough to almost arrive in time
to be in on it.
‘People on Earth have talked about this man for twenty centuries after he walked
through the old world. We’ve all wanted to see him and hear him, and never had
the chance. And now, today, we just missed seeing him by a few hours.’
Captain Hart looked at Martin’s cheeks. ‘You’re crying like a baby. Stop it.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Well, I do. In front of these natives we’re to keep up a front. You’re
overwrought. As I said, I forgive you.’
‘I don’t want your forgiveness.”
‘You idiot. Can’t you see this is one of Burton’s tricks, to fool these people,
to bilk them, to establish his oil and mineral concerns under a religious guise!
You fool, Martin. You absolute fool! You should know Earthmen by now. They’ll do
anything’blaspheme, lie, cheat, steal, kill, to get their ends. Anything is fine
if it works; the true pragmatist, that’s Burton. You know him!’
The captain scoffed heavily. ‘Come off it, Martin, admit it; this is the sort of
scaly thing Burton might carry off, polish up these citizens and pluck them when
they’re ripe.’
‘No,’ said Martin, thinking of it.
The captain put his hand up. ‘That’s Burton. That’s him. That’s his dirt, that’s
his criminal way. I have to admire the old dragon. Flaming in here in a blaze
and a halo and a soft word and a loving touch, with a medicated salve here and a
healing ray there. That’s Burton all right!’
‘No.’ Martin’s voice was dazed. He covered his eyes. ‘No, I won’t believe it.’
‘You don’t want to believe.’ Captain Hart kept at it. ‘Admit it now. Admit it!
It’s just the thing Burton would do. Stop daydreaming, Martin. Wake up! It’s
morning. This is a real world and we’re real, dirty people’Burton the dirtiest
of us all!’
Martin turned away.
‘There, there, Martin,’ said Hart, mechanically patting the man’s back. ‘I
understand. Quite a shock for you. I know. A rotten shame, and all that. That
Burton is a rascal. You go take it easy. Let me handle this.’
Martin walked off slowly toward the rocket.
Captain Hart watched him go. Then, taking a deep breath, he turned to the woman
he had been questioning. ‘Well. Tell me some more about this man. As you were
saying, madam?’
Later the officers of the rocket ship ate supper on card tables outside. The
captain correlated his data to a silent Martin who sat red-eyed and brooding
over his meal.
‘Interviewed three dozen people, all of them full of the same milk and hogwash,’
said the captain. ‘It’s Burton’s work all right, I’m positive. He’ll be spilling
back in here tomorrow or next week to consolidate his miracles and beat us out
in our contracts. I think I’ll stick on and spoil it for him.’
Martin glanced up sullenly. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he said.
‘Now, now, Martin! There, there, boy.’
‘I’ll kill him’so help me, I will.’
‘We’ll put an anchor on his wagon. You have to admit he’s clever. Unethical but
clever.’
‘He’s dirty.’
‘You must promise not to do anything violent.’ Captain Hart checked his figures.
‘According to this, there were thirty miracles of healing performed, a blind man
restored to vision, a leper cured. Oh, Burton’s efficient, give him that.’
A gong sounded. A moment later a man ran up. ‘Captain, sir. A report! Burton’s
ship is coming down. Also the Ashley ship, sir!’
‘See!’ Captain Hart beat the table. ‘Here come the jackals to the harvest! They
can’t wait to feed. Wait till I confront them. I’ll make them cut me in on this
feast’I will!’
Martin looked sick. He stared at the captain.
‘Business, my dear boy, business,’ said the captain.
Everybody looked up. Two rockets swung down out of the sky.
When the rockets landed they almost crashed.
‘What’s wrong with those fools?’ cried the captain, jumping up. The men ran
across the meadowlands to the steaming ships.
The captain arrived. The airlock door popped open on Burton’s ship.
A man fell out into their arms.
‘What’s wrong?’ cried Captain Hart.
The man lay on the ground. They bent over him and he was burned, badly burned.
His body was covered with wounds and scars and tissue that was inflamed and
smoking. He looked up out of puffed eyes and his thick tongue moved in his split
lips.
‘What happened?’ demanded the captain, kneeling down, shaking the man’s arm.
‘Sir, sir,’ whispered the dying man. ‘Forty-eight hours ago, back in Space
Sector Seventy-nine DFS, off Planet One in this system, our ship, and Ashley’s
ship, ran into a cosmic storm, sir.’ Liquid ran gray from the man’s nostrils.
Blood trickled from his mouth. ‘Wiped out. All crew. Burton dead. Ashley died an
hour ago. Only three survivals.’
‘Listen to me!’ shouted Hart bending over the bleeding man. ‘You didn’t come to
this planet before this very hour?’
Silence.
‘Answer me!’ cried Hart.
The dying man said, ‘No. Storm. Burton dead two days ago. This first landing on
any world in six months.’
‘Are you sure?’ shouted Hart, shaking violently, gripping the man in his hands.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure, sure,’ mouthed the dying man.
‘Burton died two days ago? You’re positive?’
‘Yes, yes,’ whispered the man. His head fell forward. The man was dead.
The captain knelt beside the silent body. The captain’s face twitched, the
muscles jerking involuntarily. The other members of the crew stood back of him
looking down. Martin waited. The captain asked to be helped to his feet,
finally, and this was done. They stood looking at the city. ‘That means”’
‘That means?’ said Martin.
‘We’re the only ones who’ve been here,’ whispered Captain Hart. ‘And that man”’
‘What about that man, Captain?’ asked Martin.
The captain’s face twitched senselessly. He looked very old indeed, and gray.
His eyes were glazed. He moved forward in the dry grass.
‘Come along, Martin. Come along. Hold me up; for my sake, hold me. I’m afraid
I’ll fall. And hurry. We can’t waste time”’
They moved, stumbling, toward the city, in the long dry grass, in the blowing
wind.
Several hours later they were sitting in the mayor’s auditorium. A thousand
people had come and talked and gone. The captain had remained seated, his face
haggard, listening, listening. There was so much light in the faces of those who
came and testified and talked he could not bear to see them. And all the while
his hands traveled, on his knees, together; on his belt, jerking and quivering.
When it was over, Captain Hart turned to the mayor and with strange eyes said:
‘But you must know where he went?’
‘He didn’t say where he was going,’ replied the mayor.
‘To one of the other nearby worlds?’ demanded the captain.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must know.’
‘Do you see him?’ asked the mayor, indicating the crowd.
The captain looked. ‘No.’
‘Then he is probably gone,’ said the mayor.
‘Probably, probably!’ cried the captain weakly. ‘I’ve made a horrible mistake,
and I want to see him now. Why, it just came to me, this is a most unusual thing
in history. To be in on something like this. Why, the chances are one in
billions we’d arrived at one certain planet among millions of planets the day
after he came! You must know where he’s gone!’
‘Each finds him in his own way,’ replied the mayor gently.
‘You’re hiding him.’ The captain’s face grew slowly ugly.
Some of the old hardness returned in stages. He began to stand up.
‘No,’ said the mayor.
‘You know where be is then?’ The captain’s fingers twitched at the leather
holster on his right side.
‘I couldn’t tell you where he is, exactly,’ said the mayor.
‘I advise you to start talking,’ and the captain took out a small steel gun.
‘There’s no way,’ said the mayor, ‘to tell you anything.’
‘Liar!’
An expression of pity came into the mayor’s face as he looked at Hart.
‘You’re very tired,’ he said. ‘You’ve traveled a long way and you belong to a
tired people who’ve been without faith a long time, and you want to believe so
much now that you’re interfering with yourself. You’ll only make it harder if
you kill. You’ll never find him that way.
‘Where’d he go? He told you; you know. Come on, tell me!’ The captain waved the
gun.
The mayor shook his head.
‘Tell me! Tell me!’
The gun cracked once, twice. The mayor fell, his arm wounded.
Martin leaped forward. ‘Captain!’
The gun flashed at Martin. ‘Don’t interfere.’
On the floor, holding his wounded arm, the mayor looked up. ‘Put down your gun.
You’re hurting yourself. You’ve never believed, and now that you think you
believe, you hurt people because of it.’
‘I don’t need you,’ said Hart, standing over him. ‘If I missed him by one day
here, I’ll go on to another world. And another and another. I’ll miss him by
half a day on the next planet, maybe, and a quarter of a day on the third
planet, and two hours on the next, and an hour on the next, and half an hour on
the next, and a minute on the next. But after that, one day I’ll catch up with
him! Do you hear that?’ He was shouting now, leaning wearily over the man on the
floor. He staggered with exhaustion. ‘Come along, Martin.’ He let the gun hang
in his hand.
‘No,’ said Martin. ‘I’m staying here.’
‘You’re a fool. Stay if you like. But I’m going on, with the others, as far as I
can go.’
The mayor looked up at Martin. ‘I’ll be all right. Leave me. Others will tend my
wounds.’
‘I’ll be back,’ said Martin. ‘I’ll walk as far as the rocket.’ They walked with
vicious speed through the city. One could see with what effort the captain
struggled to show all the old iron, to keep himself going. When he reached the
rocket he slapped the side of it with a trembling hand. He holstered his gun. He
looked at Martin.
‘Well, Martin?’
Martin looked at him. ‘Well, Captain?’
The captain’s eyes were on the sky. ‘Sure you won’t’come with’with me, eh?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It’ll be a great adventure, by God. I know I’ll find him.’
‘You are set on it now, aren’t you, sir?’ asked Martin.
The captain’s face quivered and his eyes closed. ‘Yes.’
‘There’s one thing I’d like to know.’
‘What?’
‘Sir, when you find him’if you find him,’ asked Martin, ‘what will you ask of
him?’
‘Why” The captain faltered, opening his eyes. His hands clenched and
unclenched. He puzzled a moment and then broke into a strange smile. ‘Why, I’ll
ask him for a little’peace and quiet.’ He touched the rocket. ‘It’s been a long
time, a long, long time since’since I relaxed.’
‘Did you ever just try, Captain?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Hart.
‘Never mind. So long, Captain.’
‘Good-by, Mr. Martin.’
The crew stood by the port. Out of their number only three were going on with
Hart. Seven others were remaining behind, they said, with Martin.
Captain Hart surveyed them and uttered his verdict: ‘Fools!’ He, last of all,
climbed into the airlock, gave a brisk salute, laughed sharply. The door
slammed.
The rocket lifted into the sky on a pillar of fire.
Martin watched it go far away and vanish.
At the meadow’s edge the mayor, supported by several men, beckoned.
‘He’s gone,’ said Martin, walking up.
‘Yes, poor man, he’s gone,’ said the mayor. ‘And he’ll go on, planet after
planet, seeking and seeking, and always and always he will be an hour late, or a
half hour late, or ten minutes late, or a minute late. And finally he will miss
out by only a few seconds. And when he has visited three hundred worlds and is
seventy or eighty years old he will miss out by only a fraction of a second, and
then a smaller fraction of a second. And he will go on and on, thinking to find
that very thing which he left behind here, on this planet, in this city”
Martin looked steadily at the mayor.
The mayor put out his hand. ‘Was there ever any doubt of it?’ He beckoned to the
others and turned. ‘Come along now. We mustn’t keep him waiting.”
They walked into the city.

The End

Some comments.

Captain Hart is faced with the possibility of this redemption, but makes two mistakes: first, he initially refuses to believe; second, when forced to believe by circumstances, he thinks he can take control of the situation with force.

Faith isn’t about taking control, after all, but releasing control and allowing a higher power to lead the way.

What Hart feels, then, isn’t faith at all, but a kind of agnostic desperation.

Agnosticism is a non-committal attitude to the existence of God: neither atheistic nor believing in God, but instead waiting for solid proof to sway one's position.

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What the meals were like during first five years of progressive socialism in the Soviet Union.

America is a mess.

It is going down the toilet on all fronts.

Here we are going to briefly review the insanity that Washington DC is involved in on the “Geo-political front”, and that will Segway into what is going on in the “home front”. Overall, it’s a damning situation, and getting uglier by the minute. Those of you who thought that Trump was insane will now be terrified that Biden is (maybe) even worse.

Yikes!

"DIPLOMACY'S DEAD, BABY. DIPLOMACY'S DEAD.

The Empire of Chaos is in utter desperation, and on a Kill Bill rampage. Without a samurai sword.

Some of us, including Alastair Crooke, Paul Craig Roberts, The Saker, and if we he was still alive, Prof. Stephen Cohen, have been warning everyone for a long time.

It doesn't matter that Russiagate was completely debunked. The Dem Dementia administration is now on Russiagate 2.0 on steroids.

This "intel" report on Russian interference in the - rigged - US elections does not even qualify as a bad joke.

What Crash Test Dummy's handlers told him to say in that interview about Putin being "a killer", "without a soul" who will "pay a price", goes way beyond ANYTHING that happened during the Cold War.

At least there was a measure of diplomatic decency in the superpowers relationship.

What's happening now is totally reckless, totally irrational - not to mention terminally stupid: there is NO American foreign policy left.

The Kremlin - as well as the Ministy of Foreign Affairs - already got the picture: they are dealing with a bunch of lowly gangsters which also happens to be criminally insane.

For the record: Stupidistan is now at war ON THREE FRONTS. Against Russia, against China and against Iran.

Declining empires are ALWAYS strategically stupid."

Posted by: Seej | Mar 18 2021 19:05 utc | 4

It’s even worse than that.

By now, you have all heard it. (From here) Here is the official transcript:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under — denigrate you, support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he pay?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we — I know him relatively well. And I– the conversation started off, I said, “I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.”
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn’t have a soul.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And — and his response was, “We understand one another.” It was– I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that — that’s how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, “I looked in his eyes and saw his soul.” I said, “Looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.” And looked back and he said, “We understand each other.” Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my experience, and I’ve dealt with an awful lot of ’em over my career, is just know the other guy. Don’t expect somethin’ that you’re– that — don’t expect him to– or her to– voluntarily appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he’s gonna pay we’ll– you’ll see shortly.

This is truly a historic interview and a watershed moment in US-Russia relations. Let’s deconstruct what is happening here:

“Director of National Intelligence came out with a report”:

Ever since 9/11, the US intel community has been under huge pressure to produce not intelligence, but to serve as a kind of criterion of truth, a substitute for any rules of evidence. 

For example, if tomorrow Biden’s handlers want to accuse Putin of eating newborn babies for breakfast, all they have to do is get the US intel community to produce a report which will say with “great confidence” that it is “highly likely” that Putin does, indeed, like to start his days by snaking on babies. 

The “logic” here works like this: “since we (the West) are the good guys, our intelligence community is objective, non-political and trustworthy”. QED. 

And the fact that the history of both the CIA and the FBI prove beyond any reasonable doubt that both of these agencies were totally politicized for decades does not matter. 

Why? 

Because the also “objective, non-political and trustworthy” US media says that the intel community must be trusted because it is, you guessed it, “objective, non-political and trustworthy”. Oh the beauty of circular logic….

Next,

“What price must he pay?”.

This one is so important that Stephanopoulos asks this twice and Biden “reassures” him twice. 

The message here is that it is not Stephanopoulos who demands a retaliation, it is the vox populi, the outraged people of the United States. And why would the people of the USA hate Putin and Russia and demand retaliation? 

Why – because the objective, non-political and trustworthy US media fully endorses the claims of the objective, non-political and trustworthy US intel community! 

How can anybody possibly doubt these two paragons of honesty?! Only a “Putin agent” would doubt their word, right?

Then,

“Putin does not have a soul”.

This is pretty pathetic, since Stephanopoulos comes from a Greek Orthodox family he should know that all humans have a soul and to suggest otherwise is, actually, a total and categorical rejection of everything Christianity stands for. 

It is also a clear case of dehumanization, something which all politicians do before they turn to violence and war. 

It is unlikely that Biden has any idea what he did or did not tell Putin when they met, but even if we assume that Biden did actually tell Putin that he had no soul, I can just imagine the true amazement (and inner giggle) of Putin hearing that. 

By the way, the “official” response of Putin was “we understand each other” which makes absolutely no logical sense. 

So what we have is a basically brain dead pseudo “President” who is programmed by his handlers to tell the US public that Putin has no soul and that Biden told him that face to face. What actual purpose such a statement would pursue is neither asked nor answered.

Finally

“Is Putin a killer”.

First, what a fantastically stupid thing to ask. 

Why? Because this question has no objective meaning unless the context or scope is specified. 

It could mean “did he commit murder?“, that is illegal manslaughter, a crime under Russian law. Or it could mean “did he, the President of Russia, order Russian special services to kill Litvinenko, Skripal, Navalnyii and others?“. 

This would be legal under Russian law and, in fact, the Russians have never denied ordering the execution of, say, Wahabi terrorists (both in Russia and outside). 

That would be a policy decision similar to one the US used to (putatively) execute Osama Bin-Laden or General Soleimani. 

Finally, that question could also mean “did Putin as the commander in chief of the Russian armed forces order military operations which resulted in the loss of human life, including possible innocent human life?“. 

This would also be a policy decision which any commander in chief has to make. These are all completely different questions, but for micro-brains like Stephanopoulos or Biden, the purpose of questions is not to elicit answers, it is to set an emotional tone, a kind of “mental background” which Orwell very aptly called the “two minutes of hate“.

Yes, all of the above is completely unprecedented: not even in the worst hours of the Cold War did western politicians use that kind of language. What we witness today is not only truly extremely dangerous, it is also the end of diplomacy.

The End of Diplomacy

When diplomacy dies, wars are born.

I grew up in So. CA and had the greatest life as a child and up to the millennia when everything changed after 9.11 

The point and the problem is that most people define America as the government whereas I define it as the people who by and large are friendly, decent and caring. 

Are they misled? 

For sure, but they are indoctrinated from early childhood and they resist the idea that their government might be a monster, same as a child does with an abusive parent. 

Americans are mostly sheep, but they are good sheep and after all even us “superior” humans share a herd mentality, i.e. shepherd/sheep. 

So it pains me to know that it will be we the people who will suffer the fallout of any hostilities with Russia or Iran or China or Venezuela for that matter. The slime overlords will avoid the radar as always.

-NATO Blues

Yes, I know, ever since the Obama administration, US “diplomats” were mostly unprofessional political appointees with a fantastically low level of education, fully compensated by an fantastically high level of arrogance and hypocrisy. But while the likes of Psaki would spew any idiocy imaginable, US Presidents have never sunk to the level of Biden.

Biden is a reaction to Trump in that his admin represents a desperate attempt to salvage the neoliberal policies of the past 50 years since the 80s. Unfortunately for Biden, and the rest of America, there's only so many populations you can exploit before exploited productive forces become so advanced that they begin to demand higher wages, and thus profits dry up. Global wage differences even out, then import prices go up, and our American standard of living continues to drop until the sweatshops come home to roost. That won't stand and ideology shifts again and again (Biden's response to these shifts is, ironically, censorship and control).

So what does the Biden admin do? They know it will eventually come down to opening up new labor power markets (those sweet, sweet populations and natural resources of Russia are so tempting to Biden's vampiric brood) and taking down competing countries (China's rise as a consumer market is a big problem for the US). This is why Biden's behavior makes sense. If they don't put maximum pressure now, not just on Russia and China, but all potential neocolonial interests, then they won't get the chance in the future. We'll see the internal contradictions in the US give rise to even more blatant fascism (doesn't matter from whom, Trump or Biden).

Posted by: Kapusta | Mar 18 2021 20:19 utc | 16

You might wonder what the Russian reaction to all that is?

First, the Russian media immediately picked up on this and posted key excerpts of this interview with Russian voice-over, as did the Russian Internet.

The goal here is simple: to show each and every Russian how much the West hates Russia and everything Russia.

This shows how much whoever “leads” US is detached from the reality. I do not know what kind of drug they are using, but I want some of that s**t! 

Loss of common sense in US is astonishing. 

They could not win war against Serbia when they were the strongest and now they want to go against Russia and China at the same time!?!

-Stekicar  on March 17, 2021  ·  at 5:55 pm EST/EDT

Furthermore, it does not take a genius to understand the implications of the combination of the two following two facts:

  1. Putin is by far the most popular Russian politician, at least since Stalin
  2. The West sees Putin as some kind of devil incarnate
  3. Ergo: the West hates all the Russian people for regularly voting for Putin

Simple and quite undeniable.

In fact, an increasing number of Russians are saying “we are the Jews of the 21st century” and, frankly, I cannot disagree with this. The big difference here is that 20th century Jews did not have thousands of nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Russians do.

I wonder of Stephanopoulos and the rest of them understand this?

I don’t think so.

Interesting comments by a senior Russian Senator:

“US President Joe Biden’s boorish remarks about Russian leader Vladimir Putin will inevitably have a negative impact on relations between the two countries, Deputy Speaker of the Russian Federation Council (the upper house of parliament) Konstantin Kosachev wrote on Facebook on Thursday……..

“This is a fault line. These boorish remarks have killed off all expectations that the new US administration will pursue a new policy towards Russia,” Kosachev noted. According to him, “evaluations like these from a statesman of such a high rank are generally unacceptable.” The Russian senator stressed that the remarks had come from the president of the country “that drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes, according to expert estimates.” “As a result, the death of more than 500,000 people has been linked to US actions since 2001. Could you comment on that, Mr. Biden?” Kosachev said………..”

https://tass.com/politics/1267337

There is a culture of total impunity in the USA which stems from the fact that the US never fought a war in defense of the US mainland in its history and from the fact that the USA used to be protected by two oceans and two absolutely peaceful neighbors.

In sharp contrast, Russia has no natural borders and 1000 years experience of war, most of them existential and most fought on Russian soil.

Maria Zakharova today:

17 March 202120:09
Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova

503-17-03-2021

en-GB1 ru-RU1

Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov has been summoned to Moscow for consultations in order to analyse what needs to be done in the context of relations with the United States.

The new US administration took office about two months ago and the symbolic 100-day mark is not too far away, which is a good occasion for trying to appraise what Joe Biden’s team has managed to do and where it was not very successful. The most important thing for us is to identify ways of rectifying Russia-US relations, which have been going through hard times as Washington has, as a matter of fact, brought them to a blind alley. We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this.

This is what we will talk about during the consultations that the Foreign Ministry and other relevant agencies will hold with the Russian Ambassador to the United States.

https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4640791

I would also add that the other comment many Russian officials are making is that Biden simply lacks even basic manners. To make clear: they are not only saying that Biden has zero understanding of diplomacy, they are saying that Biden simply has no basic manners which any semi-educated person ought to have.

On the main Russian TV channel reporters were even asking today whether Russia ought to completely break diplomatic relations with the USA!

Whistling Shrimp  on March 18, 2021  ·  at 4:03 am EST/EDT 

Maybe American leadership is hoping that we the people will fail to notice that they have thoroughly destroyed our economy when those of us left after the nuclear exchange are freezing in the rubble of our homes during a truly anthropogenic climate change known as nuclear winter. 

There also will be no worries about questions of ownership, acquisition of food, medicine or political power as the well-armed oligarchy ensconced in their bunkers with their mercenary armies will simply take everything not vaporised and leave you to die and rot on the frozen and nuclear-contaminated formerly fruited plain. 

It will be a glorious and divinely-inspired “reset.”

That would be a very dangerous mistake and I don’t think that the Kremlin will go so far, at least officially, but there is a clear understanding amongst Russian officials while officially the two countries still have diplomatic relations, in reality the US basically terminated them.

Do I really have to spell out here how insanely dangerous this is?

While it is absolutely normal for some tribes still living in the bronze-age to play out ritual threats and displays of macho prowess in order to impress an adversary, to see the (nominal) leader of a nuclear superpower acting like such a bronze-age tribal leader is perplexing to say the least.

And just like the Sentinelese tribesmen believe that their bows and arrows can scare away metal ships and even helicopters, so do the “Biden tribesmen” (let’s call them that) hope that sanctions or US military capabilities will scare Russia into complete submission.

US military capabilities will scare Russia into complete submission?

Furthermore, at no time does Stephanopoulos question the moral and legal right of the US President to “punish” Russia and/or Putin.

In fact, by repeating this question, he strongly suggests that punishing Russia and/or Putin is not only the right of the US President, but his moral and, possibly, even legal obligation.

This is exactly what Dr John Marciano calls “empire as a way of life” (see here and here for details).

This ignorant, arrogant, narcissistic, messianic and terminally delusional belief that the USA is some kind of “collective messiah” tasked by nature or some god with policing the planet. The Sentinelese try to “defend” their own shores and land and they don’t have millions of members in an organization called “Veterans of Foreign Wars” (have they really no shame at all?) and they don’t spend on “defense” more than the rest of the planet combined.

Finally, we can rest assured that whoever is in command of the Sentinelese he (or she) is a much smarter and honest leader than the brain-dead vegetable that the theft of the US 2020 election put into power.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s wonderful tale the breaking moment comes when an innocent child explains “he hasn’t got anything on!“, while the rest of the people are under the spell of what is called “pluralistic ignorance“.

Let me ask you: how soon do you think that declaring, say, “Uncle Shmuel is truly brain dead…” will become a criminal offense in the so-called “the land of the free and the home of the brave“?

The point is that the neocons in the US needed a puppet in the White House, who would continue the globalist Agenda of introducing a globalist empire run by corporations and private banks. For that to succeed, both Russia and China need to be broken up and plundered. 

Too late for that, and by now it’s clear that not only is Sleepy Joe brain dead, but the neocon elite which is still living in the past, incapable of fully understanding that the world is changing.

What the neocon elite is very much aware is the fact that the present Western financial Ponzie scheme cannot function perpetually, showing signs of financial collapse. 

You cannot keep postponing gigantic foreign and internal debts and at the same time keep printing funny money in the trillions. 

For this scheme to have any chance of being maintained, then good old fashioned plundering is required, the chief targets being Russia and China. 

And now we have the answer why Anglo-American elites are aggressively disposed towards both countries. A boiling point is being created, which can explode into something very dangerous and suicidal. 

When a rat is cornered, it becomes dangerous, as proven by the neocons, who are apparently losing their nerve, failing to achieve a globalist world wide empire, while the empire they have created is showing signs of dissolution.

-Leo

It is dangerous insanity.

For the record: Stupidistan is now at war ON THREE FRONTS. Against Russia, against China and against Iran.

Declining empires are ALWAYS strategically stupid."

Posted by: Seej | Mar 18 2021 19:05 utc | 4

And…

Alas, more than 30 years ago it was observed in USA that it benefits a politician to seem stupid, and being genuinely stupid is even better. 

Why do you think power to be within Democratic Party decided to maneuver the least intellectually able contender to win in the primaries? That in itself is not necessarily bad, but on the lower levels of government, you must prove stupidity (or at least utter lack of original thinking) to advance. 

Now we have new generations of opportunists hiding any sign of thinking, apart from passing all the required exams in elite schools etc. Let me think of the greatness and extinction of Irish elk.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Mar 18 2021 19:20 utc | 7

Now it all makes sense…

There is a reason why Xi Peng, Putin and Iran are constructing the BRI out of Xinjiang. Asia is unifying against the “dangerous menace”.

BRI simplified, showing only the land routes.

Remember that China-Russia-Iran are a unified block

They have banded together in defense of an out-of-control United States Military Empire.

By Pepe Escobar and first posted at Asia Times…

Leviathan seems to be positioning itself for a geopolitical Kill Bill rampage – yet brandishing a rusty samurai high-carbon-steel sword.

Predictably, US deep state masters have not factored in that they could eventually be neutralized by a geopolitical Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.

In a searing, concise essay, Alastair Crooke pointed to the heart of the matter. These are the two key insights – including a nifty Orwellian allusion:

1. “Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off.”

2. “The US thinks to lead the maritime and rimland powers in imposing a searing psychological, technological and economic defeat on the Russia-China-Iran alliance. In the past, the outcome might have been predictable. This time Eurasia may very well stand solid against a weakened Oceania (and a faint-hearted Europe).”

And that brings us to two interconnected summits: the Quad and the China-US 2+2 in Alaska.

The QUAD

The virtual Quad last Friday came and went like a drifting cloud. When you had India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying the Quad is “a force for global good,” no wonder rows of eyebrows across the Global South were raised.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi remarked last year that the Quad was part of a drive to create an “Asian NATO.”

It is.

But the hegemon, lording over India, Japan and Australia, mustn’t spell it out. Thus the vague rhetoric about “free and open Indo-Pacific,” “democratic values,” “territorial integrity” – all code to characterize containment of China, especially in the South China Sea.

The exceptionalist wet dream – routinely expressed in US Thinktankland – is to position an array of missiles in the first island chain, pointing towards China like a weaponized porcupine. Beijing is very much aware of it.

Apart from a meek joint statement, the Quad promised to deliver 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines throughout the “Indo-Pacific” by the end of… 2022.

…

… by the end of 2022.

… about two years from now.

The vaccine would be produced by India and financed by the US and Japan, with the logistics of distribution coming from Australia.

      • Produced in India.
      • Financed by the US and Japan.
      • Logistical distribution out of Australia.

That was predictably billed as “countering China’s influence in the region.”

Too little, too late. The bottom line is: The hegemon is furious because China’s vaccine diplomacy is a huge success – not only across Asia but all across the Global South.

Yah. China has been doing this all year. And it is just insane to think that American promises of some day in two years is going to matter. Or make a difference. Or to provide credibility.
And as crazy as all this is, we are not even going to begin to talk about the crazed printing of trillions of US Dollars that is now flooding the world.

This ain’t no ‘strategic dialogue’

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken is a mere apparatchik who was an enthusiastic cheerleader for shock and awe against Iraq 18 years ago, in 2003. At the time he was staff director for the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by Senator Joe Biden.

Now Blinken is running US foreign policy for a senile cardboard entity who mutters, live, on camera, “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” – as in Nancy Pelosi; and who characterizes the Russian president as “a killer,” “without a soul,” who will “pay a price.”

A dance towards nuclear war.

Paraphrasing Pulp Fiction: “Diplomacy’s dead, baby. Diplomacy’s dead.”

With that in mind, there’s little doubt that the formidable Yang Jiechi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, side by side with Foreign Minister Wang Yi, will make shark’s fin soup out of their interlocutors Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the 2+2 summit in Anchorage, Alaska.

Only two days before the start of the Two Sessions in Beijing, Blinken proclaimed that China is the “biggest geopolitical challenge of the 21st century.”

According to Blinken, China is the …

“only country with the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system – all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to, because it ultimately serves the interests and reflects the values of the American people.”

So Blinken tacitly admits what really matters is how the world works “the way we want it to” – “we” being the hegemon, which made those rules in the first place. And those rules serve the interests and reflect the values of the American people.

As in: It’s our way or the highway.

America is the best, and all the soldiers are Rambo. America is invincible, and you had best obey us or we will destroy you.

Blinken could be excused because he’s just a wide-eyed novice on the big stage. But it gets way more embarrassing…

American foreign policy 2021

Here’s his foreign policy in a nutshell (“his” because the hologram at the White House needs 24/7 instructions in his earpiece to even know what time it is):

      • Sanctions, sanctions everywhere;
      • Cold War 2.0 against Russia and “killer” Putin;
      • China guilty of “genocide” in Xinjiang;
      • China is a notorious apartheid state getting a free pass to do anything;
      • Iran must blink first or there’s no return to the JCPOA;
      • Random Guaido recognized as President of Venezuela, with regime change still the priority.

There’s a curious kabuki in play here.

America is used to fighting wars in far away lands. World War III will be an easy win.

Following the proverbial revolving door logic in DC, before literally crossing the street to have full access to the White House, Blinken was a founding partner of WestExec Advisors, whose main line of business is to offer “geopolitical and policy expertise” to American multinationals, the overwhelming majority of which are interested in – where else – China.

So Alaska might point to some measure of trade-off on trade.

Americans are not afraid to die for “democracy”. Because God has “blessed America” with invincibility.

The problem, though, seems insurmountable.

Beijing does not want to eschew the profitable American market, while for Washington expansion of Chinese technology across the West is anathema.

Blinken himself pre-empted Alaska, saying this is no “strategic dialogue.”

So we’re back to bolstering the Indo-Pacific racket;

      • Recriminations about the “loss of freedom” in Hong Kong – whose role of US/UK Fifth Column is now definitely over;
      • Tibet;
      • The “invasion” of Taiwan, now on spin overdrive, with the Pentagon stating it is “probable” before 2027.
      • Shutdown of the BRI by intervention in Xinjiang.

“Strategic dialogue” it ain’t.

A new America awaits.

A junkie on a bum trip

Wang Yi, at a press conference linked to the 13th National People’s Congress and the announcement of the next Five-Year Plan, said: 

“We will set an example of strategic mutual trust, by firmly supporting each other in upholding core and major interests, jointly opposing ‘color revolution’ and countering disinformation, and safeguarding national sovereignty and political security.”

That’s a sharp contrast with the post-truth “highly likely” school of spin privileged by (failed) Russiagate peddlers and assorted Sinophobes.

Top Chinese scholar Wang Jisi, who used to be close to the late Ezra Vogel, author of arguably the best Deng Xiaoping biography in English, has introduced an extra measure of sanity, recalling Vogel’s emphasis on the necessity of US and East Asia understanding each other’s culture.

According to Wang Jisi,

“In my own experiences, I find one difference between the two countries most illuminating. 

We in China like the idea of “seeking common ground while reserving our differences.” 

We state that the common interests between our two countries far exceed our differences. 

We define common ground by a set of principles like mutual respect and cooperation. 

Americans, in contrast, tend to focus on hard issues like tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea. 

It looks that the Chinese want to set up principles before trying to solve specific problems, but the Americans are eager to deal with problems before they are ready to improve the relationship.”

The real problem is that the hegemon seems congenitally incapable of trying to understand the Other. It always harks back to that notorious formulation by Zbigniew Brzezinski, with trademark imperial arrogance, in his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard:

“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are [1] to prevent collusion and [2] maintain security dependence among the vassals, [3] to keep tributaries pliant and protected and [4] to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

Dr Zbig was referring, of course, to Eurasia. “Security dependence among vassals” applied mostly to Germany and Japan, key hubs in the Rimland.  “Tributaries pliant and protected” applied mostly to the Middle East.

And crucially, “keep the barbarians from coming together” applied to Russia, China and Iran. That was Pax Americana in a nutshell. And that’s what’s totally unraveling now.

"the Americans are eager to deal with problems before they are ready to improve the relationship."

That observation is consistent with that of an entity that only wants its orders obeyed and seeks no relationship or friendship with any other entity since it sees itself as Top Dog, and #1 in every way. As with the Nord Stream project, we see the Gangster mentality--Do as I say or else!

Not only does the Emperor have no clothes or much of a working memory, he's got erectile dysfunction too that's well beyond the ability of Viagra to fix.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 18 2021 19:22 utc | 8

The Kill Bill Logic

Kill Bill scene.

Hence the Kill Bill logic. It goes back a long way. Less than two months after the collapse of the USSR, the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance preached total global dominance and, following Dr Zbig, the absolute imperative of preventing the emergence of any future peer competitor.

Especially Russia, defined as “the only power in the world with the capacity of destroying the United States.”

Then, in 2002, at the start of the “axis of evil” era, came the full spectrum dominance doctrine as the bedrock of the US National Security Strategy. Domination, domination everywhere: terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, cosmic, psychological, biological, cyber-technological.

And, not by accident, the Indo-Pacific strategy – which guides the Quad – is all about “how to maintain US strategic primacy.”

This mindset is what enables US Think Tankland to formulate risible “analyses” in which the only “win” for the US imperatively requires a failed Chinese “regime.”

After all, Leviathan is congenitally incapable of accepting a “win-win”; it only runs on “zero-sum,” based on divide and rule.

And that’s what’s leading the Russia-China strategic partnership to progressively establish a wide-ranging, comprehensive security environment, spanning everything from high-tech weaponry to banking and finance, energy supplies and the flow of information.

To evoke yet another pop culture gem, a discombobulated Leviathan now is like Caroline, the junkie depicted in Lou Reed’s Berlin:

But she’s not afraid to die / 
All of her friends call her Alaska / 
When she takes speed / 
They laugh and ask her / 
What is in her mind / 
What is in her mind / 
She put her fist through the window pane / 
It was such a / 
funny feeling / 
It’s so cold / 
in Alaska.

Washington Has Resurrected the Specter of Nuclear Armageddon

5688 Views March 17, 2021 53 Comments  By Paul Craig Roberts

Truth Is An Endangered Species:  Support It

During the 20th century Cold War with the Soviet Union, there were US Soviet experts who were concerned that the Cold War was partly contrived and, therefore, needlessly dangerous. Stephen Cohn at Princeton University, for example, believed that exaggerating the threat was as dangerous as underestimating it. 

On the other hand, Richard Pipes at Harvard believed that the CIA dangerously underestimated Soviet military power and failed to grasp Soviet strategic intentions.

In 1976 President Gerald Ford and CIA Director George H.W. Bush commissioned an outside panel of experts to evaluate the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates. This group was known as Team B. 

Under Pipes’ leadership Team B created the perception that the US faced a dangerous “window of vulnerability.”

In conventional wisdom, in order to close this window of vulnerability President Reagan began an American arms buildup. 

On this point conventional wisdom is wrong.

The Reagan military buildup was as much hype as reality.  Its purpose was to bring the Soviets to the negotiating table and end the Cold War in order to remove the threat of nuclear war. 

Reagan’s supply-side policy had fixed the problem of worsening trade-offs between employment and inflation, thus making an arms buildup possible. 

In contrast, Reagan regarded the Soviet economy as broken and unfixable. 

He reasoned that a new arms race was more than the Soviets could afford, and that the threat of one would bring the Soviets to the table to negotiate the end of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union collapsed when hardline communists, convinced that Gorbachev was endangering the Soviet Union by giving up too much too quickly before American intentions were known, placed President Gorbachev under house arrest. 

The Yeltsin years (1991-1999) brought the dismemberment of the Soviet Empire and was a decade of Russian subservience to the United States.

Putin came to power as the American neoconservatives were girding up to establish US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

As General Wesley Clark told us, seven countries were to be overthrown in 5 years. The American preoccupation with the Middle East permitted Putin to throw off American overlordship and reestablish Russian sovereignty. 

Once Washington realized this, the American establishment turned on Putin with a vengence.

Stephen Cohen, Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union), myself and a few others warned that Washington’s refusal to accept Russian independence would reignite the Cold War, thus erasing the accomplishment of ending it and resurrecting the specter of nuclear war.

But Washington didn’t listen. 

Instead, Cohen and I were put on a list of “Russian agents/dupes,” and the process of trying to destabalize Putin began.  In other words, once an American colony always an American colony, and Putin became the most demonized person on earth.

Today (March 17) we had the extraordinary spectacle of President Biden saying on ABC News that President Putin is a killer, and “he will pay a price.”  This is a new low point in diplomacy. 

It does not serve American interests or peace.

This all is dangerous.

Yesterday a CIA-Homeland Security report was declassified. The “report” is blatant propaganda.

It alleges that Russia interfered in the 2020 election with the purposes of “denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”

“Russiagate” is still with us despite the failure of the three-year Mueller investigation to find a scrap of evidence.

We desperately need a new Team B like the one the CIA commissioned in 1976 to check on itself.  But in those days discussion and debate was possible. 

Today they are not. 

We live in a world in which only propaganda is permitted. 

There is an agenda.

The agenda is regime change in Russia. 

No facts are relevant.  There will be no Team B to evaluate whether the Putin threat is exaggerated.

New York City in 2025?

The anti-Russian craze that has been orchestrated in the US and throughout the Western world leaves the US in an extremely dangerous situation. 

Americans and Europeans perceive reality only through the light of American propaganda.  American diplomacy, military policy, news reporting, and public understanding are the fantasy creations of propaganda.

Los Angles in 2025?

The Kremlin has shown amazing forbearance of Washington’s inanities and insults.  It was the Democrat Hillary Clinton who called President Putin the “new Hitler,”  and now Democrat Biden calls Putin “a killer.” 

American presidents and presidential candidates did not speak of Soviet leaders in these terms. They would have been regarded by the American population as far too deranged to have access to the nuclear button.

Chicago in 2025?

Sooner or later the Kremlin will understand that it is pointless to respond to demonization with denials. 

Yes, the Russians are correct.

The accusations are groundless, and no facts or evidence is ever provided in support of the accusations. 

Sooner or later the Kremlin will realize that the purpose of demonizing a country is to prepare one’s people and allies for war against it.

They have realized this. They know what will occur. They are ready and prepared.

Washington pays no attention to Maria Zakharova and Dmitry Peskov’s objections to unsubstansiated accusations.

Houston in 2025?

When “sooner or later” is, I do not know, but the Russians haven’t reached that point.  The Kremlin reads the latest allegations as an excuse for more sanctions against Russian companies and individuals. This reading is mistaken. 

Washington’s purpose is to demonize Russia and its leadership in order to set Russia up for regime change and, failing that, for military attack.

In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda. 

Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.

This response is far outside the boundaries of the 20th century Cold War.  It precludes any rational or intelligent approach to American foreign policy.  Sooner or later the Kremlin will comprehend that it is confronted by a gangster outfit of the criminally insane. 

Then what happens?

Oh you know.

Sigh…

Pepe does get to the essential detail so clearly. Commonality verses divide all and conquer all. When he says it goes back a long way he is surely right again.

“To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

“To keep the barbarians from coming together” This is so telling with regard to the little noticed reality that the Roman Empire never truly collapsed.

Its patriarchal method of class rule, wherein an externally imposed force imposes a unity of subjugation on all peoples (symbolized by the fasces) with its iron rings that hold all peoples within its steely grip – is still the dominant ideology of governance in the West.

Boston in 2025?

The collapse of Capitalist America is nothing less than the real and final collapse of the ideology of Roman rule. It has been so long coming that the Western mind has to stretch deeply into history to see it for what it is.

It was Peter Ustinov who said that Americans make the best movies about the Roman Empire. Because they share the same excesses along with similar bad taste. There is a reason that Washington DC has a Cato institute. Rome never had an ideology of commonality.

It had a religion of anti-commonality in governance.

Now all it has left is a very old propaganda display that cannot hide its own sunset. As the dog finally faces its death its plaintive barking becomes ever more shrill and detached from reality.

And on the home front…

The entire United States has become a free-for-all brawl.

Those that are not rioting, or trying to grab as much cash as they can, are busy planning the “new” utopia that will replace the flailing nation.

In America, many millennials are very interested in reliving the Soviet and Chinese experiments with communism. They believe the glowing positive stories that they learned in American public schools, and believe that progressive socialism could easily be implemented in America.

What they don’t realize is that what they have been taught is a lie, or at best an illusion.

All you need to do is crack open a history book and relive that time. It’s not pretty. Here we do talk about it. In fact we talk about a very simple aspect of that time; how people ate. After all, the implementation of progressive socialism under the communist banner was going to right some wrongs, feed everyone, provide safety by disarming everyone, and provide free healthcare. What happened instead should be a wake-up call to everyone.

Here we concentrate on a small area (about the size of California) and how it fared once the Communists came to power in Russia. In America we would today refer to this movement as “progressive socialists”, but aside from the name they are carbon copies of the communists of 1918.

With that being said, please kindly keep in mind that a name is just a name. Many Americans tend to equate all "democracies" at wonderful utopias, and all "communist" nations as Hell-holes. Neither is true. 

Many times nations use a name as a cover to pretend and mask what they really are. 

Such as the United States "democracy" when it is actually an oligarchy-ruled Military Empire, and the "communist" China with is actually a merit-led republic.

Do not be fooled by what the popular narrative is. Observe how the nation acts, and functions. That will tell you what the nations actually are and what to expect from them.

The February Revolution

The February Revolution (March 1917 in the Gregorian calendar) was a revolution focused around Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). The Russian Revolution of 1905 is considered as a major factor to explain what sparked the February Revolution. In particular, the events of Bloody Sunday triggered massive unrests. A council of workers called the St. Petersburg Soviet was created and the beginning of a communist movement began.

Meanwhile, a Provisional Government was formed by members of the Imperial parliament or Duma. The Soviets, which stand for “workers’ councils”, initially permitted the Provisional Government to rule while they kept control over various militias. It took place in the context of major military setbacks during the First World War. After the entry of the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers in October 1914, Russia was deprived of a critical trade route which led to a minor economic crisis and Russia’s inability to provide munitions to their army. As a result, the army leadership considered they did not have the means to quell the revolution and Nicholas II was soon to become the last Emperor of Russia. [1]

The disruption of agriculture was also a considerable problem in Russia, but it was not caused by poor harvests, which had not been significantly altered during war-time. The indirect reason was that the government had been printing off millions of ruble notes in order to finance the war, and by 1917 inflation had made prices increase up to four times what they had been in 1914.

The peasantry made no gain in the sale of their products, since it was largely taken away by the middlemen on whom they depended. Consequently, they tended to revert to subsistence farming. Therefore, the cities were constantly in a situation of food shortage.

In the meantime, rising prices led to higher wages expectations in the factories. In January and February 1916, revolutionary propaganda partially financed by German funds resulted in widespread strikes.

The overall outcome was a growing criticism of the government. The original patriotic excitement, which had caused the name of St. Petersburg to be changed to the less German-sounding Petrograd, may have subsided a little but heavy losses during the war strengthened thoughts that Nicholas II was unfit to rule. [2] 

The following is a reprint of an article titled "How to serve man" By Douglas Smith. Reprinted as found, and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author.

How to Serve Man

In 1921, the Lenin-led Soviet Union faced one of the worst famines in history. A new book details its horrors and the American effort to combat cannibalism

By Douglas Smith

The stories began to appear in the Soviet press in the autumn of 1921, each one more gruesome than the last. There was the woman who refused to let go of her dead husband’s body. “We won’t give him up,” she screamed when the authorities came to take it away. “We’ll eat him ourselves, he’s ours!” There was the cemetery where a gang of 12 ravenous men and women dug up the corpse of a recently deceased man and devoured his cold flesh on the spot. There was the man captured by the police after murdering his friend, chopping off his head, and selling the body at a street market to a local restaurant owner to be made into meatballs, cutlets, and hash. And then there was the desperate mother of four starving children, saved only by the death of their sister, aged 13, whom the woman cut up and fed to the family.

The stories seemed too horrific to believe. Few could imagine a hunger capable of driving people to such acts. One man went in search of the truth. Henry Wolfe, a high-school history teacher from Ohio, spent several weeks in the spring of 1922 traveling throughout Samara Province, in southeastern Russia, intent on finding physical evidence of cannibalism. In the district of Melekess, officials told him about a father who had killed and eaten his two little children. He confessed that their flesh had “tasted sweeter than pork.” Wolfe kept on searching, and eventually found the proof he had been looking for.

At first glance, it appears to be an unremarkable photograph of six individuals in winter dress: two women and four men, their expressions blank, betraying no particular emotion. But then our eyes catch sight of the grisly objects laid out across a wooden plank resting unevenly atop a pair of crates. There are two female heads, part of a rib cage, a hand, and what appears to be the skull of a small child. The adult heads have been cracked open, and the skulls pulled back. Along with human flesh, cannibals had feasted upon the brains of their victims.

Wolfe stands second from the right, surrounded by Russian interpreters and Soviet officials. There’s a faint look of satisfaction on his face at having accomplished his goal. Here, at last, was the incontrovertible proof he had set out to find.

An American in Russia

Wolfe may have found the answer he had been seeking, but to us, a century later, the photograph raises a number of questions. What was Wolfe doing in Russia in the first place? What had led this young American to a remote corner of the globe, half a world away, in search of such horrors? And why would the Soviet government, the newly formed socialist state of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party, dedicated to world revolution and the overthrow of the capitalist order, have helped Wolfe to uncover, much less document and publicize, its miserable failure at feeding its own people?

If we look closely, a clue to answering these questions is to be found in the three letters stamped on the box in the center of the frame: “ARA.” Facing one of the worst famines in history, the Soviet government invited the American Relief Administration, the brainchild of Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States, to save Russia from ruin. For two years, the A.R.A. fed over 10 million men, women, and children across a million square miles of territory in what was the largest humanitarian operation in history.

Why would the Soviet government have helped Wolfe to uncover its miserable failure at feeding its own people?

Its efforts prevented a catastrophe of incalculable proportions—the loss of millions of lives, social unrest on a massive scale, and, quite possibly, the collapse of the Soviet state. Having completed their mission by the summer of 1923, the Americans packed up and went home. Before the A.R.A. left, the leaders of the Soviet government showered the organization with expressions of undying gratitude and promises never to forget America’s help.

“An act of humanity and benevolence,” Machiavelli wrote in his Discourses on Livy, “will at all times have more influence over the minds of men than violence and ferocity.” Machiavelli was wrong. The Soviet government quickly began to erase the memory of American charity, and what it could not erase, it sought to distort into something ugly. But it wasn’t just the Russians. Back in the United States, where Americans had followed the work of the A.R.A. with great interest, knowledge of Hoover’s achievement faded. By the time Hoover was voted out of office a decade later, during the Great Depression, the story of this extraordinary humanitarian mission had been forgotten. Now, almost a hundred years later, few people in America or Russia have ever heard of the A.R.A. Here is the story of one of the most horrifying aspects of the famine, and how the Americans sought to document it.

All P.R. Is Good P.R.

During his stay in the Soviet Union, William Garner, the P.R. man for the A.R.A., pushed for information on a subject of particular interest: cannibalism. He said he was hoping to get a chance to sit down with a cannibal for an interview before heading home. This wasn’t just morbid curiosity on his part; rather, he had been directed by his bosses to find solid, incontrovertible evidence of cannibalism. The A.R.A. had received Soviet reports on the problem but wanted its own proof. “We have ’em,” William Kelly, stationed with the A.R.A. in the city of Ufa, told Garner, “but they won’t talk for publication.”

Kelly had heard plenty of stories since arriving in Russia. He was convinced there had been thousands of cases of cannibalism that winter, but it was difficult to get precise details. Few Soviet officials were willing to talk to the Americans about this most horrifying aspect of the famine, largely out of a sense of shame and embarrassment for what they felt it said about their country. Nonetheless, a few had shared with Kelly what they knew, telling him that cannibals were dealt with forcefully when caught—put on trial and punished, some of the guilty even sentenced to death for their crimes.

Once, Kelly saw the trial records of a case, complete with a photograph of the accused and a boiled human head. The official policy of the A.R.A. was to soft-pedal such “horror stuff,” in Kelly’s words, in order to avoid accusations that the Americans had been exaggerating for cheap publicity. In early February, the Moscow office wired London to say that “any implication that the American Relief Administration vouches for the existence of cannibalism should be carefully avoided.”

Garner was hoping to get a chance to sit down with a cannibal for an interview before heading home.

“There are continual rumors about cannibalism around here,” Henry Wolfe, the high-school history teacher from Ohio, wrote from Samara on February 12 to his little brother Eddie, a student at Phillips Academy back in Massachusetts. “It is said there are cases where starving people have been eating dead bodies. I have heard some weird stories, but don’t know whether they are true.” He left soon after for the village of Melekess, a journey of some 250 miles. Wolfe wrote Eddie again from there on March 5, describing his trip: “At nearly every village we visited we heard of cannibalism. The stories were told to me by reliable persons and their accounts were corroborated by everyone in the village…. There is a woman in prison here in this town who ate her child. (Keep this on the quiet.) I’m going to see her today. You can’t imagine the terrible straits the peasants in the famine zone are in.”

Wolfe had traveled to New York in August 1921 to hand in his application in person to join the A.R.A. A member of the staff told him they might be in touch later, but they’d already received 500 applications and couldn’t make any promises. He waited around for several days, hoping to hear something. “The more I think of this Russian proposition the better I like it and the more I hope they will need me,” he wrote to his mother. But nothing came through, so Wolfe headed back to Ohio to prepare for another year of teaching history to the kids in the public schools of Coshocton County.

This was a far cry from his days as a volunteer ambulance driver during the war, first with the American Field Service in France and then the Red Cross in Italy, where he crossed paths with Hemingway and Dos Passos. He sent letter after letter to the A.R.A. that autumn, but still there were no openings for him. Finally, in December, he received word that they could use him if he could be ready to sail from New York on January 7. The office made sure to instruct him to bring heavy underwear, high boots, galoshes, and his sleeping bag.

Bodies of Evidence

When he arrived in Moscow at the end of the month, he was shocked to discover that his war service had not prepared him for Russia. The stench of the railroad station was beyond description, as was the mass of ragged humanity lurking in the darkness. Two days later, on the ride from the station in Samara to the A.R.A. house, he passed two dogs fighting in the street over a partially eaten corpse. Wolfe looked at his driver in horror, but the man paid no heed. Such things had become commonplace. On a short walk after dinner, he counted 14 dead bodies lying in the streets around the personnel house.

Wolfe spent most of his time as the lone American in the town of Melekess (now Dimitrovgrad) in northern Samara Province. Touring the villages in the area, he encountered the same hardships witnessed by other A.R.A. men—the frozen corpses stacked like cordwood in locked warehouses awaiting burial in the spring; the fetid hospitals lacking beds, blankets, aspirin, and soap; the walking dead, their eyes sunken and dull, dragging one heavy foot after the other through the snowy streets before collapsing from exhaustion.

Two dogs fighting in the street over a partially eaten corpse—such things had become commonplace.

Wolfe had a particular curiosity about what he called “the infernal crimes” that hunger could drive people to. In village after village, he met peasants who admitted to eating human flesh, whether corpses they had found or victims they had killed for food. It became something of an obsession for Wolfe, and he spent several weeks “on the trail of the cannibal,” as he wrote in a letter to a fellow A.R.A. man, William Shafroth, in early March, aided by “definitive information concerning cannibals” from local officials. Just to be safe, he made sure to carry a revolver with him on his travels.

Hearing the stories of cannibals was one thing, but to be able to catch them in the act was another. “If it can be seen, perhaps it would be valuable information to the A.R.A.” Not long after this, Wolfe found what he had been looking for, and he posed alongside his Soviet helpers for the photograph with his find, a mission-accomplished look on his face. The A.R.A. had its proof. He sent the photograph on to his superiors in Moscow. Unfortunately, the details of the image—where it was taken, the names of the men and women surrounding Wolfe, and the facts behind the discovery of the body parts—have been lost.

Original Sin

According to official Soviet reports, the first instances of cannibalism appeared in late summer 1921. The government was, not surprisingly, alarmed by the reports; nonetheless, it permitted articles about them to be published in the leading newspapers—Pravda and Izvestiia. By the spring of 1922, however, some officials felt the press had gone too far. In March, People’s Commissar for Public Health Nikolai Semashko complained in the pages of Izvestiia that the press had begun to treat the matter as some sort of “boulevard sensation.” Secondhand stories were being reported as facts, and reporters were increasingly prone to unwarranted speculation and exaggeration.

The medical doctor and amateur poet Lev Vasilevsky was prompted by Semashko’s criticism to conduct his own study of cannibalism. In Vasilevsky’s opinion, the problem was too important to be swept under the rug or left to unscrupulous reporters. The truth needed to be known and the guilty punished or, if proved to be psychologically ill, institutionalized. So he set out to undertake a serious investigation, interviewing medical workers and state and local officials, and consulting the materials that had been collected by the city of Samara’s “Famine Museum,” created by two local academics both to document the horrors of the famine and to educate the public. Among the museum’s collections were a series of gruesome photographs of cannibals, typically shown alongside the body parts that had been found with them at the time of their arrest.

In 1922, Vasilevsky published a brochure based on his research, A Horrifying Chronicle of the Famine: Suicide and Anthropophagy. In sparse, unadorned prose, Vasilevsky compiled a chilling catalogue of murder, violence, insanity, and ineffable suffering. He quoted a Bashkir edition of Izvestiia: “In the cantons are very many cases of people consuming human flesh. Driven wild by hunger, they are cutting up their children and eating them. In the grip of starvation, they are eating the bodies of the dead.” Vasilevsky also quoted a provincial official from the village of Bolshaya Glushitsa, in Pugachëv County, who warned that they were being “threatened with the danger of mass cannibalism.”

According to Vasilevsky, there had been hundreds of cases of cannibalism, and he predicted that the numbers were certain to grow as the famine worsened and the taboo against eating human flesh weakened. Indeed, it was the fear of “psychological infection” that prompted Vasilevsky to publish his research with a warning on the title page stating that this work was not to be distributed within the famine zone: readers, he worried, might draw the wrong conclusions from his work.

The people’s commissar for public health complained that the press had begun to treat the matter as some sort of “boulevard sensation.”

Among the cases recounted in A Horrifying Chronicle was that of a group of three adolescents from Ufa Province. Before they were caught, they had lured little children to a remote hut, strangled them, chopped them up, then boiled and eaten their remains. The authorities never did manage to determine the exact number of their victims. The three youths were sent off to a special facility for juvenile criminal offenders, yet the overseers made certain to separate them, concerned that they might try to continue their crimes from inside the institution.

Vasilevsky spoke to the investigating medical doctor. He found the case particularly disturbing. It turned out that the three inmates had had plenty of food at home and had apparently ventured into this grisly business out of sheer curiosity. In their interrogations, they had appeared normal, quiet, and even respectful, but he had no doubt that their “derangement had reached an extreme stage from which there was no hope of recovery.”

Their case reminded Vasilevsky of something he had read in a Kursk newspaper: “People are no longer people. Human feelings have died out, the beast, devoid of all reason and pity, has awakened.” Although Vasilevsky had to agree, he insisted that this had nothing to do with the Russian character but was quite simply the logical result of years of misery and suffering. In this, Vasilevsky was correct. Acts of cannibalism have been recorded during famines throughout history in other parts of the world, such as Ireland during the Confederate Wars of the 17th century and China during the Great Leap under Mao.

Devil in the Detail

Around the time Vasilevsky’s brochure appeared, the Samara State Publishing House released The Book of the Famine, a much larger work filled with official documents—telegrams, letters, interrogation records, police reports, and photographs—describing in grisly fashion many cases of murder, suicide, and cannibalism.

One of the most complete records concerned a 56-year-old illiterate peasant from the village of Yefimovka, Buzuluk County, by the name of Pyotr Mukhin. On January 12, 1922, he testified before Balter, an investigator for the Samara Province Revolutionary Tribunal, that his family had not had any bread since Easter of the previous year. At first they lived off grass, horsemeat, and then dogs and cats. After that, they were reduced to gathering bones and grinding them into an edible paste. But then this, too, ran out, along with all the animals in the village.

“All over our region and in our own village a great number of corpses lie about in the streets and are piled up in the public warehouse. I, Mukhin, early one evening stole into the warehouse and took the corpse of a boy around the age of seven. I had heard that some people of our village were eating human flesh. I took him home on a sleigh, chopped up the corpse into small pieces, and set about to boil it that same evening. Then we woke the children—Natalya, 16 years old, Fyodor, 12, and Afanasy, 7—and we ate it. We ate the entire body in one day, all that was left were the bones.”

Soon after, a man from the village soviet came and asked Mukhin whether the rumor that they had eaten human flesh was true. Mukhin said yes, it was—many did it in the village, although they hid the fact. The man took him to the soviet for questioning. “We don’t remember what human flesh tasted like, we were in a mad frenzy when we ate it. We never killed somebody to eat them. We’ve got plenty of corpses and so it never crossed our minds to kill someone. There’s nothing more I can tell you …”

That same day, Balter questioned Mukhin’s 28-year-old son-in-law, Prokofy, a former Red Army soldier. He told Balter that, a week before he began eating human flesh, he had had to bury his grandfather, father, and mother in the course of just 10 days. All of them had starved to death. Earlier, in the spring of 1921, he had buried his only son, aged two, also dead from hunger. A week before Christmas, his pregnant wife, Stepanida, brought home some boiled human flesh from her father, Pyotr Mukhin, and they ate this together with Prokofy’s sister Yefrosinya. The three of them were arrested and taken to the village soviet, along with some human flesh found in their home.

They were held for three days with no food, and then conveyed to Buzuluk, a journey of four days. Given nothing to eat along the way, they asked one of the accompanying officials whether they might eat the pieces of flesh. He told them no: it had been entered into the police files as evidence. They ignored him and ate it anyway.

Mukhin, his daughter, and his son-in-law were all held in the Buzuluk House of Forced Labor, where they were examined by a psychiatrist from the faculty of Samara University in the middle of January. It was his judgment that none of them displayed any signs of “delirium, delusion of the emotions (hallucinations or illusions), maniacal agitation, condition of melancholy or similar signs of emotional disturbance.” They were neither mad nor insane, but in their right minds. It was hunger that had made them resort to cannibalism, and they presented no danger of committing violence against the community. “They present as typical normal subjects who have been placed in exceptional circumstances that have forced them to commit acts of an anti-human nature, at odds with the normal expression of human nature.” The subsequent fate of Mukhin, his daughter, and his son-in-law is unknown.

They were neither mad nor insane, but in their right minds. It was hunger that had made them resort to cannibalism.

The matter-of-fact tone in which these flesh-eaters described their actions was typical. According to the report of the A.R.A. inspector in Pugachëv County, a man by the name of Svorikin, once the starving had eaten human flesh, they no longer considered it a crime. The corpse, devoid of any human soul, was food, either for them or for “the worms in the ground.” He noted: “They speak of these things with a curious kind of passiveness and quietness, as if the question were not of eating a person but simply a herring.”

The practice became so common in this district that the peasants approached state officials to request the government to permit it. That this took place in Pugachëv County in Samara Province is not surprising. This part of the Volga region, which included Buzuluk, home of the Mukhins, suffered like nowhere else. By July 1922, the population had fallen from 491,000 to 179,000 in just two years: over 100,000 had perished from starvation and disease, 142,000 had been evacuated by the state and various relief agencies, and roughly 70,000 people had simply vanished without a trace. Pugachëv County was particularly remote: cut off from the rail lines, isolated from the outside world, left to survive on its own. It was precisely in such places that the most desperate victims of the famine resorted to cannibalism.

Once the starving had eaten human flesh, they no longer considered it a crime.

But not all peasants were willing to accept their fate and take to eating the dead. On the morning of December 8, 1921, in the village of Pokrov-Tananyk in Buzuluk County, a group of almost 50 angry peasants dragging the body of a brutally murdered man on a sleigh arrived at the home of Comrade Golovachëv, the county chairman. They pounded on his door until he came out, and demanded he give them food or else they would come back and eat the man instead. They threw the bloody corpse on the doorstep and departed. Golovachëv’s response is not known, nor is it known whether the mob made good on its threat. The policeman who reported this incident added, “Crimes of cannibalism are becoming more and more prevalent.”

False Alarm

Even if the A.R.A. wanted to play down cannibalism in its publicity, the subject was too explosive to keep out of the Western press, which had a tendency to treat it with the same tawdry sensationalism that had so angered Commissar Semashko. In April 1922, Reuters reported that during a riot in Samara a member of the A.R.A. staff had been killed and eaten. That same month, a story appeared in a Parisian newspaper stating that the American boss of the A.R.A. in Samara had been murdered, cooked, and eaten by the locals. A bemused Wolfe wrote to his brother in mid-May to say he was sure Eddie had read of the reports that an American had been killed and eaten in Samara, and that the likely victim had been none other than Henry himself, but there was no cause for alarm: this was an old rumor that had been going around for months, and he was safe and sound.

On May 29, The New York Times carried a story on cannibalism that made reference to an exhibition of gruesome photographs recently set up in the Kremlin, only a few doors down from Lenin’s office. The article questioned the reason for the exhibition, surmising that the terrifying images and stories were part of the government’s strategy to wring more aid out of the West. Many of the photographs had been taken by G.P.U. agents to be used as evidence in criminal cases. Although the article gave a vivid, and horrifying, description of the images, the Times refused to publish some of the details, substituting in brackets the words “Here follow details too revolting for publication.”

By the autumn of 1922, Wolfe had had enough of Russia. On November 9, he wrote a letter to Colonel William Haskell, head of the A.R.A. operation in the Soviet Union, informing him that he was beset by “a depression and nervous tension which make it impossible for me to work as I would.” Given what he had seen, no one could blame him. He had gone to Moscow on leave for a time, hoping this would help his mental state, but as soon as he returned to the famine zone, he felt stricken once again with famine shock. The only thing for him to do was resign and go home. The comfortable normality of his native Ohio had never looked so good.

Adapted from The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin, by Douglas Smith. To be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 5, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Douglas Smith. All rights reserved. Photos: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images; Courtesy of Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, J. Rives Childs Papers; © Photo12/The Image Works; Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Library and Archive, Stanford University (three women; Kapitonovich); © Fine Art Images/Heritage/The Image Works

Conclusion

Please keep in mind that as America goes though all these changes, that there will be areas of discomfort and distress. Some areas might experience broken lines of supply and transport. If that happens, the people may become hungry. And a nation where just everyone owns guns, and has a shit-fit over wearing masks, and hoards toilet tissue would go “ape shit” when hungry. Learn from history.

Do not be caught unprepared.

And do not count on your “leaders”. If anything they are puppets controlled by other interests who themselves are idiots.

America is devolving from a land of the “lone wolf” to a land of “every man for himself”. Be safe. Be frosty.

You greatest ability right now is to control your thoughts, to prepare, and establish friendships to everyone in your neighborhood. Be helpful. Obtain useful skills. Know how to be valuable. You will be fine.

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How to jump off a sinking ship. Should you scurry like the rest of the rats, or do something else?

Yikes, the United States is crumbling all around you. You trusted your leaders and they betrayed you. You followed the laws, you obeyed the rules, and you worked hard. Now you have a nice life (sort of) on rent. One missed paycheck and your life goes down the toilet. Not only that, but as you get older you notice that the life of working towards a “career”, is not worth not having close friends, and a social life. You find yourself wishing for the days of when you were in your 20’s and had the world by it’s tail. You look outwards…

As one MM reader…

Guys, as an ethnic Chinese living in America, (dfw) this year I took the penalty hit and withdrew my 401k savings (Im in my mid 30s) and also since last year I basically stopped paying income taxes (marked myself exempt even though Im not) and this year in 2021 I opt out of all savings, retirement plan, healthcare insurance etc etc… So effectively Im netting well over someone who makes 6 figures who plays by the rules. I also got paid the $1200, $600, and $1400 stimulus checks lol… Plus I have couple credit cards, one with around $35,000+ credit line… am single no kids, no wife/gf, no car or home payments, etc….

Im frontloading life while I still can. Our local Costco has A5 Waygu fedex from Japan by air… Im on WhatsYourPrice and going on dates with all the pretty women… Im planning to go on a luxury vacation this year, overseas if Covid permitting…

You read about exotic lands, but (for many) it’s actually a little too late for you. You are too old to learn a difficult (to learn) language. You don’t have the resources to pack up and move to a new nation, and even if you did, you ties to your family, and society are too great. Certainly Asia is not on your list of locations to “bug out” to. So you start looking for some place closer.

There’s Canada, and there’s about a thousand other Americans like you that have the same idea. So many, in fact, that Canada is not really going to be an easy “bail out” location. It’s still an option. It’s sort of “America lite”. It’s an American territory, maybe not on paper, but certainly in practice. But it is nice, and it is close.

And they do have some absolutely great maple syrup.  Absolutely stunning fishing, and some fine, fine folks that do appreciate drinking beer on long cold winter nights. It’s something that is worthy of consideration.

Processing maple syrup from harvested tree sap in Canada.

And while I do live in a tropical area, there is a trade off (well, actually many tradeoffs). And with this I have to point out that if you move to a place that is really comparatively different from what you are uncomfortable of, you will (no matter how great you like it otherwise) end up being uncomfortable. It’s just something that comes with the territory.

I grew up in the North East, and refer to Pennsylvania as my boyhood “stomping ground”, yet I love where I am now. And while I would enjoy a visit back “home” and let my wife and family experience the sights and sounds of the USA that I grew up in, it will feel alien to me when I return back to it. Our experiences change us.

Canada might not be all the different. Canada might be just sane enough, just similar enough, just good enough for you all to consider a move there. Just like an entire horde of others who are escaping and fleeing the United States like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Harvesting the golden delicious maple sap.

Where else?

There’s Mexico. And many others are deciding to go South of the border. It’s an option, and if you have the right means, and friends you can probably carve a life out for yourself there. It’s something worthy of consideration. Others are following in your footsteps. That’s for certain.

Vibrant facades, cobblestone streets, multicolored lakes and mountainous backdrops are just a few things that make Mexico’s small towns spectacularly photogenic. The diversity of landscape across Mexico means that different regions offer distinctive delights, from desert ghost towns and quaint colonial pueblos seeped in history to laid-back beach towns popping with color.

How about considering something a little further South?

Like in South America, South.

If you have some funds, and some skills, and can understand some basic Spanish this might be the option for you. If you are reading this and concerned about all the changes that America is STARTING to go though, it might just be wise to sit the changes out and ride them from under the wide canopy of a large swaying palm tree.

I myself have never explored South America. Though I would like to try. It’s certainly on an old “bucket list” of things that I wanted to do at one time, and the history of the entire continent is so fascinating. It would be a pleasure to live in such an area… provide that you choose the location, the lifestyle wisely.

With that in mind here is a partial reprint of an article by Jeff Thomas. Reprinted as found, and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the author.

This is a reprint of…

Where Should I Go?

by Jeff Thomas

One of the questions I’m most often asked is, “I’ve decided to get out of my home country before it’s too late. Which countries are the best ones to go to?”

Unfortunately, answering this question is akin to answering, “What’s the best place in town for me to have lunch?” The question is too broad to answer. It will depend upon what sort of food you like, how much you want to spend, whether you want a restaurant with a liquor license, etc. Likewise, the “best” destination will depend upon your age, whether you’ll need to work, whether you have school-age children, whether you’re seeking luxurious amenities or whether you’re hoping to lower your cost of living, etc.

No one can tell you what the best destination is for you. In fact, they can’t even recommend a “top five.” The choice depends entirely upon the individual’s needs and aspirations.

Although I’ve explained this many times over the years, I’m still asked repeatedly, “Yeah, but what are your personal choices and why?”

Again, it matters little what my choices are, but I must agree that the second question, of “Why?” is quite valid. So, here they are:

The Cayman Islands

My primary home is the Cayman Islands. Cayman is a highly prosperous Caribbean country where great opportunity for investment exists. The government understands that their own livelihood is dependent upon the island continuing to be attractive to foreign investors and expatriates have virtually the same legal rights as locals.

The Cayman islands are very beautiful, but rather pricey.

Prejudice toward expatriates is minimal, racism is almost non-existent, as 70% of Caymanians are of mixed race. Crime is contained.

In a major economic collapse, Cayman is likely to not only survive, but prosper.

On the other hand, this is not a country like, say, Belize, where an expat can pitch a tent on the beach and be welcome.

It’s a relatively costly place to live (similar to New York or London), but incomes also tend to be commensurately higher. In addition, there is zero direct taxation, which means that the government largely keeps out of your life.

First and foremost, though (in my view), is that the indigenous people are West Indian, which provides a greater level of kindness and a higher level of humanity than in most of the “first world.”

It’s an easy place to live and work, if you have requisite skills, but it’s not a place to “retire on a budget.”

Not cheap.

Colonia, Uruguay

My second home is in a small town of 14,000 people in Uruguay. It’s large enough to have all the basic businesses and services, but not large enough to be impersonal. Again, the primary concern of tolerant, supportive people is a major attraction.

Ananda is a beautiful country house situated in the idyllic Colonia, Uruguay. It has 156m2 living space, 40m2 pool, and is set in a stunning 6ha plot with its own eucalyptus forest. 5km distance to the secluded beaches of the Rio de la Plate, 109km from Montevideo, 70km to Colonia del Sacramento and from there 1 hour by ferry to Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is right across the river, providing a buoyant economy to the small, antique town, even when Argentina is experiencing crisis times.

Yet it remains “a country apart” and is largely unaffected by the Argentine economic rollercoaster.

Uruguay produces 90% of what it consumes and exports only 10% of what it produces, so it’s able to be independent of international crises, as it was during the two world wars.

Uruguay is also rich in rivers and farmland and produces an excess of all-natural food. On the other hand, the economy is chronically sluggish and it’s a poor place to seek employment or open a business.

Uruguay is south of the equator, which means that, if there’s nuclear war in the northern hemisphere, Uruguay will be minimally impacted by fallout, since the southern hemisphere has an independent weather system from the northern hemisphere.

It therefore has a different set of advantages and disadvantages from the Cayman Islands. As a “Plan B”, it may therefore be preferable to “Plan A”, depending on what befalls the world in the future.

Cafayate, Argentina

But, there’s also a “Plan C” – ironically, located in Argentina. The town of Cafayate is in the extreme northern province of Salta, so far away from the disorganised and underfunded government in Buenos Aires that it largely ignores diktat from the Capitol.

Cafayate is a small town (about 13,000) where living expenses are quite low.

Cafayate, Argentina

This means that for the well-heeled, everything is inexpensive, but it also means that this is not a good place to seek employment. Additionally, locally-available goods are generally on the basic side. Someone seeking an escape from a crisis elsewhere, however, is likely to enjoy a decidedly peaceful existence here.

But Cafayate has an unusual and interesting advantage, in that, years ago, the foresighted Doug Casey created an upscale community just outside of the town, which has a golf course, polo, an excellent hotel and property for sale on which to construct luxury homes.

La Estancia de Cafayate is populated by very interesting and largely libertarian people of many nationalities.

For this reason, there are, in essence, two Cafayates. The two enhance each other and residents of La Estancia enjoy the unusual benefit of an upscale community, yet low day-to-day expenses.

In each of the above possible choices, the objective is to provide as content and untroubled a life in a time of great potential crisis as can be found.

Quito, Ecuador

For someone who is retired, but may soon lose his 401 K and social security to an economic collapse, a better choice might be to move to Quito, Ecuador. Rent a corner bodega and turn it into a trendy coffee shop for the tourists. You’d live a modest life, but would be well looked-after and enjoy a peaceful existence.

Chiang Mai, in Thailand

Another choice might be Chiang Mai, in Thailand, where, although you’d be regarded as farang (and could not own property), you’d be treated very well by locals and have opportunities for investment. You’d be well away from the problems of the capitol, Bangkok, in a still sizable town of 130,000 and live very well, very inexpensively.

Chiang Mai, in Thailand

But again, the above are locations that are of interest to me, as I’ve researched them and each one has attractions that appeal to my personal needs and economic situation.

The reader is encouraged to do his own investigations, beginning with the internet and leading to actual visits.

One thing is certain: the former “free world” is now in an economic bubble of historic proportions. For those living in a country that’s at risk, there will be an extended period (at least ten years, but very possibly more) during which there will be dramatic decline.

This decline will most certainly be reflected in the standard of living, but, worse, will also be reflected in the quality of life.

When a nation of people who have been living a spoiled life of unrealistic expectations suddenly has the plug pulled on the largesse, they tend to behave very badly. In such a case, we’re unlikely to see a repeat of America after its revolution, in which the people rolled up their sleeves and got to work, due to their self-reliance and strong work ethic.

Instead, we’re more likely to see something akin to the aftermath of the French or Russian revolutions, in which the people expected an easier life. When they didn’t get it, they reacted in a primitive fashion, destroying the source of what might otherwise have been prosperity. In each case, a true recovery was therefore very long in coming.

And you don’t want to be anywhere near that buildup and explosion of pent-up anger and frustration.

You want to flee and go to a “safe place”…

Green Acres

Oliver Wendall Douglas, a New York lawyer, gives up his law practice to follow his lifelong ambition of becoming a farmer. He and his reluctant wife, the Hungarian Lisa, move to the tiny town of Hooterville, where they try to assimilate to country living. Given the kookiness of the town’s residents, that may be difficult — for Oliver, that is.

-The Ten Best GREEN ACRES Episodes of Season Five

In the old 1960s’ television show “Green Acres”, the main character was always talking about how much he loved the quiet and peaceful life in the country. His name was Mr. Douglas. He would always go into these tirades about the life in the big city and the “rat’s race” there. His wife would repeat his views about “the rats racing in the city”. And while it’s all fun and games, it appears that many Americans now find themselves in the same conundrum as Mr. Douglas.

Green Acres

And when we look at the situation, it gives us a glimpse at our new reality…

… the television show was a comedy all right, but the culture shock that one experiences when they leave their homeland for a “better life” stays true to form. Consider the television show “Green Acres”…

THE WHOLE RIDICULOUS PREMISE WAS BASED IN REALITY.

If it seems a bit farfetched that a city slicker would leave a lucrative career in finance to rehab a dying farm without knowing a thing about agriculture, well, at least one person has tried it. “I got the idea from my stepfather when I was a kid,” Sommers, the show’s creator, said in a 1965 interview.

“He wanted a farm in the worst way and he finally got one. I remember having to hoe potatoes. I hated it. I won’t even do the gardening at our home now, I was so resentful as a child.”

The neighbors; the Ziffels.

Not so crazy after all.

Especially now.

EDDIE ALBERT DIDN’T FIND THE PREMISE RIDICULOUS AT ALL.

Eddie Albert, who starred as Oliver Wendell Douglas, had previously eschewed television roles, believing that the medium was “geared to mediocrity.” But after his agent explained the idea behind Green Acres, Albert was hooked.

“I said, ‘Swell; that’s me. Everyone gets tired of the rat race. Everyone would like to chuck it all and grow some carrots. It’s basic. Sign me,'” he told TV Guide. “I knew it would be successful. Had to be. It’s about the atavistic urge, and people have been getting a charge out of that ever since Aristophanes wrote about the plebs and the city folk.”

And he’s right. After all, why are you all reading this article, eh?

Mr. Haney.

BOTH STARS HAD A LITTLE BIT OF THEIR CHARACTERS IN THEM.

Albert turned the front yard of his Pacific Palisades house into a cornfield, and also had a large greenhouse in the back where he grew organic vegetables.

Eva Gabor, who played Lisa Douglas, owned cats, dogs, birds, chickens, roosters, and rabbits. She was a little bit like her urban character, though; according to her assistant, Gabor hadn’t had the rabbits for long when she decided to show them off at a party. When she got to the hutch, it appeared that the rabbits had done what they do best, because there were suddenly quite a few more. “Didn’t I just get a pair of rabbits? Where did the others come from?” she asked her assistant. Her dinner party guests explained that rabbits were famous for their impressive reproduction.

Hooterville fire department.

You will be surprised at how different certain ways of doing things are outside the Untied States.

IT WAS ONE OF DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER’S FAVORITE SHOWS.

During his retirement years, keeping tabs on the residents of Hooterville became one of the former president’s favorite pastimes. The Eisenhowers loved the show so much that they deemed their valet’s pet pig “Arnold” and allowed it to freely roam their house—even letting it lounge on slip-covered chairs that their grandkids weren’t allowed to sit on.

Who would figure?

No hyperbole: this is on my short list of the all time greatest Green Acres episodes. The premise is imaginative without being fantastical: after seeing Oliver with a tax refund check, the residents of Hooterville claim their losses to the government and demand compensation of their own. Thanks to a glitch in the computer, they all get exactly what they’ve requested. When the IRS figures out what’s happened, it’s too late: the town has already invested in The Hooterville Monkey Racing track. Unbelievably hysterical — “Release the banana!”

ALBERT WASN’T PLEASED WITH GABOR’S FURS AND FEATHERS.

On one occasion, Albert—an environmentalist—asked Gabor to avoid wearing an expensive outfit festooned with feathers onscreen.

When Gabor protested, saying how beautiful it was, Albert told her that he didn’t want other women to copy the fashion, causing the deaths of more birds.

“Eddie, feathers don’t come from birds,” she told him. When he asked her where she thought feathers came from, she responded, “Dahlink. Pillows! Feathers come from pee-lowz!”

“She swears that she was not teasing me!” Albert later said.

Green Acres.

MR. HANEY WAS BASED ON ELVIS PRESLEY’S MANAGER.

Actor Pat Buttram, who played Mr. Haney, met Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, on the set of the movie Roustabout, where Buttram played the owner of a carnival. He got the part of Mr. Haney just a year later—and later stated that he used Parker as inspiration for the Green Acres swindler.

He reminds me so much of our Congressmen and Senators in Washington, DC.

Mr. Haney has some things to sell.

WE NEVER FOUND OUT WHERE HOOTERVILLE WAS LOCATED.

Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, as Oliver and Lisa Douglas, were the perfect examples of the jet-setter lifestyle; until they gave it all up and moved to Hooterville, that is.

Much like The Simpsons’s Springfield, viewers never found out for sure where Hooterville was located. Though Sommers once referenced time spent on a farm in Greendale, New York, Mr. Haney stated the town was located about 300 miles from Chicago. And the accents on the show are all over the place.

THE SHOW WAS FULL OF LITTLE INSIDE JOKES.

During one episode, Lisa explains to Oliver that he needs to accept her lack of cooking skills. “When you married me, you knew that I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t sew, and I couldn’t keep house. All I could do was talk Hungarian and do imitations of Zsa Zsa Gabor.” Zsa Zsa, of course, was Eva Gabor’s real-life sister.

There are also many references to The Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, both of which were also produced and/or written by Green Acres‘s executive producer Paul Henning. In the episode below, Hootervillians discuss putting on a local production of The Beverly Hillbillies. Lisa ends up playing Granny Clampett while Oliver stars as Jethro.

Green Acres.

IT WAS CANCELED AS PART OF THE “RURAL PURGE” OF THE EARLY 1970s.

When Green Acres got the axe in 1971, it wasn’t the only show to go. That was the year that CBS got rid of “everything with a tree,” according to Buttram. The so-called “rural purge” also saw the demises of The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Hee Haw, The Andy Griffith Show, and Lassie.

And brought in “minority oriented programming” aimed at African-Americans in urban settings.

ARNOLD THE PIG WAS NOT EATEN AT THE SHOW’S WRAP PARTY.

Arnold the pig Ziffel. Although he always seemed to be watching cowboy and indian pictures, his FAVORITE show was actually the soap opera “Love is never a stranger.”

After the show wrapped, the actors were often asked what happened to Arnold the pig. On one such occasion, Tom Lester, the actor who played Eb Dawson, responded that Arnold was cooked and eaten at the luau-themed wrap party. Don’t worry—he wasn’t.

THE SHOW EXPERIENCED A REVIVAL IN THE 1990s.

In the 1990s, Nick at Nite brought Green Acres back, advertising it with the tagline, “It’s not stupid … it’s surrealism!”

Apparently they weren’t the only ones who thought so. “A professor once told me students see it as surrealistic,” Albert told People Magazine. “He said, ‘The comedy is like Pickwick Papers or Gulliver’s Travels or Voltaire.

It’s so far out that it becomes truth, deep truth.'”

You know, sometimes I feel alienated when a series goes overboard. I would agree with those who say this episode goes overboard — taking on the Jack and the Beanstalk story (as both Gilligan’s Island and Bewitched have done). But the episode’s hysterical, and despite my eye-rolling at the story, I can’t deny its inherent comedic value. (And there is an explanation at the end — albeit, a predictable one.)

Green Acres is so far out that it has become truth, deep truth.

Conclusion

It seems that most people realize that the USA is beyond hope for meaningful corrective change, and that sudden and painful change is on the menu.

Most people are afraid of this fact, but it need not be such a serious terror.

You can still move. You can still bunker down and hunker in place. You can still plan, and you can still go to a nice safe community. And when you go there, you adapt. Sure there will be some things that you will miss, and other things that you will need to adapt to. it’s called “change”, but it is also called “growth”

The residents of Hooterville fear that Oliver’s suit and tie is ruining their image. This episode is probably one of the best of the series, for it deals with the central struggle: Oliver, the city man, and his attempts to acclimate to country life. This episode specifically addresses Oliver’s decision to dress formally while doing his farming. The residents of Hooterville decide to teach him a lesson — with hilarious results. (Those frou-frou fur-lined overalls Lisa gives him are a riot!)

It’s never too late.

You change, and you adapt.

In any event, no matter what you decide to do, you must do it, and don’t look back.

Please be careful, plan well, and execute your plan with precision and a strong healthy affirmation / prayer campaign. I am rooting for your success.

-MM

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China, Russia and Iran are unifying in Xinjiang BRI, and the United States military empire is in full panic.

If you take a casual glance at the American media you will be exposed to the ideas of “genocide”, “concentration camps”, “slave labor”, and other abuses by China in the Xinjiang province. And, if you are an American, you will believe them. After all, the “news” never lies … right? Well, in this post we are going to look at the reason WHY there is such an uproar in the USA over this patch of land in Western China. And the reasons behind it is NOT anything presented to the American citizenry. It’s something else entirely.

Where is Xingjiang?

Xinjiang is in China. It is a State / province of China. It’s a kind of “China’s version of America’s New Mexico”.

First of all, let’s look at where Xinjiang is. Because a picture will tell you more than any write up that I can compile will. So check out this map of China showing the Xinjiang region…

So, those of you all in the MM audience that somehow believe that American neocon narrative that US military troops can tromp into the region and “liberate” the Chinese people there. (For “democracy”® and “freedom”®.) Had best think long and hard if you want to deal with half of the Untied States rendered into radioactive waste.

China does not play.

This area is owned, controlled, and a fundamental part of China, and has been so for many… many years.

China will treat any “forces of liberation” with the same level of violence as Washington DC would do to defend Texas from invasion. If you all think that a “color revolution” is possible there, or that “American troops can liberate it” you had best get back on your medicines. Those fantasies are for ignorant children and the feeble-minded.

Now, let’s take a look at the BRI, shall we?

Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
China ’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (一带一路) is a strategy initiated by the People’s Republic of China that seeks to connect Asia with Africa and Europe via land and maritime networks with the aim of improving regional integration, increasing trade and stimulating economic growth.

The BRI is a very involved trade route into the heart of Asia that is designed to replace or supplement the sea-lane shipping routes out of China. (And subject to American Naval Blockades.)

There are many aspects of it, and it is very comprehensive.

In short, it leverages all of the neighbors to China, and builds upon robust lines of communication, trade and investment. And thus maps depicting such efforts tend to be rather convoluted and messy, such as this map from France…

The belt and road initiative.

Now, let’s simplify all this.

Let’s [1] concentrate on the land routes only, and [2] paint the canvas in broad brush strokes showing the areas of development, and influence in the BRI. And [3] lets do so taking note of the locations of China, Russia and Iran.

And when we do so, we end up with this (greatly simplified) map…

BRI simplified, showing only the land routes.

Now what can you see, when you simplify everything down and distill it into it’s simplest components?

You see the BRI as a unification of the nations of China, Russia and Iran. And internally upon the vast landmasses. Well… well, out of the reach of the “long arms” of the United States Navy.

Now, with the BRI the entire trade situation changes.

Now, Aside from trading with the Americas, China can trade with the rest of the world by land routes only. Not only is [1] logistic costs via rail cheaper than by sea, but [2] they are protected from piracy, ship damage and loss, and naval blockades by rogue nations (read; The United States and Britain.)

Sep 20, 2020 · If a naval blockade is a feasible strategy, it strengthens the American system of deterrence and dilutes any potential attempts by China to coerce the United States or its allies. 

-Could The U.S. Navy Blockade China Into Submission?
Apr 06, 2019 · If a naval blockade is a feasible strategy, it strengthens the American system of deterrence and dilutes any potential attempts by China to coerce the United States or its allies. 

- How a Massive Naval Blockade Could Bring China To Its Knees...

The National Interest is THE publication that you read if you desire to feel the “pulse” of the war-mongering neocons in Washington DC. Some of their typical  reads are;

Now, let’s take a look at the American neocon plans to isolate and suppress China. Let’s look at what their plans have been…

Why do I feel like the planners in Washington DC like to play with little toy soldiers, fancy electronics and high technology, and fail to see the human side of their insanity? Interesting isn’t it?

Now, let’s take a look at the above map showing the BRI…

I am sure that most MM readers can read maps. And when you do, you can clearly see that the BRI renders the complete American military; Air, Land, and sea impotent.

It removes the threat of naval blockades on China.

It lowers the prices in trade goods. It enriches and uplifts the lives of millions of people in the most poverty stricken areas of the world, and connects China with it’s biggest customers for the next decade.

…

So since the BRI puts American military might at a disadvantage, it becomes critically important that the BRI be stopped at all costs.

And…

Now, boys and girls, look at where the “gateway” to the BRI is located at. Yup. That’s right.

It’s located in Xinjiang.

A map of the BRI showing the location of the “gateway” at Xinjiang.

Are the puzzle-pieces falling in place for ya? Are things getting a little clearer for you all to understand?

All this propaganda onslaught against China and Uighur Muslims isn’t about what they say it is. It’s about stopping China from building the BRI at all costs, and set in place a narrative to justify military action there.

Of course, not directly.

By proxy.

Well that is the plan at least.

And when you look at the bigger scope of things then you can understand why the military is suddenly pouring more money, more equipment and more manpower into both Afghanistan and Syria.

You just look at the map.

So what’s all this narrative all about?

Well, let’s look at another article titled “Is China committing genocide?” Reprinted as found, and all credit to the author.

Is China Committing Genocide? Behind the US Government’s Propaganda Campaign

XINJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA — Up is down. War is peace. And the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands have accused China of genocide.

“This is forced labor, this is forced sterilization, this is forced abortions, …the kind of thing we haven’t seen in an awfully long time in this world,” declared then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

To be fair, the accusers are experts in genocide: the U.S. and its junior imperial partner, Canada, wiped out their indigenous populations. Today the U.S. is responsible for the three biggest human rights catastrophes in the world in Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. And the Netherlands is just coming to terms with its massacres in Indonesia.

Mike Pompeo’s successor at the State Department, Antony Blinken, is sticking with the genocide claim. That’s despite the State Department’s top lawyers stating that whatever might be happening in Xinjiang, it’s not genocide. That’s right. Chinese Communist Party genocide denialists have infiltrated the U.S. State Department to impurify our precious bodily fluids.

My goodness!

Dr Strangelove Precious Bodily Fluids Quote

Aug 12, 2020 · Everyone loves to quote famous lines from movies so having a good knowledge of good movie quotes. Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made stanley kubrick s cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual and certainly without any choice.

Pure Zenz

So what did Pompeo and Blinken base their accusations of genocide on? There must have been a pretty strong body of on-the-ground reporting and research. Or not. It turns out that one guy is pretty much responsible for the whole narrative. His name is Adrian Zenz.

“Adrian’s research, as many of you know, has been key in establishing the existence of the camps in the first place, and in documenting the buildup of the PRC police state,” explained Hudson Institute fellow Eric Brown.

Zenz appeared almost overnight as a go-to expert on Xinjiang and Uighurs. Now he’s a regular on mainstream outlets and even on supposedly progressive news show Democracy Now. In fact, in Mike Pompeo’s official statement accusing China of genocide, he directly credited Zenz.

But most of his so-called research has been discredited, and he’s been revealed to be a straight-up fabulist. A Grayzone News investigation showed that Zenz’s claims of 1 million Uighur detained in camps were based “on a single report by Istiqlal TV, a Uyghur exile media organization based in Turkey, which was republished by Newsweek Japan.” In other words, no evidence, and not even an attempt.

Meanwhile, Zenz’s study accusing China of forced sterilizations didn’t contain any proof of coercion. The Grayzone showed how “Zenz consistently framed the expansion of public healthcare services in Xinjiang as evidence of a genocide in the making.”

Characterizing expanded access to birth control as genocide is what the Christian Right does.

So it makes perfect sense that Zenz – an evangelical fundamentalist himself – holds this view.

Jesus will cleanse the world of the infidels, and the righteous will go to Heavenly paradise.

Zenz’s first book is a psychedelic trip through the mind of a Rapture-ready Christer.

The tome is entitled “Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation.”

In it, the book claims that in the end times, “God’s refining process will wipe out all unbelieving Jews who refuse to come to Christ.”

So Zenz writes racist fantasies about Jews, like me. Who knows what he thinks will happen to Uighur Muslims! Yikes!

Jesus will cleanse the world of the infidels, and the righteous will go to Heavenly paradise.

He also says that Satan is using postmodernism to attack gender-authority structures and undermine what he believes are God’s unique but different role assignments for men and women.

Clearly, he is against women’s rights.

So does he support criminalizing birth control in his native Germany and here in the U.S. where he now resides?

Even more deranged, Zenz’s big genocide study claimed that women in Xinjiang receive 800 to 1600 IUD insertions per capita. That means every Uighur woman is surgically implanted with 4 to 8 IUDs every single day of the year.

It’s not even possible.

Evidently, none of the outlets that feverishly published his claims bothered to give even a cursory examination to the evidence, or lack thereof, that he presents.

Other reasons (besides genocide) for having fewer kids

In reality, the decrease in birth rate is a normal, predictable outcome of economic development. When people are more financially secure, they choose to have fewer kids and do it later in life.

In fact, China is pouring money into Xinjiang to develop its economy.

According to a 2015 U.S. government study, “To decrease ethnic instability in Xinjiang, the Chinese government’s plan is to economically develop the region.”

That’s right. Chinese Communist Party agents have also time-traveled to 2015 to infiltrate the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and write a study trying to justifying genocide. Damn you Xi!!!

As a result of this economic development, China’s birth rate is falling at rapid rates in all regions, which comes with its own set of problems, like an aging population – similar to what the U.S. is dealing with. So Chinese lawmakers are now pushing for the universal two-child policy to be changed to three.

But this rapture-ready fanatic Adrian Zenz isn’t the only source for these claims of genocide, right?

Well, Newsweek cites Adrian Zenz.

How about CNN: the self-described most trusted name in news? CNN says its reporting found that some Uyghur women were being forced to use birth control and undergo sterilization… There it is. Can’t argue with that.

…The article was “based on a report by Adrian Zenz.”

Uh oh.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum accuses China of crimes against humanity and genocide against Uighurs. They reference “leaked government documents” and “researchers,” …

Of course, referring to Zenz.

Zenz and the Genocide Choir

With Zenz at the center, a cast of shady characters have promoted this disinformation to support the phony genocide claim:

  • Rushan Abbas — former Pentagon contractor who worked for Radio Free Asia, a U.S. propaganda mouthpiece started by the CIA.
  • Darren Byler — a fellow at the Wilson Center, which is funded by the U.S. government and a host of other NATO governments, big banks and corporations. His resume shows he has also been funded to the tune of 100,000 dollars through the U.S. Department of Education.
  • He does panels with Louise Greve — the former vice president of the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, who now runs the NED-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project.
  • There’s Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson — this cold-warrior wrote an op-ed in the liberal interventionist Foreign Affairs magazine calling for Biden to confront China over human rights. What the hell are the people at Human Rights Watch smoking to believe the guy who just bombed Syria and sponsors Israel’s project of apartheid has a shred of crediblity on human rights?
  • Then there’s the Australian Strategic Policy Institute – the self-declared independent, non-partisan think tank, which is totally dependent on funding from the Australian and American departments of defense, NATO, weapons makers, the Embassy of Japan, and the Embassy of Israel, among others.

All with the blessings of Jesus.

2018 and the sudden “genocide” drumbeat

The Uighur genocide claim was virtually unheard of before 2018. Up until that point, Western media coverage of the issue was dramatically different.

Take The New York Times. In the 1980s, it published a series of articles about how Uighur Muslims were actually prospering and Islam was flourishing under Chinese rule.

By the 1980s, this separatist movement was becoming violent. In one 1997 incident, the Times reported on, about a thousand Muslim separatists of the Uighur ethnic minority rampaged through the town Yining on Wednesday, smashing cars, burning shops and beating up ethnic Chinese to protest Beijing’s rule.

In 1994, the Times reported that Uighur extremists were returning from Afghanistan, where the CIA spent a billion dollars arming what it called a “University of Jihad.” The Times noted that “Afghan veterans have fought in two western provinces, Uighur and Xinjiang, where they have armed and trained Chinese Muslim rebels.”

In the wake of the U.S. destruction of Yugoslavia, the Times noted the separatists fantasized about a NATO bombing campaign

This Uighur separatist movement, its violent anti-Han rampages, or the militants returning from Afghanistan are barely mentioned in any of the contemporary Times reports claiming genocide.

In 1981, The Washington Post wrote about growing ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, noting that “Peking has taken pains to ensure ethnic rights and elevate minority group members to leadership positions. In Xinjiang, a kind of affirmative action program has been started at the provincial university to guarantee that 60 percent of new students are from ethnic backgrounds.” Today, none of this gets mentioned in the Post’s coverage.

How about Newsweek? Back in 2000, it reported that Xinjiang was a weak point that threatened to fragment China along ethnic lines, that Uighur separatists threatened the security of Beijing, and some might even join forces with Islamic “holy warriors.” Now it’s all genocide, all the time.

With these misleading or outright false claims based on manipulated statistics, the only evidence for a Uighur genocide is anecdotal, which is hard to prove or disprove. But the testimony in Western media is often full of contradictions.

Take the case of Sayragul Sauytbay. In 2019, she told the UK tabloid The Daily Mail that she witnessed concentration camp “inmates being flayed, raped by guards in front of other prisoners, given injections that made them infertile and force-fed pork.” Keep in mind this is the same tabloid that has spent years peddling Islamophobic hysteria and once warned about Muslim fanatics hijacking the royal wedding. Sauytbay has told similar stories in more respectable newspapers like Foreign Policy, Haaretz and Deutsche Welle.

But back in 2018, Sauytbay told the Globe and Mail that “She did not personally see violence.” For some reason, she completely changed her story. Maybe she was fearful and traumatized, or maybe she falsified it. Apparently, none of the outlets that published her testimony bothered to check into that discrepancy.

Then there’s Tursunay Ziyawundun. She’s the central character in the forced-sterilization narrative cooked up by Adrian Zenz. She’s delivered teary testimonies for the BBC, CNN and Democracy Now. A few months before those reports, however, she told Buzzfeed News, “I wasn’t beaten or abused.” Again, why did she change her story? And why did all of these media outlets fail to do a basic check into her past statements?

Older rumblings

In my research, the first mention of Uighur genocide took place back in 1997, when several so-called “Chinese dissidents” testified to Congress. One woman named Rizvangul Uighur claimed that China’s birth control policy involved murdering babies as soon as they were born. She said the one-child policy was so strictly enforced that “babies are being killed in [the] delivery room without seeing the mother’s face and world.”

Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ) – a homophobic bigot from the Christian right – claimed that Uighur women “are often taken physically to the abortion mill. Forced abortions can be performed very late in pregnancy, even in the ninth month. Sometimes the baby’s skull is crushed with forceps as it emerges from the birth canal. Either the woman or her husband may then be forcibly sterilized.”

That’s the same Chris Smith who several months before was railing against abortion rights at the so-called March For Life rally and accusing Bill Clinton of murdering unborn children:

You are and your legacy will be abortion president. You know, mister president, that the scriptures admonish us to pray for those in authority. And we will be faithful to that. As believers we will pray and fast, and sincerely hope, that you reject the culture of death.”

Neither Rizvangul Uighur nor Smith bothered to mention that in 1997 Uighurs and other ethnic minorities were not subject to the one-child policy. So the birthrate in Xinjiang province was 19.66 – meaning there were nearly 20 births per 1,000 people. Meanwhile, in Beijing, the birthrate was 7.91.

Of course, there was a clear political goal in the bogus testimony delivered in Congress. It was coordinated to be released on the day that Bill Clinton met with President of China Jiang Zemin.

Members of Congress were demanding Clinton take a hardline approach to China, some even using racist epithets to warn of a Chinese invasion. “The White House will not wise up until there’s a full blown rice paddy on the east lawn,” warned Democratic Ohio Congressman James Traficant, whose career ultimately ended in a bribery conviction and expulsion from Congress.

After that, save for a couple of Voice of America articles, there was no mention in Western media about the Uighur genocide — until 2018…

…And the Donald Trump “War on China”.

The contemporary hypocritical propaganda barrage

It’s worth pointing out that the vast majority of American politicians taking up the supposed Uighur genocide cause are totally supportive of U.S.-sponsored genocides around the world. Like Chris Smith (yup, he’s still there).

The same Chris Smith who welcomed Benjamin Netanyahu with a statement of “unequivocal support for Israel” just a few months after it killed 551 Palestinian children in Gaza.

Or Florida Senator Rick Scott – also a bestie of the butcher of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The neocon Michael Pillsbury – the same Michael Pillsbury who in the 1980s, as a state department official, oversaw the CIA’s arming of the Afghanistan mujahideen with Stinger missiles, the same mujahideen who would train Uighur jihadists.

The Uighur genocide is almost perfectly tailored for right-wing agitators who want to portray socialism as a totalitarian system akin to Nazism. “When people say ‘never again’ they were (sic) full of crap. They’re just full of crap. This is one area where the United States should be taking a leading role… shaving people’s heads, shipping them on trains and to concentration camps where you force them into labor and/or sterilize them,” declared Ben Shapiro.

“Many of them women who, of their own volition, had the Chinese government paramilitary forcefully end those pregnancies. Forcefully sterilize,” said Tim Pool. “They’re trying to sterilize the Uighur population but force the Han population genetic code into other Uighur women,” his fellow podcaster claimed.

Should I mention here that the U.S. government forcibly sterilized 1,400 Black women in a California prison? Haven’t seen any U.S. government officials or news media talk about that!

This propaganda deluge is having a powerful impact on U.S. public opinion. In 2017, just before the Uighur genocide narrative kicked into high gear, 53% of Americans had a favorable view of China – the highest in three decades. Now, a new poll shows it’s down to 20% – a historic low. That was accompanied by a 150% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in U.S. cities.

It’s the “sheeple effect“. It’s when zombie population mindlessly regurgitate the media narratives about things that they themselves have NEVER personally experienced. They just repeat without thinking. They regurgitate without consideration. They have no personal experiences to justify their beliefs.

"Oh, China is terrible."

How do you know this?
"Everyone knows this. What a silly question."

Did you experience something bad while you were in China?
"I've never been to China, but I have a friend of a friend who has. And he says it's terrible".

How do you know that the third hand information is correct, and accurate?
"I know.  I feel it in my bones, besides everyone knows that China is terrible."

Sheeple drink Brawndo. It has electrolytes.

Trillions of dollars worth of “caring”

So what is this all about?

Why did corporate media and militaristic right wing politicians, along with a surprising number of progressive dupes, suddenly start freaking out about a supposed genocide in China?

Why?

Xinjiang is the heart of China’s Belt and Road initiative, the economic plan that connects Asia to Europe and the Middle East. It’s an alternative model to the dictatorship of the U.S. dollar, where the World Bank and International Monetary Fund turn countries into neo-colonies for American corporations – a system backed up with the constant threat of military invasion.

The U.S. can’t deal with legitimate competition, so it’s resorting to smears in an attempt to isolate China diplomatically and slow its economic growth.

It’s either that, or the government and military that forcibly sterilized minority women in prisons, tortured in Abu Ghraib, relies on prison labor, and is waging genocidal wars against multiple Muslim-majority countries, just simply cares a whole lot about the Uighurs.

Sure…

But you know, China is starting to fight back

While they have been passively building, and negotiating, studying, researching, and making, other things are a-foot…

Companies, individuals in Xinjiang to sue rumormongering Adrian Zenz for causing reputation damage, economic losses
By Global Times Published: Mar 09, 2021 10:23 AM
A number of enterprises and individuals in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have directed lawyers to sue German national Adrian Zenz (who calls himself Zheng Guoen in Chinese), Xinjiang local news outlet ts.cn reported.

Local people said that Zenz spread "forced labor" and other rumors related to Xinjiang, which damaged their reputation and caused them to suffer economic losses.

They have filed a civil lawsuit with a local court in Xinjiang, demanding that Zenz apologize, restore their reputation and compensate them for their losses.

Adrian Zenz, born in 1974, is an infamous anti-China pseudo-scholar. He is a German far-right fundamentalist Christian who believes he is "led by God" on a "mission" against China, member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a far-right organization established by the US government in 1993, and senior fellow in a research group set up by the US intelligence community against the vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang.

In 2018 when he was still a faculty member of the European School of Culture and Theology at Columbia International University, Korntal, he has gone almost overnight from an unknown researcher into a go-to pundit on Xinjiang, as the US steps up its disinformation campaign against China.

In recent years, Zenz has produced multiple sensational "reports" on Xinjiang on social media platforms like Twitter, and fabricated false academic research on Xinjiang, in which he spread rumors such as large-scale monitoring of local ethnic minorities and forced labor of the Uygurs.

These false claims have been pursued by Western media. Misled by such rumors on Xinjiang, some countries and companies have reduced or even halted imports of cotton and cotton products from Xinjiang, causing some cotton farmers and cotton processing enterprises in Xinjiang to suffer great economic losses.

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

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.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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The Star by Arthur C Clarke (full text)

This is a nice short story by Arthur C. Clarke. It is titled “The Star”. It’s actually wonderful. It’s the reason why many of us started reading science fiction short stories in the first place.

The Star

From The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed the heavens declared the glory of God’s handwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.

I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.

The crew were already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it. (Why are medical men such notorious atheists?) Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned over and over with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.

“Well, Father,” he would say at last, “it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me.” Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.

It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that cause most amusement among the crew. In vain I pointed to my three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.

I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word “nebula” is misleading; this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of unborn stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.

Or what is left of a star. . .

The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the Universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored Universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.

On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?

We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our Galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with hundreds of times their normal brilliance until they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novas—the commonplace disasters of the Universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.

But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.

When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the Galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in A.D. 1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand years that have passed since then.

Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become—a White Dwarf, smaller than earth, yet weighing a million times as much.

The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the center of the cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many millions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.

We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.

No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished Solar System, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.

The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.

Its builders had made sure that we should. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all-but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s eye like an arrow into its target.

The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruits of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten. Would we have done as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest Solar System was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was better thus.

Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shallows, yet attracting no attention at all.

And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.

Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?

My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia Spiritualia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed they worshiped any. But I have looked back at them across the centuries, and have watched while the loveliness they used their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into the light of their shrunken sun. They could have taught us much: why were they destroyed?

I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the Universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our Galaxy, at this very moment some race is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emotion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to man. He who built the Universe can destroy it when He chooses. It is arrogance—it is perilously near blasphemy—for us to say what He may or may not do.

This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But there comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I have reached that point at last.

We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronomical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one surviving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration reached the Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in the east before sunrise, like a beacon in that oriental dawn.

There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

The End

Do you want more?

I hope that you enjoyed this. I have more posts in my fictional story index here…

Fictional Stories

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Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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China and Taiwan are being linked together by high speed train and the American Military Empire is having a fit!

One the most profound realizations that one MUST arrive at is that the American (and Western) “news” is a massive propaganda organ. It’s not that they twist and distort the news. Oh, I wish it was that simple. No. Rather, they lie, and make up fanciful stories towards manipulation. That’s it, and nothing more can be said.
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Now, of course, you can categorize the the lies.
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You can say that the lies fall under categories. And of these, purposes for the manipulation of large groups of people.
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I really don’t think that this is all that difficult to understand.
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All these different organizations are vying for your mind. They want you to think certain ways, and in doing so it gives them advantage. Depending on who is involved, you can then map out the funding, and the then compare with the depth and breadth of the articles that the media bombards you with.
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I’ve posted a lot of articles about the anti-China narrative, and discussed the people behind this screed. Pretty much it’s a mix of religious fundamentalists, neocons, and hard-Right players. And when Donald Trump became President in 2016, the opened the funding floodgates, as well as staffed his administration with neocons, and the result was a “firehose” of anti-China disinformation.
They all are looking forward to getting involved in a hot war with “juicy and wealthy” China. They just want an EXCUSE.
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If you want to read more about this go HERE.
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You will find these articles all over the internet. Such as this one (below) that I pulled off of Free Republic right now…
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China's military is poised to outgun the West after HUGE growth
3/15/2021, 9:34:39 AM · by RomanSoldier19 · 12 replies
Daily Mail via msn ^ | 3/14/2021 | Marco Giannangeli

It follows an ominous warning last week by the commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific that China may launch a military operation against Taiwan "in the next six years". This would likely lead to military reprisals from the US Navy and allies including Britain, which is sending its new carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, to lead a multinational strike force to the Far East in May. China commands the world's largest military, with 2.18 million soldiers, sailors and aviators on active duty. And after a recent 6.8 percent rise it will command a £200billion military budget this year. But it...
Oh, Ah.
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Read the text, of “ominous warning” and “military reprisals”. War in that far-away land is being jinned up, don’t you think? Any day now, some proud American Rambo’s are gonna “kick some slant eyed butt”, don’t you know.
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Not gonna happen.
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Why?
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Well, in the first case the American and UK military excursion into the South China Sea in late Summer 2020 was a disaster, and the seven aircraft carriers steamed back to American (and the UK) with their “tail between their legs”. Trump incensed that his orders were not carried out, fired his military brass as soon as then returned. It was a “Waterloo moment“, and scared the living shit out of the military brass.
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Read about it HERE.
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And in the Second Case, please just keep in mind that Taiwan is part of China. No matter how much this is omitted in the neocon publications and articles. No matter how many times the American “news” talks about the USA “doing something”, nothing is going to happen. You can yell, scream and stamp your feet but that will not change the fact that Taiwan agreed to become part of China, and this union is recognized by the United Nations.
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Taiwan stopped being an independent nation, and became a Chinese client state in 1972 by [1] The Shanghai Communiqué and the 1982 [2] Joint Communiqué and [3] the August 17 Communiqué. It's the 23rd province of China.

All of this his was codified and made permanent on October 1971, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, which recognized the government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China at the United Nations and established the One-China Principle.
You can read more about this HERE.
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American “news” is a big lie, and people are following it because just about everything in America has been corrupted beyond recognition. No one trusts the government, yet somehow they believe the media. They turn to alternative media in the belief that they have not been corrupted.
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Ah. But they have.
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But anyways,
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Aside from all that “noise” out of the “news”, China is moving on. It is on all fronts. So the USA doesn’t want to partner with China on anything. OK. No problem. But watch out. As I have said before; China does not play.
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Meanwhile check out what is going on with China and Taiwan right now…

China’s railway operator echoes netizens’ call for a high-speed rail route to Taiwan

By Global Times Published: Mar 14, 2021 03:03 PM
Reprinted as found. All credit to the author, and edited to fit this venue.

An aerial photo shows the Pingtan Strait Road-rail Bridge in East China’s Fujian Province. The first of its kind in China, the bridge opened on Saturday, shortening travel time between the provincial capital of Fuzhou with the island county of Pingtan to 35 minutes from around two hours. The bridge will make it more convenient for compatriots in the island of Taiwan to travel to the Chinese mainland. Photo: cnsphoto

China’s top railway operator said on Sunday that it has “taken seriously the building of a railway to the island of Taiwan,” echoing Chinese netizens’ calls as well as the Russian Ambassador to China’s wish to visit the island by train.

China Railways, the country’s top railway construction company, discussed the technical issues and routes of building the high-speed railway from East China’s Fujian Province to the island of Taiwan in an article published in its official WeChat account on Sunday.

No wonder Donald Trump wanted to ban WeChat, you cannot have the anti-China narrative polluted by facts.

In the article, it mentioned China’s National Comprehensive Transportation Network Plan, which was rolled out in late February and set the construction goals from 2021 to 2035 with a long-term plan extended. A route from Fuzhou to Taipei, in the island of Taiwan, was also listed in the plan.

China’s HST (High Speed Train) rail network as of 2020.

The plan soon drew heated discussions on Chinese social media platforms. Netizens also expressed a strong wish to “visit Taiwan by train.”

Russian Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov also voiced confidence in China’s capability to build a high-speed railway between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and stressed that both sides across the Taiwan Straits belong to China.

Close up showing the HST bridge between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

Denisov said he is looking forward to taking a high-speed train to visit the island some day in an interview with Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV in early March. “If I could have a chance to visit Taiwan Province, of course I prefer to do it by train.”

Responding to such calls, the railway operator giant noted, “The dream that countless Chinese people have dreamt is finally drawing closer,” as the Beijing-Taipei high-speed rail has only “the last part” between the Straits left to be completed.

It further went on to explain that with the completion of the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway last December, all of the construction work on the Beijing-Taipei high-speed rail has been completed except for the last section, which will link the mainland across the Straits, referring to “the last part” from Pingtan to Taipei.

The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, the nearest one on the mainland from Taiwan, was put into operation on December 26. Pingtan is only 68 nautical miles away from Taiwan’s Hsinchu, the closest point across the straits.

The Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge, a key project of the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, has a total length of 16.34 kilometers. It is the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge and the first road-rail bridge in China.

Is this even possible, or is this a “pipe dream”?

Oh yes. It is absolutely possible. Consider that all of the neighboring nations are enthusiastically participating with China in establishing communication and trade routes and upgrading their infrastructure. And consider the a fore mentioned “Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge” which was just completed last year. Which followed the HK – Macao – Zhuhai bridge effort (outside my front door)…

As discussed in this article…

China opens Fuzhou-Pingtan railway to boost cross-strait travel

Updated 14:45, 27-Dec-2020
By Hong Yaobin

The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway in east China’s Fujian Province went into operation Saturday morning after seven years of construction, allowing visitors from the Chinese mainland and China’s Taiwan to travel more conveniently across the Taiwan Straits.

The Fuzhou-Pingtan railway in east China’s Fujian Province went into operation Saturday morning after seven years of construction, allowing visitors from the Chinese mainland and China’s Taiwan to travel more conveniently across the Taiwan Straits.

The 88-kilometer railway, designed to support high-speed trains running at a speed of up to 200 km per hour, connects the provincial capital of Fuzhou with the largest island in the province, which is the nearest place in the Chinese mainland to Taiwan Island, only 68 nautical miles (about 126 km) away from Hsinchu City.

The 88-kilometer railway, designed to support high-speed trains running at a speed of up to 200 km per hour, connects the provincial capital of Fuzhou with the largest island in the province.

Noting that they have been taking the “Strait” ship to travel between Pingtan and Taiwan, Yang Binghao, who is from Taiwan and runs a cultural and creative center in Pingtan, said that with the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, “Taiwan compatriots can now transfer via railway after arriving in Pingtan by sea, and then we can easily travel to Beijing, Shanghai and other parts of the mainland.”

Yang believes that the railway will further promote the opening-up and development of Pingtan and facilitate cross-strait travel and communication, benefiting local residents and people from both sides.

Thanks to bullet trains running on the Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge, it now only takes around half an hour for residents and visitors to commute between both places.

Thanks to bullet trains running on the Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge, it now only takes around half an hour for residents and visitors to commute between both places. The 16.3-kilometer-long bridge, with a six-lane highway on top and a high-speed railway at bottom, is China’s first and the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge.

The 16.3-km-long Pingtan Strait Road-Rail Bridge is China’s first and the world’s longest cross-sea road-rail bridge. /CFP

The new railway will link the island county with major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen through the transportation hub in Fuzhou, according to Li Fei, an official with the China Railway Nanchang Group Co., Ltd.

In 2009, the Pingtan Comprehensive Pilot Zone was launched in the county to facilitate cross-strait exchange and cooperation, aiming to become a “common home for compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Straits,” which currently houses more than 1,000 Taiwan-invested enterprises.

A young child ride the HST on the way to Taiwan.

Comprised of 126 islands, Pingtan is home to marvelous natural wonders and a number of tourist attractions such as Haitan Island, Tannan Bay, Pingtan Island National Forest Park, and Haitan Ancient City, and has become increasingly popular among visitors from home and abroad in recent years.

From January 20, up to 17 sets of bullet trains will run on the line every day, up from 9.5 sets plying currently, further boosting the development of local tourism.

So what is China doing to quench the anti-unification efforts?

Sure all this is fine and good. China is building bridges, and tunnels and aiding in economic development. However the United States is funding the Taiwan separatist movement. (As well as funding NGO’s such as the NED, and NID for insurgency efforts.) But what is China doing to quench those who want to fight a “hot war” for “American Democracy”?

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Thursday stressed the importance of the one-China principle and 1992 Consensus in addressing the development of cross-strait relations.

The premier made the remarks during a virtual press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing after the closing of the fourth session of the 13th National People's Congress, China's top legislature.
The Chinese mainland welcomes dialogue with different parties regarding cross-strait relations to achieve the unification of China, Li said, before stressing opposition to any form of separatist activities or foreign interference in cross-strait affairs.

The central government will continue to enable Taiwan compatriots to share in opportunities on the mainland, he added.

So yeah. Who, as you well know, already have Chinese passports, is still able to buy property and set up businesses but will now be granted easy loans and smooth sailing in new businesses and ventures.  China is “pulling out all the stops” to help integrate the Taiwanese with the mainland Chinese.

Some thoughts

When I was a young boy, the “news” was all about the “War in Vietnam”. Every day were reports on how our “brave young men were saving the world from communism”. And the media was all over it. From Walter Cronkite on television to magazines such as “Popular Mechanics (illustrated)” and “Vanity Fair”. In those days we were all afraid of “The Red Menace”, and the “Domino Effect”, and were terrified of  the “loss of our freedoms”.

Domino theory, also called Domino Effect, theory in U.S. foreign policy after World War II stating that the “fall” of a noncommunist state to communism would precipitate the fall of noncommunist governments in neighbouring states. The theory was first proposed by President Harry S.Truman.

domino theory | international relations | Britannica.com

In those days, as a young boy, I would watch Hollywood movies glorify war.  I would envision myself flying in The B-24 Liberator bombing the shit out the of the evil Nazi’s (12 O’Clock High), or fighting on the front lines with John Wayne in the movie The Green Berets (1968).

John Wayne in the movie The Green Berets (1968).

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It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that were I to follow my boyhood dreams, I would probably have been shipped off to die in some distant land. I would have died a virgin, and forgotten by the rest of the world. But no one else realizes this, and America is still playing the same old games that ended up killing thousands of Americans, and millions of civilians over the last fifty years.

This is just a typical example of how absolutely “off the wall” American media is when it comes to reporting what is going on in China.

  • It omits facts.
  • it omits history.
  • It omits contemporaneous news.
  • It fabricates news.
  • It distorts events.
  • It produces emotion laden articles full of fear.

It is, after all, a reflection of what America stands for.

I will generate more articles along these lines in the future. For now they will all fall under the heading… “America is having a hissy fit.”

Do you want more?

Well go here…

China

.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

 

Metallicman Donation
Other Amount:
Please kindly enter any notes that you would like to attach to the donation here:

 

Going through one of the poorer fifth tier cities in China, a video exposé.

Yeah. This is what it is like. I’ve got a video that you’ll all will want to see. It’s pretty good. Almost as good as being here. It’s a pretty much grass-roots view of China in one of the “back water” towns in the “hinterland”. LOL. I think that you will all enjoy it.

But first…

… let’s talk about things that aren’t so serious. I mean, why not? Right? Like Pistachios. And Jarts. And blueberry pop-tarts, and big breakfasts with baked beans, easy over eggs, and lots and lots of bacon. And coffee. Percolated coffee. Thick.

The postman always drinks twice.

Not so serious things.

Or, maybe serious.

And right off the bat I want to discuss some of the odd things that make me scratch my head in thought. Well, actually pet my beard, up and down, and go hummmm.It’s some thoughts that aren’t big enough for a post of their own, but curious enough not to omit.

And the first up is this little critter. Kinda cute. You know.

Cute little creature. I think that he is a really good candidate for an actual dragon. Don’t you?

I always thought that dragons were a creature from fantasy, and the legends of dragons might be from remote memories of dinosaurs in our common shared humanity. But here, it pretty much seems definitive. Here be an actual dragon.

So here I am, minding my own business and I come across this little picture. I look at it, scroll past it. Pause. Stop. Think about the little guy, and go back to him.

He’s sort of cute, eh?

And here’s a group of guys from “Trailer Park Boys”. Not so cute. They remind me of my friends from Arkansas. In fact, their stereotype can pretty much be found all over America.  Not that it’s bad mind you, but that it is not the narrative, its the way people interact with each other at different levels of financial success or distress.

Here’ to “the crew”!

Trailer Park Boys chilling out.

I know that it is supposed to be a comedy, but really I actually know a lot of people like this. It’s the human experience, don’t you know.

The human experience.

You all have a front-row-seat. Don’t you know.

And speaking about the human experience, look at this little tool. It’s advertised to massage the gums. But come on! You aren’t  going to tell me that that’s the real purpose of this little gizmo. Are you?

Designed to massage the gums.

No. The real reason and the real purpose of this little device is to make it easier to pick your nose. Now with this vibrating finger your nose can be really get all clean and worked up.

Next up is a nostalgic picture.

When a government is working, and efficient, and has crime under control, inflation doesn’t exist. All inflation can be traced back to government mismanagement at some level. And sure there are all kinds of excuses justifying it’s existence, I like to believe that it is a measure of government mismanagement.

With that in mind, look at this picture please…

The good old days.

…and then, boom!

We are back to serious things.

Where has Americans’ income gone?

By Ding Gang 

Ten years ago, I went to New York City with the correspondent group of then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's delegation. After we arrived, the Chinese side invited some former US senior officials and entrepreneurs to hold a symposium. At that time, the trade imbalance between China and the US was already prominent.

Wen gave the example of an iPod player, whose price was about $290 in the US at the time, but a Chinese manufacturer can only get $6 from each sale. I remember there was a heated discussion in China at that time - we would exchange 800 million shirts for a Boeing plane.

Do Americans earn more because they make more money? From what I have learned during my visits to the US these years, prices of commodities did not change much, or even become cheaper as production bases have been moved to China and other countries. But wages for middle- and low-income Americans have not risen much, or none at all. Reports show that in a 2015 contract between the United Automobile Workers and the Detroit automakers, senior workers received just a 2 percent annual pay increase, after suffering a 10-year pay freeze.

Where has Americans' income gone?

To answer this question, we need to look at the earnings of the biggest companies in the stock market. Apple, for example, was number one, with a net income of $57.4 billion in 2020, up from $14 billion in 2010. Of course, the growth of income of the senior executives at big companies and the big investors is even more startling. In January, The New York Times reported that "America's richest 10 percent, who own more than 80 percent of US stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains." 

Economist Jonathan Rothwell listed an example in his book A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society: In Spain, Sweden and Iceland, doctors earn twice as much as the average worker, but in the US, physicians and surgeons earn nearly five times as much.

Such a huge gap between the rich and poor will bring at least two troubles for the future reforms in the US. First, the large-scale relief measures which aim at helping relieve the pressure of middle- and low-income Americans will actually help big enterprises, the rich and the upper class. In other words, the measures won't address the problem of the rich-poor gap.

Second, the US design of system is based on the principle of "profits first." But the increase of profits for big companies comes more and more at the cost of unemployment of the middle and lower classes. As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote, "We're in the middle of a pandemic that has crushed jobs and small businesses - but the stock market is soaring. That's not right. That's elephants flying. I always get worried watching elephants fly. It usually doesn't end well."

Both of these issues touch upon the old issue of raising taxes from big companies and from the rich. This will inevitably touch the foundation on which the US is built - competition in the free market economy which aims at improving efficiency. Moreover, getting vested interests to concede benefits is not an easy task.

If money can't be obtained from taxes, there is only one way to go: printing more money. When things get to this point, it is no longer just a question of whether the social divisions can be healed, whether people can be united to move forward.

US economist Stephen Roach recently pointed out that last year, the combined COVID-19 relief packages in the US hit a total of $5 trillion, or 24 percent of GDP in 2020. This far exceeds all records. On March 6, US Senate passed President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. 

Will this destroy the world's confidence in the dollar? After all, green note is the foundation of US hegemony.

Will all this destroy the world’s confidence in the United States dollar? Heck! You bet. It’s already destroyed, and most nations welcome alternatives. Leading the pack is China with Gold Backed digital yuan. And trading directly and electronically.

Which brings up this most timely article from the Economic Collapse Blog;

Brace Yourselves For The Most Dramatic Shift In The Standard Of Living In All Of U.S. History

by

They are assuring us that we don’t have to be concerned about “inflation” because they have everything under control.  Do you believe them?  The value of the U.S. dollar has been steadily declining for a long time, and most Americans have grown accustomed to having the cost of living rise at a faster pace than their paychecks do.  But over the past 12 months an enormous paradigm shift has begun.  Instead of devaluing our currency a little bit at a time, now our leaders are going “full Weimar”.

Our money supply is growing at an exponential rate, and this is becoming a major national crisis.  As I pointed out yesterday, it took from the founding of our county all the way to 2020 for M1 to reach 4 trillion dollars.  But then from the start of the pandemic to today, M1 has gone from 4 trillion dollars to 18 trillion dollars.  To call that “economic malpractice” would be way too kind.

The truth is that it is complete and utter lunacy, and we are all going to literally pay the price for such madness. Sadly, inflation is already starting to show up in a major way all throughout our economy.

For example, most Americans have noticed that the price of gasoline has really started to shoot up over the last several weeks…

Gas prices have been increasing at the pump for the past few weeks, reaching a national average of $2.77 a gallon as of Monday, which is 39 cents higher than the same time in 2020, according to AAA.

A lot of people are alarmed by this, but the Federal Reserve insists that this is completely normal.

Meanwhile, the price of agricultural commodities has risen by 50 percent over the past year…

The price of agricultural commodities traded on the global stage has shot up by 50 percent since the middle of 2020, according to economists at Rabobank.
In a new report, the bank pins the lift in the price of wheat, corn, soy, sugar, and a range of other commodities on the northern La Niña, a weakening US currency, market speculators, and rising demand from importing nations.

As those prices are passed along to the consumer, you will be paying more for groceries at your local supermarket, but authorities assure us that prices will stabilize once the economy returns to “normal”.

The good news is that at least the price of food is not rising as fast as the price of lumber is…

Lumber prices have increased more than 180 percent since last spring, and this price spike has caused the price of an average new single-family home to increase by $24,386 since April 17, 2020, according to the NAHB standard estimates of lumber used to build the average home.

Now that is some serious inflation!

There are so many people that have had to put their plans to build a home on hold in recent months because the price of lumber has gotten so ridiculously high.

But the experts at the Fed insist that those that are warning of hyperinflation just have wild imaginations. Over the course of the past year, our leaders have pumped trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into the system, and all of that money has to go somewhere.

In such a highly inflationary environment, this sort of a thing can happen…

A digital collage by American artist Beeple which exists only as a JPG file sold Thursday for a record $69.3 million at Christie’s, fetching more money than physical works by many better-known artists.
‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ became the most expensive ever ‘non-fungible token’ (NFT) – a collectible digital asset that uses blockchain technology to turn virtual work into a unique item – after being listed at the start of the two-week auction for only $100.

The U.S. dollar is being transformed into “toilet paper money”, and we are rapidly approaching the point of no return.

At least if our paychecks were rising as fast as the cost of living was, American families would be able to keep up with the escalating prices. But of course that is not happening, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day.

In fact, vast numbers of formerly middle class Americans no longer have jobs at all.  Last week another 712,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits, and the number of claims continues to hover around “four times the typical pre-crisis level”…

Weekly jobless claims have remained stubbornly high for months, hovering around four times the typical pre-crisis level, although it’s well below the peak of almost 7 million that was reached when stay-at-home orders were first issued a year ago in March.
There are roughly 10 million fewer jobs than there were last year in February before the crisis began.

This is not what an “economic recovery” looks like.

The truth is that the U.S. economy is broken, and the only solution our leaders have is to print, borrow and spend even more money.  Now Biden and his minions are about to pump another 1.9 trillion dollars into the system. Do you think that will make the inflation crisis better or do you think that it will make it worse?

You don’t need to answer, because the answer is self-evident.

As prices soar into the stratosphere, life is going to become increasingly difficult for most Americans.

If your income does not rise as fast as prices are going up, your standard of living will go down. Of course you will be far from alone.  The vast majority of Americans are about to experience a dramatic shift in the standard of living, and most of the population doesn’t even realize what is happening.

All they know is that more government checks are on the way, and most of them are absolutely thrilled about that. But all of this printing, borrowing and spending has put us on a path to national financial suicide. As we continue to recklessly destroy the value of our currency, other nations will begin to realize that a move to a different reserve currency is needed.

And once the U.S. dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world, there will never be any going back to the “good old days”.

We are so close to the economic endgame, and the word “collapse” is not nearly strong enough to describe what is eventually going to happen to the United States.

…
Yikes!

It makes me yearn for the good old days.

Well for all the good stuff that I have to say about China, now I am going to vent on some of the bad stuff. It’s not that I want to, but sometimes it’s just so frustrating. You want to eat some olives, and some slices of cheese, maybe Swiss or a fine Lorraine, and the only think that you can find is the pseudo cheese slices. Ugh!

It is difficult to truly enjoy cheese.

Ah. The Chinese enjoy everything, but cheese seems to elude them. Sigh.

Oh sure, you can find it here, but it’s not common and it’s not enjoyed the same way. It is sprinkled on items like you would sprinkle salt and pepper. Not layered and melted into a smooth creamy consistency. Like on Pizza.

It’s treated like a spice. Not as a major food group.

Which brings me to the delicious subject of Fondue. Now, I know it’s not all that popular in America these days, but at least there’s a few Americans get to try it at least once a year or so. And at that, when you pair it with a fine wine, it becomes a wonderful occasion.

Oh, and do not mistakenly believe that you need to buy any expensive fondue pots, pans or utensils to make it. You don’t. All you need is a pan, and the ingredients, and some long stemmed forks. That’s it. So what is stopping you?

Eh?

From HERE…

Fondue is a traditional Swiss dish that is prepared from pieces of cheese, thermally melted with white wine in a special fondue pot – “caquelon”, to a creamy consistency, flavored with cherry rakia or cherry brandy. It’s tasted by dipping hard bread cubes, rolled in the melted cheese with special fondue forks.

 Fondue is a warm dish that can contain one or more types of cheese, usually Gruyere and Vacherine Fribourgeois. It is the main national dish of Switzerland together with с raclette. It is also known in the Eastern French regions Savoie and Franch-Comte since the 1950s where it is prepared with Beaufort cheese or Comte cheese.

Now, maybe the “officially correct” way of making fondue uses the dish, the forks, and the special cheeses. But we are just simple people wanting to have simple pleasures with our friends… RIGHT NOW.

Here’s a hint, you make use of what you have. And you call up your friends, and you add some wine. Some nice music, and you all work together to make that delicious cheesy fondue happen.

Delicious fondue.

And he continues on the narrative…

At the table, the fondue of melted cheeses is served in the so-called “caquelon” (a type of enameled, cast iron or ceramic pot) in which pieces of bread are dipped with a special fork with three prongs (there are also forks with two prongs, but they are mainly associated with the meat fondue – the Bourguignon or the Chinese type). The fondue pot (caquelon) is located on a metal pad (usually made of wrought iron) at the base of which is located the heat source (a heater or candles) that keeps the fondue at the desired temperature throughout the meal.

Fondue forks are long-stemmed with a round handle. A piece of bread or rarely potato slices (traditionally consumed with Fondue fribourgeoise) are dipped into the melted cheese stirring in a circular or a figure-eight motion of the fork. 

When removing the fork from the fondue, it should be rotated continuously in a circle so that the melted cheese doesn’t drip outside the pot. The soaked mouthful is served towards the mouth when the cheese is already cooled to a suitable temperature for consumption and thus a full taste is achieved.

It is a common rule for cheese producers to sell ready-made cheese mixes, especially for fondue preparation, which makes it possible to avoid the difficult choice of the cheese combination. In Switzerland, these cheese mixes can be found in supermarkets.

They are not generally found in the United States, and most certainly not in China.

But that’s the price you pay when you live in different areas. If I lived in Switzerland, I would be in “seventh Heaven” smunching on all that delicious food. I’ll tell you what.

There are many and varied Fondue recipes. For example, before beginning the fondue preparation, several cloves of garlic can be crushed at the bottom of the caquelon, then add the grated or sliced cheese and finally pour the wine.

The specific thin in the Fribourgeoise fondue recipe is that the wine is replaced with water. The fondue set is turned on on a slow fire while stirring periodically until the cheese is completely melted. Then pepper and other supplements are added according to the desired recipe, such as sliced in cubes shallots, morel mushroom, mustard, etc. Corn starch dissolved in a little bit of cherry brandy can be used to thicken and improve consistency in cases where more wine is added, for example, or when the fondue is more liquid.

Sometimes, a little bit of cardamom powder (which improves digestion) or other spices can be poured directly into the plate, where the cheese dipped bite is rolled right before consumption.

Finally, when the fondue is over, it is possible to have dregs or crust of toasted cheese, called “religieuse”, which is removed with a fork, sometimes it is quite difficult.

Also, at the end of the fondue you can add and prepare scrambled eggs.

Main varieties of Swiss cheese fondues

FONDUE CHEESE CONTENT
Moitié–Moitié 50% Gruyére and 50% Vacherin
Fribourgeoise 100% Vacherin Fribourgeois
Appenzelloise 100% Appenzeller
Neuchateloise 50% Gruyére and 50% Emmental
Central Switzerland 1/3 Gruyére, 1/3 Emmental, 1/3 Sbrinz
Savoyard 50% Emmental of Savoy and 50% Beaufort or Comté
Franc-Comtois 100% Comté

Now my deep secret…

I love cheese. Oh I really do. And you know you don’t appreciate things until you live without them. And that is so very true about cheese and China.

Like on hamburgers turning them magically into cheeseburgers. (It’s magical how it works.) You put the cheese on top of the burger after you cooked one side, and then you let the heat from inside the burger melt the cheese on to the paddy. You don’t rely on the heat around the burger to do it. Then you watch the cheese melt. It gets soft at the edges and then starts to wrap around the burger and starts to clutch it like a firm loving embrace.

Ahhh.

Turning hamburgers into cheeseburgers.

And…

As much as the delicious improvements to hamburgers come from cheese, so do improvements in just about anything else. You know like this…

Delicious cheeseburger.

Do you know what is better than thick gooey cheese on top of a cheeseburger? It’s thick gooey cheese inside of a cheeseburger. That’s what.

You know, it’s been years, but I used to make the “pizza burgers”. I would mix pizza sauce with the hamburger meat. Then put a chunk of mozzarella cheese in the middle of the patty and cook it that way. My only problem was that the meat would tend to crumble and resemble a “sloppy Joe” more than a burger. But it tasted oh so good. I’ll tell you what.

What a pizza burger is not…

There are many ideas of what a pizza-burger is. I’m gonna tell you all what it is not…

  • It is not a burger with pizza sauce instead of ketchup.
  • It is not an open bun burger (the top missing) with pepperoni slices.
  • It is not a mini-pizza the size of a hamburger.

And if you try to do an image search on Bing that is what you are going to find.  Sad. So very, very sad.

Not real pizza-burgers.

Nope. A real pizza burger has the burger consisting of meat and pizza sauce, and lots and lots of gooey melted cheese. That’s a pizza burger!

Smunching on a burger, and then enjoying life.

Maybe it’s time to go out and do some shopping. Eh?

Going shopping with Mom.

Moving on

You know that there is one very special thing that would really improve the taste of cheese. Aside from friends, and your favorite pets, and some nice tunes (music). Can you guess what I am thinking about?

Yes. You are right.

Alcohol.

Or, more specifically… wine.

Wine and a cheeseburger. So very delicious.

While I have my thoughts, other people are far better versed in explaining the nuances between the different kinds of wines.

A good hamburger is an indulgence. It is also pretty much always a little decadent, rich and hearty, which makes it a natural match for red wine. Sure, some white wines could work, and lots of sparkling wines too. But come on, let’s drink some red wine with our red meat.

  • A Red wine goes best with a hamburger / cheeseburger. You can tell if it is a red wine by it’s color. Red wine has a red color.

Below are some classic wine styles (and bottle recommendations) that pair with burgers, plus a couple of not-so-classic picks that worked well recently with a variety of burger styles — from a simple Swiss cheeseburger with all-American condiments, to a black-truffle-mayo-and-fried-egg stunner, to a bison burger with cheddar, caramelized onions and wasabi mayo.

I would never suggest a ho-hum wine just because burgers are, at the end of the night, just hot sandwiches with toppings.  With that in mind, only one of these 10 bottles rings up higher than $20. (140 RMB for those of you in China.)

Zinfandel

Not a “white Zinfandel” which is everywhere, but rather a “red Zinfandel”. A red Zinfandel wine is both fruity and spicy. Some fruit aromas such as raspberries, blackberries, cherries, cranberries. And there is a generous sprinkling of cinnamon and black pepper. Depending on the winemaking and ageing methods it undergoes Zinfandel can display a range of secondary and tertiary aromas.

Red Zinfandel Wine Information
The color of a zinfandel wine is deep red, bordering on black. Zinfandel is a spicy, peppery wine, with a hint of fruity flavor – berries or dark cherries are often the taste range. Zinfandel goes well with “typical American” food – pizza, burgers, and steaks. It’s hearty enough to match up with thick red sauces.

Zinfandel is one of the all-time classic burger wines. Big, jammy, juicy and spicy, it’s almost as if it were invented for this most-American of sandwiches.

Cabernet

A Taste of Cabernet Sauvignon | wine.co.za
https://wine.co.za/wine/wine.aspx?WINEID=41057

2021-2-16 · Cabernet Sauvignon is a noble variety red grape - and is usually deep red in colour, full-bodied, with dark fruit flavours. It arose out of an accidental breeding between a red Cabernet Franc and a white Sauvignon Blanc grape plant - which subsequently has become one of the most planted and popular varieties in the red wine world.

There used to be an old television commercial. I forget what was being sold. Maybe it was a Heinz product for “57 Steak Sauce”. Encouraging people to shake a particular steak sauce onto their hamburgers instead of ketchup, the TV advertising campaign went something like this:

"...Is a hamburger made of ground ham? No — it's made of ground steak."

As long as it is not a tannic powerhouse, a California cabernet sauvignon, best friend of the juicy steak, is probably going to be a good match for your burger. It’s got a rich flavor, and when you drink it after a bite of a fine thick, cheesy burger the taste really excels.

Oh, I get goosebumps thinking about it.

A nice Cabernet is my favorite, as well as a fine sweet Shiraz.

Malbec

Taste and Flavor Profile Malbec wines are dry, full-bodied, and exhibit rich, dark fruit nose and flavors like blackberry and red plum. They're juicy and jammy, with notes of vanilla, tobacco, dark chocolate, and oak. With medium acid and moderate levels of tannins, they pair well with food.

What Is Malbec Wine? - The Spruce Eats
www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-malbec-wines-3511186

Argentines love their beef, and they wouldn’t dream of eating one of their famous steaks without a glass of malbec. Naturally, malbec is also a great burger wine, with its velvety plum, blackberry, chocolate and earth.

Rhone varieties

The Rhône, a major river in France, rises in the Alps and flows south to the Mediterranean Sea. This river lends its name to the southern French wine region on its banks, the Rhône Valley, as well as its major AOC, Côtes du Rhône.

The indigenous grape varieties that grow in the region, like Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Viognier and Roussanne, are often referred to as Rhône grapes. So, regardless of their place of origin, wines made from these grapes are said to be Rhône-style wines the world over.

Rhone Blend
https://www.tastemonterey.com/rhone=blend
Definition: The Rhone region of France has a delightful selection of red varieties. There are 22 grapes allowed in the Rhone AOC, about half of them red. Most of these varieties are used as secondary blending partners, often comprising less than 10% of the blend. The primary red players of Rhone blends are Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre.

Can you imagine not seasoning a hamburger patty with a little bit of salt and black pepper? This is where the Rhone grape varieties come into play, especially the powerful and legendary syrah, which can range from floral to leathery, often with a bite of pepper.

Merlot

Most Merlot wines are thick and full-bodies. It’s sort of the “milkshake” of the wine world. It’s considered to be “heavy”, and if you are not used to it, it will get you drunk faster than the lighter wines. Because of this, you will need to drink it slowly and eat it with some fine beef or mutton.

A Taste of Merlot - wine.co.za
https://cellardirect.co.za/a-taste-of-merlot
The Eikendal Merlot 2017 has an attractive nose that reminds one of forest floor, violets, plums, black berries, cherries and peppery spices. On the palate the wine and full and rounded, with soft tannins and a rich taste of black berries and plums.

With richness and a silky mouthfeel, merlot is sort of the wine equivalent of a milkshake in this pairing scenario — if you consider that some people like the fizz and tang of soda with a burger, and others opt for a mouth-coating chocolate shake.

Here’s a picture where someone went into a White Castle fast-food franchise and got some sliders with their wine.

What a better moment than to think of Harold and Kumar…

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

So, here I am enjoying a home made cheese burger. (And no, I did not skimp on the tomatoes, and yes, I do enjoy a nice onion with my burger) and drinking it with a fine local wine; Great Wall. It’s a very reasonably priced good real wine. Basic. Just the way I like it.

And I thought that I would cruse the internet, like I used to back in the mid 1990’s during the Bill Clinton years. Back then I actually believed the “news”. Now I know better.

The state of American “news”

Let me say a few words about the state of “news” in America today…

It sucks.

Yup, that’s pretty much it.

Tell ’em George.

For Shits and Giggles

So, for shits and giggles I visited Free Republic to check out what narratives are being promoted these days.

I used to frequent it excessively. But it’s become the mouthpiece of the hard-right, and no longer stands for anything resembling free discourse. And my being perma-banned pretty much validated that belief. After all, what is more hypicritical than to promote the idea of a “Free Republic” where you can freely experss ideas, and then perma-ban a member because “your ideas and thoughts are not welcome here.”

No longer searching for truth and providing a medium for free exchange of ideas it has become a money making venue which now maintains a niche market that caters to a mixture of old-world-conservatives, war-mongering neocons, and the religious right.

One of the first things you learn once you've been out of the United States for six months or longer is just how absolutely bad the American "news" actually is. It's horrible. They lie, and they distort and they do everything in their power to make you afraid.

I check up on the American media enclaves from time to time so that I don’t go too far off the deep end. (It’s easy to do.) Hard right. Hard left. Mainstream. I mostly just scan the headlines. It tells me all that I need to know.

I try to give equal time to all the “news” venues. They all have soemthing to say. They all are visited by people who are searching. It’s just that they all manipulate to push their own agendas.

I am NOT saying bad things about liberals or conservatives, or moderates or any other flavor. I am saying that there are some seriously ill people with some very little minds, and very big mouths. If not properly corralled they will end up causing all the rest of us to endure some real pain.

Contemporaneous news…

BUCS Sign Brady To 4-Year Contract... 

Michelle Obama considers 'retiring' from public life... 

Rubio sides with Alabama workers in AMAZON union battle...

Bezos invited by Sanders to hearing on income, wealth inequality... 

Congress Leaning Towards Big Tech Breakup...

What the AT&T Split Teaches About Antitrust... 

GOOGLE Faces 'Very Large' EU Advertising Probe, Vestager Says...

Claims MICROSOFT's Stance on News Is Effort to Distract from Hack... 

'NEWSROOM' actress appears to have plagiarized NYTIMES essay... 

Spring forward forever? Push to keep daylight saving time year-round grows... 

UPDATE: 'Historic' snowstorm to pummel Wyoming, Colorado...

'6 FEET'...

'Impossible travel conditions'... 

USA had coldest February in 30 years... 

ISIS creates 'elite new cell of jihadis to carry out attacks on West'... 

Rioters Set Fire to Federal Courthouse in Portland 1 Day after Fencing Removed... 

MYSTERY: Number of twins being born at 'all-time high', researchers say... 

Two-Thirds of Italians Set For Lockdown as Pandemic Worsens... 

Germany declares 'third wave' has begun... 

LA primed for disaster, but virus took it to another level! 

HALF adults infected with virus have symptoms of depression... 

Mexico czar got infected -- then walked through Mexico City... 

EU Governments Push to Relax Ban on Travel From Rest of World... 

Maskless, boozing JETBLUE passenger faces $14,500 FAA fine... 

Latest hotel amenity: Free test...

And yeah, Free Republic hasn’t changed, it’s still the anti-China crusade running hard and hot, plus the usual fearful articles, and a bunch of shit about anti-vax, anti-5G, anti-social reform, and anti-huawei. It’s anti-everything. Except for guns, walls, and war.

The only thing positive that I can say about it is that the culprits are pretty well brazen. They aren’t hiding their disgust about the rest of the world at all. It’s all pretty open, and well-aired. I’ve got to give them credit for that.

Yeah…

So I went through the first three pages and pulled out a slew of anti-China articles. And guess what? They are all from the same source. I wonder why they are spamming FR so aggressively?

Theyare all from the hard-religious-Right publication The Epoch Times.

What is The Epoch Times?. Dangerous Propaganda ...
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/what-is-the-epoch-times-e8f80d152a6f 

May 15, 2020 · The Epoch Times was started by John Tang in the year 2000 as a Chinese language newspaper. John Tang is a graduate of Georgia Tech who publicly supports the Fulan Gong...

All of the articles came from this singular source.

All of the anti-China articles are from this publication that advocates world war III to bring about global social change. Yeah, not all that different from other dooms-day-cults. Like Heaven’s Gate. Or the Jonestown Massacre in 1978. It’s curious to know that so many American conservatives are willing to listen, follow and fund a lunatic that follows in the same footsteps as the Jim Jones when he lead more than 900  followers to their deaths.

People do not drink the Kool-Aide that is being offered by The Epoch Times. It can lead you down a very dark, and scary, path.

Check out their religious-justified Anti-China war-mongering…

Let’s start here with this one. This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Reuters piece to bang-on China. Now the Reuters piece pretty much reports that the FCC is following the already in-place policies of the former Trump Administration. This republishing keeps the narrative alive. Giving the FR readership the idea that the Biden Administration is “keeping the heat on China”.

My comments:

It’s all fun and games for now. Just wait in ten years. When China and Russia tire of all this and the American electronic industry and software industry is under a graduated state of collapse. (Just like every other industry in America over the last few decades.) And then when it is tottering before the big fall, China, Russia and all of Europe pulls the rug out, and performs a “tit for tat” payback.

Oh, you all think that cannot happen?

How about this next article…

This one is a laugh. It’s implying and making statements that the Chinese people are fearful of what is going on and how the government is handing things. At a 93% Chinese approval rating the narrative doesn’t make sense. While I am sure that the local government is very active in Beijing, just as they are here, no one, and I do mean NOBODY is concerned. But the American readership knows none of that.

So they believe these LIES.

  • Beijing Pushes for Door-to-Door COVID-19 Vaccinations, Citizens Worry
3/13/2021, 9:38:12 AM · by SeekAndFind · 11 replies
Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Alex Wu

Chinese authorities recently launched a door-to-door COVID-19 vaccination program in Chaoyang District, in the capital city of Beijing. Some residents shared their concerns with The Epoch Times over their distrust of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its propaganda about COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic. Mainland Chinese media reported on March 10 that Beijing’s Chaoyang District began a new door-to-door vaccination program in residential communities and villages. The program is also carried out in five types of places such as government offices, the Central Business District (CBD), industrial parks, business offices, and school campuses. Chaoyang is where international companies, foreign...
    Now of course, all this anti-China narrative makes you think certain things about China. And since there are NO NAMES, and there are NO PICTURES, and there are NO VIDEOS, and no one is willing to provide links to the ACTUAL CHINESE DOCUMENTS, you all just believe what is being told. Yet the actual validity of what you read has as much worth as the ten year old riding the bike down the street.

And this one… it really cracks me up!

  • Nearly Half of Trump Supporters Won’t Take the CCP Virus Vaccine: NPR, PBS, Marist Poll
3/13/2021, 9:35:04 AM · by SeekAndFind · 94 replies
Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Samuel Allegri

Almost half of former President Trump’s supporters don’t plan to take a CCP virus vaccine according to a poll by NPR, PBS, and Marist. The poll indicates that 47 percent of people who identified themselves as Trump supporters would not want to be vaccinated when the doses became available to them. Upon widening the demographics, the survey found that 41 percent of Republicans would not take the vaccine, compared to only 11 percent of Democrats saying they wouldn’t take it. In total, about two-thirds of Americans polled said that they’ve already taken a vaccine or would take one when they...
    Do you want something funny? Half the Trump supporters won’t take ANY vaccine, let alone one from China. But it’ll be hard for them to get the Chinese vaccine inside of America because it is not being shipped to America.

Uh Duh!

I’ll tell ya, you’ve got to be a fucking brainless morn to actually believe the bullshit that is being peddled in America today.

Here’s another…

  • 3 Deaths in 9 Days After Hongkongers Get China’s Sinovac Vaccine
3/13/2021, 5:21:07 AM · by SeekAndFind · 12 replies
Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Emma Yu

Since Hong Kong began vaccinating the public with the China’s domestically-produced Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac, on Feb. 26, three deaths in nine days have increased anxiety about the vaccine’s safety. On March 8, a 71-year-old man in Hong Kong died four days after receiving his vaccine shot. The patient was reported to be in good health before the vaccination. This was the third death in nine days in Hong Kong following a CoronaVac injection. It’s unclear whether the vaccine contributed to the deaths. Authorities have said they are investigating the causes of death. The first known death in Hong Kong...
    This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Jimmy Lai piece to bang-on China. He might be behind bars, and probably getting ready for organ harvesting, but his papers and media empire lives on…

…for now.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

And you all wonder why these sources and editors, and writers are being banned off the min platforms?

And here’s a hate spewing nonsense trying to associate the COVID-19 lite with China. You all want to know what these people look like to me…

  • Florida Gov. DeSantis Cancels All CCP Virus Fines Issued by Local Officials
3/13/2021, 3:15:54 AM · by lightman · 36 replies
epoch times ^ | 12 March A.D. 2021 | Lorenz Duchamps

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that will eliminate all fines issued by local government officials over the past year to people and businesses in the state who violated restrictions related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The order (pdf) was signed after the Board of Executive Clemency approved DeSantis’s proposal on March 10 to categorically remit all fines related to local government CCP virus restrictions. “I hereby remit any fines imposed between March 1, 2020, and March 10, 2021, by any political subdivision of Florida related to local government COVID-19 restrictions,” DeSantis confirmed in the order,...

It’s all war-mongering antagonistic bullshit. And if left unchecked it will lead to war. And people are gonna die!

Listen to me.

These NEOCONS are Dangerous.

The History of the Neocon Takeover of the USA

Copied as found with editing to fit this venue. It’s a good read and worth your time. All credit to the author.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

Senator J. William Fulbright identified the Neocons’ irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago, in a New Yorker article titled Reflections in Thrall to Fear: “Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them”, leading to “The ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never] – or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis…But these were not rational men and their need to further their irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.”

This same ideology drove the failed War in Iraq – and now, they’re at it again, with their foolhardy saber-rattling towards Russia.

The birth of the Neocon movement grew out of what had previously been known within the Eastern Establishment as “Team B”, in which official policies were tested by “competitive analysis”. The first Team B was created by George H. W. Bush, while he was Director of the CIA. This brought together very unlikely bedfellows, such as the ex-Trotskyite, James Burnham and Right Wing business interests, both of whom lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism.

This Team B/Neocon doomsday cult managed to weather the defeat of the Vietnam War and their non-fact-based analyses continue to maintain a stranglehold on US policy.

James Burnham’s nihilist, elitist vision was criticized by George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Second Thoughts on James Burnham, in which he wrote, “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in the latter’s book, The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.” In fact, George Orwell’s classic book, 1984 was based on Burnham’s vision of the coming totalitarian state, which he described as “A new kind of society, neither Capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery.”

There are many well-known godfathers of the Neoconservative agenda of “Endless War”, the guiding principle of America’s foreign policymakers today but Gould and Fitzgerald identify James Burnham as by far its most important figure, although he is little-known today.

Burnham was born in Chicago, the son of an English immigrant father. He attended Princeton University and later Oxford University’s Balliol College. He briefly became a close advisor to Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, from whom he learned the tactics and strategies of infiltration, political subversion and dirty tricks. Gould and Fitzgerald note that the Right Wing Neocon cult of “Endless War” is ironically rooted in Trotsky’s permanent “Communist Revolution” and they describe how James Burnham helped to turn this into the permanent battle plan for a global Anglo-American empire. They write, “All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive for generations.”

In 1941, Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxist idealism and he moved towards a cruel realism, with his belief in the inevitable failure of democracy and the rise of the oligarch. During the following years, he wrote several books and memos, predicting the rise of a technocratic elite. By 1947, Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical to New World Order American Conservative was complete, landing him smack into the loving arms of America’s Right Wing defense establishment during and after World War II.

In my own writings, I’ve noted that the use of the word “Freedom” by the US Government, whether it be “Freedom Fries”, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” or “They hate us for our freedom,” has completely mangled the significance of this F-word, certainly from a Constitutional perspective. Gould and Fitzgerald trace the bastardization of this word to James Burnham:

“Burnham’s Freedom only applied to those intellectuals (the Machiavellians) willing to tell people the hard truth about the unpopular political realities they faced. These were the realities that would usher in a brave new world of the managerial class who would set about denying Americans the very Democracy they thought they already owned. As Orwell observed about Burnham’s Machiavellian beliefs, in his 1946 Second Thoughts, ‘Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to use the masses.’”

With the CIA’s 1950 founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Gould and Fitzgerald write, “By its own admission, the CIA’s strategy of promoting the non-Communist Left would become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

Today, it appears that this strategy has been a smashing success, where we see the so-called Left in the US playing the role of fulminating, pro-Establishment Statists, a behavior formerly relegated to the Right. Never, in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the “tolerant Left” behaving like an army of Phyllis Schlaflys!

Prior to the catastrophe that was the Vietnam War, the Right was the establishment. The factual defeat of the ideals which drove this war was instrumental to the rise of the 1960s Counterculture movement, which was an even bigger disaster for the Neocons than losing the war. The Counterculture needed to be co-opted by any means necessary and I believe this has been successfully achieved.

Gould and Fitzgerald write that, “CIA’s control over the non-Communist Left and the West’s ‘free’ intellectuals [enabled] the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.”

Gould and Fitzgerald cite historian Christopher Lasch, who wrote in 1969 of the CIA’s co-optation of the American Left: “The modern state… is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists, not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.”

We see this very much today, in the Late Night comedy of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and SNL, the staff writers of which are largely hand-picked from the Harvard Lampoon, where young comedians are trained in a particular brand of comedy that deftly implants a fascist philosophy of extreme elitism and which fuses the ideals of the old Trotskyist left together with those of the right-wing Anglo-American elite, aka the Deep State.

The product of this fusion is called “Neoconservatism” – or its sneaky twin, “Neoliberalism”. The overt mission of this ideology is to roll back Russian influence everywhere. The covert mission is to reassert British cultural dominance over the Anglo-American Empire, maintained through propaganda. Traditionally, comedy has been used as a form of social and political criticism. Today, it cows the hapless consumer into submission to the hegemony.

Gould and Fitzgerald then inform us about the secret Information Research Department of the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office known as the IRD, which was funded by the CIA and served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. Gould and Fitzgerald cite Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, which describes how the IRD spread ceaseless disinformational propaganda (a mixture of lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists working for major news agencies, including Reuters and the BBC and all other available channels. This was but one of many similar initiatives launched by the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board, including Project Mockingbird and the abovementioned Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The mind is the ultimate battlefield. In my next talk with Gould and Fitzgerald, we will go into how the Deep State has designs on our dream life, in such figures as Robert Moss, a former assassin who now gives New Age workshops on “Active Dreaming.” (Incidentally, the New Age Movement was a CIA subproject of MK Ultra mind control programs). The soon-to-be-released 5G network will enable Virtual Reality, as predicted by Gould and Fitzgerald’s book, ‘The Voice: An Encrypted Monologue’, which takes the reader through the process of reclaiming one’s own narrative from the “noize” of unrelenting psychological warfare that saturates our environment.

Check out their book, ‘The Voice’ here:
https://www.forbiddenmedia.com/product/the-voice/

All this neocon “firehose” of disinformation from the hard-right seriously give me a headache. It’s like this…

(Since we are talking about 1994, and the Bill Clinton years of surfing the “web”.)

Oh, and where was I, oh yeah…

Video on the fifth tier cities in China

Let’s move away from the American “news” and let’s see a taste of what real reality actually is.

Here we just provide a video that is making the rounds in China. A fellow from the UK, who lives in China, has been making various You-tube videos of his experiences in China. And you can come across these kinds of videos all over the internet. But what makes this particular video so special is that it isn’t a first or second tier city. He’s making videos in the smaller “back woods” communities within China. It’s the real deal.

You see, most you-tube videos are of expats exploring Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Cool and big cities most certainly. But they are first-tier enormous urban landscapes.  But those of us, like myself, live in the smaller communities.

Here he is visiting some of the “smaller communities”. To an American, or Brit, it looks like a city. To a Chinese person, it is considered a small village. It’s not big and it doesn’t qualify for high speed rail, or subway access. But it is still vibrant and alive as all of China is these days.

Here’s the video. Click on the picture for the video to open up in a new tab. It’s around 12 minutes or so long, and is narrated by a British expat. Please excuse his accent, and his “squirly” appearance. He’s a typical. Don’t you know.

I do hope that you enjoy it. It’s pretty much what it is like when you enter the Chinese version of “Fly over country”, and a “Red State”.

Now, go and get some cheese, a bottle of wine, some music and call up some friends. Time is too short to waste!

Do you want more?

I have more articles in my China experience section. Go here…

China Experience

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More secrets the American mainstream news keeps quiet about; Chinese families are twice as wealthy as Americans

Number 6:
Everybody votes for a dictator.

You know, the Western “news” is just propaganda. Nothing more. It is used to instill fear, control and manipulate huge masses of people, and to bludgeon them into predefined and specific types of behaviors. And of the many things that propaganda does (lie, distort, and emphasize incorrect narratives) is ignore real and substantive actual news. And yeah. They do this for a reason, don’t you know. And this article is going to talk about one thing that the American media is very quiet about; the Chinese people are much more prosperous than Americans are.

So forget that neocon belief that the Chinese people are shivering in fear and oppression from their all-power Chinese Communist overlords (it is the de facto narrative). They aren’t. They are overwhelmingly happy, approve of their government, and just living their life in near carefree abandon.

Which is why I enjoyed traveling outside of America. When I went to Australia, the relationships with the folk there reminded me of my boyhood days in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And when I went to South East Asia, it reminded me of the days of “keg parties” and “hanging out”… you know. Doing ‘nothin. It was glorious.

It was everything I hoped it would be.

In those lands I wasn’t barraged with “news”. Even being connected to the USA though Wifi (much faster than what you get in the States, and for FREE!) no one read the “news” like I would (do so). They just pretty much ignored it. It was a much smaller part of their life. Certainly much smaller than what we from the States would think. And as a result they were far happier because of it.

Imagine that!

The lack of regulations, rules, policing control, laws, and just about everything else that is part and parcel of the regulatory and all-controlling America is absent in Asia. And it’s just glorious.

But anyways…

The American (and Western) “news” is just a big mill and den of lies and distortions. It is at all levels, and if you haven’t figured this out by now, you are either stupid or have mental problems. They lie. they distort. They cause you to live in fear. They spew hate. They are just awful.

  • The dangers of 3G; your brain will cook when you answer your cell phone.
  • Oh, and 5G, that terrible Chinese radiation is much worse!
  • Mad cow disease will kill you when you eat a hamburger.
  • Y2K is going to have your toaster jump and strangle you in the kitchen.
  • Killer zombie hornets is going to attack your community.
  • Donate money now to SAVE THE CHILDREN in far away Africa.
  • Dangerous child abductors are prowling all over your neighborhood.
  • Ask your doctor about Prozac Plus, the new gateway to happiness!
  • You too can get a free trial of unlimited internet only $9.99, special conditions apply don’t you know…

Do something. Now! Now! Nowwww!

Number 6:
Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.

Do you think I’m exaggerating?  I’m NOT.  It’s just that when you view the “news” narrative out of context, at a time when the media onslaught has subsided, it seems just so very silly.

Silly.

Like mixing wine and chocolate.

Um. I take that back. Make that’s a good pairing. I’ll have to give it a try. Anyone game to experiment with me?  

Anyways back to the silliness about the United States. It is, really is, silly.

Sorry for being so darn harsh, but it’s true. American “news” is just plain silly. Like check out the latest “shit-storm” that’s a-brewing on Drudge today…

Ahem…

It’s sort of like this…

Anyways, lets leave the fairy tale world of American (and UK, Australian and Indian) “news”…

…and discuss something that really is intentionally omitted.

Number Two:
I'm the boss.

Number 6:
No. One is the boss.

It is the idea that not only is the rest of the world growing, and prospering, but that China is leading the pack and doing much, much… so much better than anything their American cousins can even realize.

What?

That’s right.

And that’s what happens when you have a capable, experienced leadership that is motivated to improve the lives of it’s people.

Observer:
Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.

The Communist Chinese are wealthier than Americans.

Ouch!

How about that for rubbing your face in a pile of shit?

This article is from Yicai global. You won't find it in the States, unless you perform a serious search. It's not that it's blocked, but perhaps it's more likely "shadow blocked". It's not gonna find it's way into your daily news feeds.  Reprinted as found with editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author Ben Armour.

There has been a lot of chatter in the [Chinese] press about the Chinese government’s setting a growth target for 2021. And specifically whether or not it was able to achieve its longstanding goal of doubling incomes in the last ten years.

While this year’s economic prospects are clouded by uncertainty, a recent study by researchers at the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) indicates that China has already achieved its objective of building a moderately prosperous society (小康社会) – at least in its cities.

The study, published in the latest issue of China Finance, highlights the results of a comprehensive survey of urban families’ finances conducted at the end of 2019. It reports that median household net worth stood at CNY1.41 million or close to USD200,000.

  • Median household worth in China is $ 200,000 USD.

The US’s own Survey of Consumer Finances was last conducted by the Federal Reserve in 2016. If I adjust its findings for inflation, then median US household net worth was about USD104,000 in 2019.

  • Median household worth in the USA is $ 104,000 USD.

Thus, one can say that the typical US household is only about half as rich as the typical Chinese urban family.

Number 6:
[referring to the chess game] Why do you use people?

Chessmaster:
Some psychiatrists say it satisfies the desire for power. 'the only opportunity one gets here.

Number 6:
That depends what side you're on.

Chessmaster:
[quickly] I'm on my side.

Number 6:
[quickly] Aren't we all.

Chessmaster:
You must be new here. In time, most of us join the enemy - against ourselves.

How is this possible?

Since per capita GDP in the US is close to five times higher than in China, how can we explain such a surprising result?

The very unequal distribution of wealth in the US is a big part of the story.

The super wealthy is skewing all the numbers to be much higher than they would be otherwise.

The graph below shows that while median US household wealth is about half that of Chinese urban families, average US household net worth is about 80 percent higher than China’s USD413,000.

.

The ratio of average to median net worth is a measure of how equally wealth is distributed.

.

If everyone’s wealth was exactly the same, the ratio of the two net worth measures would be 1.0.  China’s mean household net worth is double its median. The ratio in the US is seven times, pointing to a much more unequal distribution of wealth.

      • The Ideal = 1
      • China = 2
      • United States = 7

China has far better financial, and social equality than America has.

What are the attributes that contribute to this situation? Reason one.

Median Income. Since it lies right in the middle of the wealth distribution, we can think of the median household as “typical. ”Half the families are richer and half the families are poorer than it is.

On average, American families are wealthier than Chinese ones. There are a lot of really wealthy American families that pull that average up.

But the typical American household remains poorer than its Chinese urban counterpart.

Note that I am making these comparisons in 2019 US dollars and am not accounting for the fact that a US dollar buys more in China than it does in the US.

Reason Two

A second reason that Chinese urban households are relatively wealthy is that home ownership is quite widespread.

According to the PBOC study, 96 percent of urban households own residential property. The corresponding figure for the US is only 64 percent.

Median Data

  • 96% of Chinese own their own homes.
  • 64% of Americans own their own homes.

The gap between US and Chinese in home ownership is even more striking at the low end of the income distribution. In the US, only one-third of the families in the lowest income quintile own a home. In China, 89 percent do.

Low Income Data

  • 89% of China’s poor own homes.
  • 33% of American poor own homes.

In fact, many Chinese families own more than one property: 31 percent of them have two and 11 percent have three or more. On average, each urban family owns 1.5 residential properties.

Chinese home ownership

  • Average family owns 1.5 homes.
  • 31% of Chinese own 2 homes.
  • 11% of Chinese own three or more homes.

Chinese family wealth does not simply rest on inflated real estate values.

Residential property represents just under 60 percent of household assets, with financial assets and other real assets (shops, productive equipment, vehicles, etc.) each accounting for close to 20 percent.

Moreover, from the information in the study, I estimate that the price-to-income ratio of these households’ residential property holdings at 3.7. This is fairly close to the median house price-to-income ratio in the US, 3.6, according to Demographia’s most recent survey.

  • Home price / Income for China = 3.7
  • Home price / income for the USA = 3.6

Reason Three

The third reason for Chinese urban households’ high net worth is their relatively low indebtedness.

Seventy-seven percent of US households have assumed some sort of financial liability (a mortgage, a car loan, student debt, etc.). In China, only 57 percent of the urban households have incurred such liabilities.

  • In debt to financial loans – USA = 77%
  • In debt to financial loans – China = 57%

Not only do fewer Chinese households carry liabilities, but what debts they owe are small relative to their assets. The debts of the median Chinese household, which does have liabilities, only amounts to 16 percent of its assets. In contrast, the median indebted American household has a leverage ratio of 36 percent of its assets.

  • American debt to assets = 36%
  • Chinese debt to assets = 16%

Reason Four

The final piece of the puzzle is understanding how Chinese urban households can have such a high rate of home ownership and such a low rate of indebtedness.

Chinese households do have much higher savings rates than their US counterparts and that is an important factor. But more important was the way in which the housing stock was privatized.

Up until the late 1990s, almost all residential property belonged to state-owned institutions, which provided low-rent accommodation to their employees. As part of the state-owned enterprise reform program, the government relieved firms of the burden of providing housing for their workers. Urban households were able to purchase their apartments from their employers at reasonable prices, leading to today’s high rate of home ownership and supporting urban prosperity.

A China First

(Yicai Global) April 27 — China may be the first country in the world to have reached a 96 percent urban home ownership rate, according to the central bank.

  • China has a 96% home ownership rate in the cities.

In an article the People’s Bank of China published in its China Finance journal today it also noted that the bulk of assets held by urban families is physical.

  • Chinese assets tend to be tangible, physical “brick and mortar” items.
  • American assets tend to be intangible, stocks, bonds, pensions, potential worth.

Home ownership in developed countries is mostly around the 60 percent level, according to data from Trading Economics. In the US, the figure was 65.1 percent at the end of last year, US Department of Commerce statistics show. The PBOC report puts China’s home ownership 28.5 percentage points ahead of the US.

  • Chinese home ownership = 96% (urban)
  • USA home ownership = 65.1%
  • Typical (developed country) home ownership = 60%

The reports also said Chinese urban households prefer risk-free financial assets, with homes making up nearly 70 percent and financial assets 20.4 percent.

The average wealth of urban households is CNY3.18 million (USD449,200), with a median value of CNY1.63 million, per the report. The difference between the two is about CNY1.55 million, indicating an uneven distribution of household assets.

Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu province ranked as the top three for family riches, with CNY8.9 million, CNY8.1 million and CNY5.1 million, respectively. The lowest three provincial-level units are the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu province in northwestern China and Jilin province in the northeast.

Households in urban areas generally take out loans. Some 56.5 percent of those surveyed are in debt. Among them, the total owed per household is CNY512,000 (USD72,346), with roughly 54 percent owing less than CNY300,000, 35.6 percent owing CNY300,000 to CNY1 million, while the remaining 10.5 percent owe over CNY1 million.

Mortgages constitute the bulk of household debt.

Some 77 percent of indebted households have home loans averaging CNY389,000, making up over three quarters of total household debt. The PBOC’s urban resident household assets and liabilities research team from its Statistics and Analysis Department canvassed more than 30,000 households in 30 provinces, autonomous regions and cities across the country in mid-to-late October.

Wow.

It’s time to celebrate!

.

Um. No, this isn’t right. Not enough food.

A real celebration requires FOOD!

.

Ah. Much better.

Pretty Amazing Stuff

Yes it is.

So what is not being reported in the American and Western press? It is that China is not some backwards, dirty, disease ridden infested dark smoggy slime-ball nation. But rather, a growing prosperous nation where most people own their homes. Where most people are debt free, and those that are in debt with loans are not too worried about it as the debts are small relative to their income stream. It’s a big, big change when you compare that to America.

How can Americans (and others in “the West”) have this kind of idea? Well consider what consists of “news”.

Here, today is a headliner article…

Westerners are increasingly scared of traveling to China as threat of detention rises

...The dramatic detention of a handful of foreigners in recent years has instilled a deep fear in some people, especially those with politically adjacent occupations. As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target...

Um…

So just in this paragraph we see…

  • Dramatic detention of foreigners!
  • Deep fear is present.
  • President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism!
  • President Xi is hostile to nations in the West.

And that is just ONE lone paragraph.

Do I have to point out the absolute falsehoods, the manipulations, the distortions and the lies in the four bullet points above, or are you aware of the reality?

It’s a non-stop bullshit garbage narrative like this that is pumped relentlessly into the brains of Americans, non-stop, 24-7.

I makes me want to have a fine libation, and some delicious food, I’ll tell you what.

[over the opening of each episode - Number 2 played by various actors]
Number 6:
Where am I?

Number 2:
In the Village.

Number 6:
What do you want?

Number 2:
Information.

Number 6:
Whose side are you on?

Number 2:
That would be telling. We want information... information... information.

Number 6:
You won't get it.

Number 2:
By hook or by crook, we will.

Number 6:
Who are you?

Number 2:
The new Number 2.

Number 6:
Who is Number 1?

Number 2:
You are Number 6.

Number 6:
I am not a number, I am a free man.

Let’s take a look at what China is today, shall we. Here’s some videos (in no particular order) that I just pulled off my Douxing feed this morning. Just you click on the picture and it will open up in a new tab.

High Speed Trains.

There are everywhere in China. Fast. Cheap. Comfortable. Convenient. Takes you anywhere and everywhere. The American news is again talking about how soon, one day, America too will be as good as China. And the talk is all about having high speed trains, like China has.

Of course they never mention that America is literally twenty years behind China in this regard, or that America has already spent 77 billion dollars for a cardboard and fiberglass mock-up. Or that America started on the American HST at the same time that China did, but with over ten times the funding level. And while China today has hundreds of lines, thousands of Kilometers of track, hundreds of trains, and stations, the United States has nothing.

But some day soon. You just wait and see. Right?

In China, HST is average, normal, and no big deal.

Just click on the picture and the video will pop up in another tab.

Guangzhou

Guangzhou is a “working class” city. Much like Pittsburgh, PA is. It’s big. really big. But it’s got a real “local” feel to it. It’s not cosmopolitan like Beijing, or Shanghai are. It’s just full of average people. Going to work and living life.

Here’s some gals going out for a nice dinner, some great friendship and some wine. Wouldn’t you all wish that you were there with them? I do. I’ll tell you what.

Some young gals having a nice dinner in Guangzhou China.

Chinese Transport Air Force

The Chinese, since there have been so many restrictions placed on them by America, and the UK, were forced to develop their own systems. This is everything from their own space stations, and Mars lander to military aircraft, and computer systems. All “home grown” and mass produced at a frenzy and pace that is stunning to behold.

We hear about it all, but then when you see just how many state of the art systems are in use, it just boggles the mind.

A Typical Chinese family

Here we have a typical Chinese family in their home. Not some kind of dirt floored hovel, is it? Do they look like they are starving, and begging for American “democracy” to “save them”?

Why so many children? I thought that the Chinese kill babies and that you are only allowed to have one </sarcasm>. But take a look at the mother and her 19 year old daughter. The Chinese don’t age like Americans do, because they EAT MUCH HEALTHIER. No GMO hormones, and no one is taking anti-stress, and anti-depression medications.

Outside of Zhuhai

This chick is a dancing and carrying on in a park right outside the supermarket where I shop for my groceries. Yeah. It’s pretty much like this. This is obviously on the weekend, judging from all the people. Must be on a Sunday.

A typical park

The Chinese have made improving the lives of their citizens a top priority. This is ALL that the government does. I would say that a full 100% of their effort is towards helping the people, improving their quality of life, and setting up defensive measures so that evil people cannot run “color revolutions” against them.

Most parks are now, beautiful, well maintained, and tranquil. Like this.

Movie making

One of the big omissions in American “news” is that just about everything is made in China. But if you listen to them, you get the idea that China only makes cheap pens, rubber duckies and the low-end products for Wal-mart. It doesn’t. All of the high-tech stuff is designed and made in China. All of it.

All of it.

Like this movie camera kit that is used to make the movies that Americans are not permitted to watch. LOL.

All this is about reality

If the masses of people could think critically for themselves, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. By the way Rod, there is a war. It’s raging and has enveloped this planet. It’s a war for our minds. Many have been captured. I know, I see them every day. And I read what they write. 

-Ohio Guy

I think that most of us are living in an artificial construct; and artificial reality. it is one that is constructed and based upon lies and untruths. And so, believing these lies and untruths we live our lives, making decisions, and behaving in certain ways that do not… and should not.. be part of our reality.

I suppose that you could point this out to anyone. You could point at them and say..

"How dare you live like you do? Your ideas and your thoughts do not match mine. You must change and agree with me! For my reality, and my understanding is the only and correct way of thinking."

So, yeah. Let’s keep a real sense of perspective here.

It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. Not really. Not if they are Americans, or Chinese, or Zambians. All that matters is what you are doing with your life.

If you are happy, having fun, trust your government, then that is fine. You can keep on believing what you want to believe. You can keep on doing what you are doing, and listening to the news as you see it. It’s working for you. Keep it up.

But if you are not, then maybe you should reevaluate your life; your reality. You need to ask whether it is an actual reflection of the truth. Or instead, are you living something else instead.

Are you like “Number 6” in the 1968 television show “The Prisoner” where you live in a nice pleasant place, but you can never leave it. And no matter what you do, you never get any straight answers and never know your true and real situation?

"The Prisoner" is a unique piece of television. It addresses issues such as personal identity and freedom, democracy, education, scientific progress, art and technology, while still remaining an entertaining drama series. Over seventeen episodes we witness a war of attrition between the faceless forces behind 'The Village' (a Kafkaesque community somewhere between Butlins and Alcatraz) and its most strong willed inmate, No. 6. who struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape from his captors. 

-Written by Stuart Berwick <berws@essex.ac.uk>

I think that for many Americans, the answer is YES.

It’s all a big farce. Elections are held, but no one really has any power. The reality looks nice and pleasant, but there is this grinding negativity just under the surface, and no one ever gets to glimpse their real reality.

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Since its initial telecast, back in 1967, this enigmatic classic has evoked every reaction from awe to contempt. Given the amount of serious critical attention THE PRISONER has received, and given that a whole society has been created in its honor, I'd say the awe has won out, and I vehemently agree that THE PRISONER deserves to be honored as one of the truly artistic programs created for commercial television.

However, I can also understand the frustration many viewers have felt. Over the course of its seventeen episodes, this offbeat spy thriller becomes further and further offbeat until it ultimately transforms into surrealistic allegory. I confess I'm not sure whether this transformation was intended as a complete surprise, or whether you were supposed to know where the show was going, but in either case, I think you can better appreciate the series if you can see the earlier episodes as preparation for what's to come.

THE PRISONER's title character is a British secret agent (series creator Patrick McGoohan) who may or may not be SECRET AGENT's John Drake. The story begins with him suddenly and mysteriously resigning, then just as suddenly and mysteriously being rendered unconscious and transported to a place known only as The Village, the location of which is known only to those who run it. The Village is a prison camp, but with all of the amenities of a vacation resort,. Attractive dwellings, shops, restaurants, etc. exist side by side with high-tech methods of keeping order and extracting information from those who won't give it up willingly.

Those who try to escape get to meet Rover, a belligerent weather balloon capable of locomotion, and seemingly of independent thought. It appears (to me anyway) that the authorities can summon Rover, send it away, and give it instructions, but that it acts more or less on its own initiative. Rover deals with fugitives by plastering itself against their faces, rendering them either unconscious or dead, depending on how bad a mood it's in. Twice, we see it haul someone in from the ocean by sucking them up into a whirlpool it creates.

Citizens of The Village, including those in authority, are identified only by numbers. Our protagonist is known only as No. 6 throughout the entire series. The Village is run by No. 2, who in turn reports to an unseen and unidentified No. 1. No. 1 is apparently an unforgiving boss, because No. 2 is always being replaced.

Shortly after he arrives in in the Village, No. 6 is informed, by the reigning No. 2, that he should count on remaining there permanently. If he cooperates, life will be pleasant and he may even be given a position of authority. If he resists -- well, the only restriction they're under is not to damage him permanently. To satisfy his captors, No. 6 need only answer one question: `Why did you resign?' His question in turn is, `Who runs this place? Who is No. 1?'

Most of the episodes deal with No. 6's attempts to escape, and/or his captors' attempts to break him, although there are a few side trips. Several episodes suggest that No. 6's own people may be involved with running The Village. Some of the episodes are fairly straightforward, while others leave you with questions as to exactly what went on. It's important to note that several of the more obscure episodes -- for example, `Free for All' and `Dance of the Dead' -- are among the seven episodes that McGoohan considers essential to the series.

And then we come to the final episode, `Fall Out,' which promises to answer all the burning questions the viewers have been anguishing over for seventeen weeks -- and which so frustrated and angered those viewers back in 1967 that McGoohan had to go into hiding for awhile. Of course, I can't reveal any of the really important details, because, as No. 2 says in the recap that begins most of the episodes, `That would be telling,' and as all of us IMBD contributors know, `telling,' is frowned upon. However, to come back to the point with which I started, you should be prepared for a resolution of an entirely different nature than the one you'll probably be expecting -- a resolution that forces you to rethink your entire concept of the Village, and of the intention of the series. If you aren't ready, you'll be frustrated. If you are, you can accept THE PRISONER is the spirit in which it was offered.

Yes. The 1968 version of the televisions show “The Prisoner” says it most clearly.

Astonishingly Original and Intelligent 
rlcsljo
14 March 2000

When I saw the first episode of this series, my jaw dropped in amazement. Here was a TV series that was entertaining and actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it appeared, no one had a real name, you never knew who was the good guy or the bad guy (or if they were one in the same!). The "final" episode was what could only be described as PSYCHEDELIC.

This TV series was, and still is, way ahead of its time.

Perhaps America today is a big prison. The inmates don’t realize that they are trapped in one, as it appears to be open and free. But in functional reality it is just one big enormous prison.

The New Number Two:
Good day, Number Six.

Number 6:
Number what?

The New Number Two:
Six. For official purposes, everyone has a number. Yours is number six.

Number 6:
I am not a number. I am a person.

The New Number Two:
Six of one, half a dozen of another.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my China and America Comparisons Index here…

China / USA comparisons

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Playing the blame game. Looking at life in America compared to life elsewhere, and the lead up towards war. Beware of those who are desirous of a hot war with China for “democracy” and “freedom”.

When I lived in Massachusetts I used to drive about and explore the beautiful, beautiful countryside.  It was always glorious. New England, and most especially Massachusetts is just breathtakingly beautiful. I, and my wife at the time, would visit the tiny quaint towns, the historical buildings and walk the thousands of quaint trails in the meticulously preserved wooded areas. And as we drove we would encounter the strangest things in the middle of the road. These things called “round a bouts” were a continuously and vexing feature of Massachusetts that I never really got accustomed to.
Roundabout
A roundabout is a type of circular intersection or junction in which road traffic is permitted to flow in one direction around a central island, and priority is typically given to traffic already in the junction.

-Wikipedia

Now, the point of this is that I would go and get on these things, and it would be a “free for all”. You wouldn’t really know when to get off, and instead your would go around, and around until you found your exit. For the locals, it’s no big deal. But for a new person entering these things, it tended to get really messy and confusing.

Take a look at this map below. This is the Kelley Square roundabout.

Kelley Square Roundabout

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Some areas you stop and wait for traffic. Some areas you yield to traffic, and some areas you wonder what is going on. We (when I lived in Mass) said that it was often a “free for all” during “rush hour”.

Now roundabouts are inherited from the British who really seemed to like them. Why, I’ll never know. But they kept them on and enhanced them to a point where they are just a royal mess and point of confusion.

Check out this roundabout in England. It’s called The Magic Roundabout. Magic Roundabout was voted the worst roundabout in 2005.

The Magic Roundabout

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Now, do you see those little points with arrows going around, and around? Those are mini-roundabouts. There are five of them in this particular roundabout. When a car reaches that point, they are to go around and around until a point opens up for them to pass into the right (or is it the left) lane.

Ah.

Modern life. We try to make things simple and orderly and end up making a very stressful, confusing and bewildering situation for everyone.

It’s really no wonder that many people in the United States are completely stressed out…

Stressing Americans

I guess the days of Mayberry RFD are long gone.

And you know, you really need to ask yourself “what happened”?

What happened to that great and glorious quality of life that we used to enjoy and were oh so very proud of being part of. What happened to it?

People, I have to ask, is the quality of life in America getting better, or is it getting worse?

Americans certainly have a lot more “money” than they did when I was a kid, but that doesn’t mean much because the U.S. dollar has only a fraction of the value that it did back then.

  • 1971 –  Burger King Meal – $0.55
  • 2021 –  Burger King Meal – $5.00

And without a doubt our electronic devices have become much more advanced, but that doesn’t mean that we are happier.

Happiness. In fact, everywhere I look, American people seem to be deeply unhappy.

Poll: Americans are the unhappiest they've been in 50 years...
World Happiness Report: Americans are unhappiest in years ...
Americans haven’t been this unhappy in 50 years
Record unhappiness reigns as Americans think something …
Americans are becoming less happy, and there’s research to ...

It is rare to see someone actually smiling in public, but of course there is a good reason for that.  If you smile too much, someone might accuse you of being creepy.

As Americans, we are being trained to not express emotions and to keep to ourselves.  Being friendly is considered to be “suspicious”, if you tell a joke there is a very good chance that you will deeply offend someone, and if you express strong opinions you might just get “canceled”.

Even though we are far more “wealthy” than they were, I imagine that our culture is not too different from what East Germans experienced before the Berlin Wall came down.

East Germany before the unification in the early 1980’s greatly resembles modern America today.

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Hate and Division. There is so much hate and division in our society, and everyone seems ready to rat out those around them at the drop of a hat.  So most people are careful to keep to themselves, but at the same time most people are desperately lonely.

Lonely.

Isolated.

Alone.

Zombies. These days, most Americans walk around like a bunch of zombies.  In fact, as a result of mental health problems and stress, a majority of Americans are exhibiting at least one of the symptoms of post-concussion syndrome…

A survey of more than 31,000 people shows that insufficient sleep, mental health problems, and stress were the causes of a whole host of symptoms doctors are used to seeing in head injury patients. Symptoms of what doctors call post-concussion syndrome (PCS) range from persistent headaches, dizziness and anxiety, to insomnia and loss of concentration and memory.

While 27 percent of people report having several of these symptoms, between one-half and three-quarters say they experience at least one. The most common symptoms are fatigue, low energy and drowsiness. Yet despite their findings, researchers believe the number in the general population could be much higher.

Of course one of the primary reasons why so many people are acting like zombies is because we have been drugged out of our minds.  Americans take more legal drugs than anyone ever has in the entire history of the world, and each year the pharmaceutical companies come up with even more drugs for us to try.

Why Are Americans Turning Into Drugged-Out Zombies

Most Americans Are Soulless, Mind-Drugged Zombies 

Zombie Apocalypse: 70% of Americans on Prescription Drugs

Prozac turns guppies into ‘zombies’ | Science | AAAS

Drug Abuse. In particular, because we are so deeply unhappy Americans take boatloads of anti-depressants.  More than 50 million Americans are on anti-depressants right now, and it gets worse with each passing year.

But even though we are taking so many “happy pills”, Americans continue to kill themselves at a staggering pace, and this is particularly true for our young people.

In North Carolina, one school superintendent recently shared the fact that “the suicide rate among teens is higher than the COVID rate of death in their county”…

The debate to reopen schools for in-person learning has highlighted an alarming idea – that students are not just falling behind academically, but at a heightened risk of death by suicide.

“One of our local superintendents recently shared with me that the suicide rate among teens is higher than the COVID rate of death in their county,” Sen. Deanna Ballard, a Republican from the 45th district, recently told CBS 17, though she declined to name the superintendent or county. Ballard did not respond to NC Health News’ requests for comment.

Isn’t that insane?

Teen Suicide. You can’t just blame the pandemic for the rise in suicide either.  In fact, the national suicide rate for teens was skyrocketing before the pandemic ever began…

The national rate of suicide in young people increased 57 percent between 2007 and 2018, according to the CDC.

“Even before the pandemic, we’ve been seeing an increase in youth suicides,” said Virginia Hamlet Rodillas, hotline manager for National Alliance on Mental Illness NC, which operates a statewide helpline.

If our society is so wonderful, then why are so many kids killing themselves?

The truth is that our society has become so sick and so twisted that life seems completely empty to so many of these youths.  Life is such a wonderful gift, and every day should be enjoyed to the fullest, but our society has become so evil that many teens are killing themselves rather than live in it one more day.

There is hope even for those that are facing the darkest circumstances, but most people don’t realize that because our society certainly doesn’t offer any hope.

Life Expectancy. Overall life expectancy has been dropping in the U.S. as well.  In fact, during the first half of 2020 life expectancy in the United States declined by a full year…

It’s already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in US history, with deaths topping 3MM for the first time. But the latest batch of morbid data is in, and they suggest things are about to get worse on average as life expectancy in the US dropped a full year during the first half of the year.

Life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average time a baby born today is expected to live. From January through June of last year, that was 77.8 years for the entire U.S. population, down from 78.8 years in 2019. It’s the lowest level since 2006, the report said.

Healthcare. Our healthcare system has become a complete and utter nightmare, and it is not going to get any better any time soon.

Education. Speaking of nightmares, our system of public education has become a sick joke.  Just look at what has been going on in Baltimore…

A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.

Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.

Millions upon millions of young people graduate from high school each year, but many of them can barely read, write or speak in public.

I could go on and on.

Life Satisfaction. Just about every system that you could possibly name is in the process of failing, and that is probably why American satisfaction with the way our country is functioning is at the lowest level ever measured.

The following comes from Gallup…

Americans’ satisfaction with seven broad aspects of the way the country functions is collectively at its lowest in two decades of Gallup measurement. This includes satisfaction with the overall quality of life in the U.S., assessments of government, corporate and religious influence, and perceptions of the economic and moral climates.

The average percentage satisfied with these seven dimensions has plunged to 39% at the start of 2021. That compares with 53% a year ago, the highest average in more than a decade amid strong economic confidence and before the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S.

Compare that to China.

With 93% satisfaction.

So what do you do when your entire population is unhappy, drugged up and facing a bleak future?

You blame it on someone else.

Some comments on the “blame game”

You can look at the American “news” and listen to the groundless, lying and nonsense and come to the conclusion that China is so enormously evil that it must be eradicated from the surface of the earth.

But is it really?

I argue (and so do others) that the A-number one American government answer to stopping the “pitchforks and torches” is to blame some other nation for all the ills that Americans experience.

Sort to like this…

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Ai!

Playing the “blame game” has been pretty effective so far.

It has. It really has.

You blame another group of people, and then you lob bombs and a propaganda campaign against them. The American flag is raised and patriotic movies flood the airwaves.

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Americans might be sad, lonely and unhappy, but at least ‘Merica “kicks ass”.

But 75 years of fighting wars in far-off and distant lands is really wearing thin. People are not getting happier, and the patriotism can only last so long.

Not to mention that you must be judicious on who you decide to pick a fight with.

Caitlin Comments

Here’s some thoughts by Caitlin Johnson…

Caitlin Johnson has been one of the most prolific tellers of truth over the last several years.  This is not empty praise.  She churns out solid, relevant, and hard hitting insight and analysis on a near daily basis and from my perspective, she has been on the correct side of every issue she has engaged with.  She recently wrote:

“In a time of great need the US government is letting its citizens freeze, go broke, get evicted, and die of preventable illnesses so obviously it’s of paramount importance right now that Americans rise up with one voice and direct their righteous anger at China. I’m developing a special disdain for people who mindlessly regurgitate US anti-China narratives, especially people who are normally skeptical of US government claims. There’s just no excuse for this nonsense. The geostrategic agendas are so obvious, the barefaced liars so familiar, and the facts so readily available for anyone intellectually honest enough to look”.

It is with this same mindset that Mr. Billy Bob penned the article below.  Reprinted from an earlier version that has since been expanded upon and elaborated. I edited it to fit this venue, from the raw, emotion-laden brilliance that Billy Bob has been famous for.

He (and myself)  share Caity’s frustration with those that want to claim the mantle of the left but whose words are seemingly written by State Department apparatchiks…

…and the comments (on my side of the ocean in “Sinoland”) is a flying in crazed abandon! Check it all out.

Rant-a-thon Numero Uno

We’ve all read the laundry list of Western propaganda that is designed to falsely depict China as a brutal dystopic, authoritarian shithole, where everyone hates their government and are totally miserable.

It’s interesting that with regards to Western propaganda targeted at China, the lies are simultaneously proportionate but the exact opposite of truth.

So, Mao who did more good for more people than anyone else in the history of the known universe, is known as “the greatest mass murderer of all time”. Or the Chinese government that according to a 2016 Harvard study has a satisfaction rating of 96% (compared to the 38% enjoyed by the US) is casually described by the Western press as “authoritarian, corrupt, unjust, and one of the biggest human rights violators on the planet”.

For people that fail to recognize the chasm of incongruence here, and are incapable of coming to the only possible conclusion, please ensure that your fork is properly corked before continuing so you don’t injure yourself.

The false indoctrination that has taken hold of far too many self identified “leftists” goes something like this:

"...the CCP is entirely opaque, forbids a free press and completely censors free information... that a few hundred members of a single ruling party dictates policy and is unelected... that political opposition is all but illegal and completely suppressed... that no workers own the means of their own production... that China has the largest increase and concentration of new billionaires while income and wealth inequality is also at its largest, due to rampant exploitative and equally destructive capitalist practices in the past decades... that China engages in imperialism via debt and increased militarism to its Asian neighbors...  that China is committing genocide against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang... that China oppresses, exploits, and impoverishes it’s citizens."

The Most Necessary and Fundamental Context: Class War

There are several mitigating factors that need to be kept in mind when analyzing the issues brought up above.

First and foremost is the reality that our planet is in the midst of a class war . It is a war where an infinitesimally small group of obscenely rich plutocrats, industrialists, and oligarchs, seek to maintain their power. They seek to maintain their wealth, power, and privilege by enforcing a global system of political and economic control. Yet doing so without any moral restraint whatsoever.

The Western ruling class consensus sees China as the enemy and is looking for any possible way to subvert, weaken, divide, and destroy their society.

These gangsters of capitalism are masters at their craft. They have successfully dismantled the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Syria among others.  They have regime changed scores of countries, most recently, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, and Bolivia.

They will not hesitate to exploit any weakness or to kill millions of people to defeat China and maintain their global supremacy.

To ignore the fact that China must defend against this very real threat. It is a valid threat posed by Western imperialism. Thus to simply analyze China’s system in a vacuum, detached from the fundamental context of class war, is to demonstrate a cluelessness about the most important aspect of the big picture.

Cluelessness.

Keep the citizens in the West ignorant, and bombard them with lies. That way, they will acting like robots, and automatons and are easily manipulated to do your bidding.

Keep them clueless.

Cherry-picking what you want to believe while ignoring the facts staring you straight in the face.

This (the desire and threat of Western imperialism to kill and destroy without restraint in the maintenance of their global supremacy) is everything.

This is the entire ballgame.

Nothing else comes anywhere close to this fundamental reality in terms of importance or relevance for humanity and the planet we inhabit.

A Propaganda Battle Over Perception:

Does China censor speech?  Of course they do as it would be naïve and reckless to allow subversive Western lies and divisive capitalist propaganda, free reign over the airwaves.

A class war is taking place and the propaganda battle is an integral front.

    • China censors divisive lies while the West censors truth.  It’s really that simple.
    • The Chinese people aren’t starved for truth.  Truth is not censored in China.
    • China censors lies that are intended to destroy their society.  The West censors truth which threatens their hegemony.

There is a tremendous difference here and failing to recognize this fundamental difference results in a misguided analysis that is detached from reality.

The Farcical and Self-Defeating Arrogance of Promotors of Liberal Governance:

The political system that governs China is in essence the dictatorship of the proletariat which has steadily raised living standards at an *unprecedented rate* for over 70 years straight and has a 96% satisfaction rating because of it.

The Chinese working class correctly rejects the Western governance by “democracy”. As they should. It’s a farce, and a full half of the American population recognizes this. Face it; putting the entire enterprise to a vote every four years…

…or engaging in some bourgeois parliamentarian democracy…

…with all the gridlock that entails and which is sure to be far less effective in furthering working class interests.

Westerners arrogantly perceive this lack of liberal democracy in China as an indictment because their liberal minds have been deluded by nonsense and are detached from political reality.

  • Democracy is the best.
  • Democracy means FREEDOM!
  • Democracy give the “little guy” power over the government.

The Chinese see the lack of Western liberal democracy as a great thing. It’s really rather simple. This is because they prefer stability and the rapid advancement in living standards to gridlock, political chaos, and turmoil every four years.

The Chinese working class collectively says “HELL NO” to Western pleas for liberal democracy and I for one agree with them.

Hell no indeed.  Long live the dictatorship of the proletariat.  May they continue to work just as hard advancing working class interests over the next 70 years, as they have over the past 70 years.

Judging China Using Unreasonable Metrics:

China is condemned by pseudo leftists because no workers own the means of their own production, but this is an entirely illegitimate bar.

Where exactly on this planet does anyone own the means of their own production?  One may as well condemn China for still utilizing money, for maintaining borders, or for not eradicating scarcity.

This is not legitimate criticism.

China’s banks are [1] nationalized, their biggest industries [2] are publicly owned, [3] the private sector is often owned by party members and it is [4] subservient to party diktats and their five year economic plans which are designed [5] to achieve specific social goals.

The pseudo left also attacks China for having classes.

This too is no more legitimate than blaming China for not yet eradicating scarcity or for not abolishing private property.  The nature of economic growth is to allocate growth disproportionately.

It’s entirely true, China is not a classless society.

So what?

China has not eliminated class and…?

Well…

And…?

Classless societies simply do not exist at this point in time.  But in China, it is the working class that has the monopoly on power.  It is the dictatorship of the proletariat that tolerates the capitalist class but only as long as they obey the law and are advantageous to the economy, exactly as Mao explained.

China is indeed far from perfect.

Room for improvement exists and this is acknowledged by the CPC.  They have had tremendous success in their public battle against corruption and inequality. They have a police force that is devoted to exactly this., problems which have resulted from unprecedented economic growth. and the CPC is actively and successfully attempting to curtail these negative externalities while at the same time, trying to maintain growth, increase productive forces, and continue to raise living standards.

Oppressed, Angry and Scared?

I’ve seen Westerners point to China’s “conviction rate” and claim that such a rate proves “innocence has nothing to do with the justice system”.

I’m curious how such a conclusion is deduced from the data.

What conviction rate is optimal? At what conviction rate would we believe that justice is being served in a fair manner?

    • Is the 90+% conviction rate in the US optimal and proof of a fair justice system?
    • What about 93% for Israel?
    • What about the 99.9% conviction rate in Japan?
    • Is the Japanese justice system even less fair than China’s?

Or, are Westerners just being bamboozled into drawing bullshit conclusions from the dishonest presentation of decontextualized statistics? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

I hear Westerners opine that “Chinese workers are exploited”...
...though wages have tripled every ten years for the past forty years.
It is claimed that the Chinese are throwing themselves off of buildings into “suicide nets”...
...though China’s suicide rate is 40% lower than that of the US.
Western propagandists claim Chinese are miserable and simply too scared to speak out against their government...
...though professional Western scientific polling companies claim China is one of the happiest places on earth.

The “narrative” being pushed through the Western “news” is fantastical and has entered the realm of fantasy.

In China, Poverty is GONE.

Extreme poverty was eradicated this year and now every Chinese has “a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care.

Meanwhile there… [are] …more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.

500,000,000 urban Chinese… have more net worth and disposable income than the average American.

Chinese mothers and infants… [are] less likely to die in childbirth than Americans are.

Chinese children graduate from high school three years ahead of Americans.

Chinese children will all outlive our American children.

Ninety-eight percent of Chinese listed as ‘poor’ already own their homes (paid for completely with no mortgages and taxes EVER on it) and what’s more…

…President Xi has scheduled 2021-2035 to bringing GINI below Finland’s.”

“Imperialism” of Peace-Through-Mutual-Prosperity?

And what about imperialism?

Is China just as imperialist as the Western ruling class which the pseudo left seems to only condemn after they are called out for their hypocritical attacks on anti-imperialist nations?

As if purchasing resources from foreign governments or defending oneself from actual violent imperialism is itself imperialism?

Please, Western imperialism is the only imperialism that actually exists.

People! Keep in mind this important fact. Defending oneself from imperialism is not the same as engaging in imperialism.

China has not sandwiched the US with military bases just off it’s northern and Southern borders.  China has not been arming, training, and funding US separatists for years.  China has not been working with Narco terrorist death squads, intolerant radical jihadists, or neo-nazi militias in order to perpetrate politically motivated acts of violence and murder.  China hasn’t regime changed nearly a country a year for the past 70 years.  China doesn’t have embargoes and economic sanctions against nearly 40 countries in order to force their political capitulation.

Seriously, the pseudo left needs to just stop with the “China is imperialist” bullshit.  It’s not even close to true.

Genocide or Winning Hearts and Minds?

Hands down, the crown Jewel of the West’s dishonest propaganda offensive and the one which they are investing all their capital in and pinning all of their political hopes on is the claim of “Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang province”.

Much needs to be said about this particular strategy to destabilize, weaken, and subvert Chinese society but for the sake of brevity I will confine myself to explaining China’s perspective on the issue.

Here are some highlights regarding the terrorism problem faced by China:

“In February 1997 the CIA-instigated bombing of public buses in Urumqi that killed nine people died and injured more than 70.

In 2007-08, Uyghur separatists exploited the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing to internationalize their cause. An attempted suicide bombing on a China Southern Airlines flight was thwarted but a terrorist attack in Kashgar in Xinjiang killed 16 police officers four days before the start of the Games.

In July 2009, Uyghur extremists in the provincial capital Urumqi killed 200 people, mostly Han Chinese. True to the imperial double standard, Washington refuses to characterize such deadly attacks as acts of terrorism.

Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkestan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida, playing key roles in several battles. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are now clashing with Uighur fighters as the six-year conflict nears its endgame.

The violence continued through 2014. There were two more failed hijackings of commercial planes as well as scores of bombings, killing tens of civilians each time.

The knife attack at the southwestern China city of Kunming railway station in March 2014 was a watershed, resulting in 33 dead and 141 injured. NATO member Turkey subsequently gave passports to four of the fugitives involved in the railroad station massacre.

In 2015 Uyghur-linked terrorists staged a Bangkok bombing which targeted mainly Chinese tourists and left 20 dead.  Thailand offered to send Uyghur terror suspects back to China to face justice and defied the US demands that the suspects be allowed to travel onward to Turkey.”

Genocide in China?

There is a new report on Xinjiang that's been hailed by CNN, Guardian, Vox etc as the "first independent/non-governmental report" that confirms the genocide narrative.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-birthrate-sterilization-genocide
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/09/chinas-treatment-of-uighurs-breaches-un-genocide-convention-finds-landmark-report
But the report is from Newline Institute, a previously unheard (?) of think tank. Moreover, it's funded by a university (Fairfax University of America) that has just 150 students and in many ways looks like a diploma mill. From Wikipedia: "In March 2019, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia threatened to revoke VIU's license to operate in the Commonwealth of Virginia after an audit found rampant grade inflation and severe deficiencies in the academic rigor of VIU's online courses.".

-MoA

And then this interesting comment comes up…

LOL ur right, that looks like a dodgy think tank founded in 2019 by a certain Ahmed Alwani, who also happened to have served on the advisory board of US AFRICOM.

https://newlinesinstitute.org/people/ahmed-alwani/
The report contains contributions by the questionable Dr Adrian Zenz, i think MoA has also mentioned him before

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-09/chinese-firms-sue-german-researcher-at-center-of-xinjiang-claims
That "university" had 181 students in 2019, it is literally 1 building... conveniently near Washington... i'm guessing this Alwani guy is a CIA asset or gets paid by one of their other million agencies?

-Posted by: #ashtag | Mar 10 2021 22:11 utc | 36

More propaganda operating out of propaganda mills. But not to worry, the internet is gonna shake some trees for “apples of truth”…

The report contains contributions by the questionable Dr Adrian Zenz, i think MoA has also mentioned him before

Not only that, the bugger is listed as a member of the "Newlines Team".
https://newlinesinstitute.org/people/adrian-zenz/
Posted by: farm ecologist | Mar 10 2021 23:29 utc | 46

And then we cut to the chase and find this…

This 'Think Tank' is in fact a front for the International Institute of Islamic Thought an islamist neo-conservative organization in the US, linked to Egypt’s Muslim brotherhood, who’s members have pleaded guilty to sponsoring terrorism.

The director of the Newlines institute, Ahmed Alwani just happens to be the Vice President of this organization. He also served as an advisor to the U.S Africa command.

In 2006, a scholar of this group, Sami Al-Arian, pleaded guilty to “aiding terrorism” and was given a five year prison sentence.

The Washington Post at that time described the group as “the nation’s largest terrorism-financing investigation,” and stated it was linked to a number of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates.

Yet now, the mainstream media seem to be absolutely content for Newlines, which is a effectively front for IIIT, to spread propaganda on Xinjiang ...


Posted by: Arch Bungle | Mar 10 2021 23:34 utc | 48

So, China faces a serious threat from Western sponsored terrorist separatists, but did they really respond to this threat by initiating Genocide?

Give me a fucking break! Will you guys.

Think people. T.H.I.N.K.

Does genocide truly sound like the go-to for a government who’s top priority has been raising living standards and eradicating poverty?

What a ridiculous farce to suggest that China would believe it’s best interest would be served by secretly committing genocide.  As always, nothing could be further from the truth and the truth is exactly the opposite:

“Some 600,000 Uighurs were lifted out of poverty in 2016, and another 312,000 in 2017. More than 400,000 have been relocated from remote villages to places where they are gainfully employed.

Neighborhood religious institutes have been set up to educate citizens on the perils of religious extremism.

These community centers where classes are held to detoxify radical Wahhabism were labelled “re-education camps” or concentration camps by the western press, and those attending the classes termed “incarcerated”.

Programs to eradicate poverty are implemented to train and prepare Uyghurs for jobs in towns and cities.

The Chinese government, through various programs, has been winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Uyghurs. This is very bad news for the US and Uyghur separatists who are making a desperate, all-out bid to unravel the work done by Beijing to eradicate religious extremism and poverty in Xinjiang.

The deluge of fake news from Western corporate media since the beginning of this year seeks to demonize the Chinese government, painting it as a gross violator of human rights, when the truth is the exact opposite.”

"Xinjiang’s GDP grew 8% last year and is expected to accelerate since it is a gateway for the Belt and Road Initiative. Its future is bright and we can expect its recent problems, like Tibet’s, to fade into memory within three years."

The Only Rational Conclusion:

In summary, each and every one of the anti-China talking points pushed by the Western propaganda apparatus and which are dutifully parroted by Western pseudo leftists, are easily demonstrated to be false and dishonest.

The China described by the pseudo left agents of imperialism simply does not exist. In actual China the people are very happy and they appreciate their government to a degree that is simply unheard of by Western standards.  This appreciation is understandable as the CPC has been tremendously successful in developing a happy, healthy, and prosperous society.

So called leftists that *honestly* bash China are confused and are totally upside down regarding political reality.  Their support for Western imperialism through the regurgitation of anti-China talking points needs to stop.”

Some Comments (Not from MM)

Hi friends, always happy to see the lively discussion on anti-China nonsense. Billy Bob sure wrote up a great piece and I will definitely share it somewhere in coming days. Meanwhile I’ve had a couple more pieces recently published all along the same lines hope you’ll enjoy…

On the NPC Two Sessions
http://enapp.globaltimes.cn/#/article/1217666

On the Xinjiang nonsense
https://twitter.com/chinadaily/status/1367484978980745217?s=21

Xinhua interview on democratic aspects in China’s govt
https://xhnewsapi.xinhuaxmt.com/share/news?id=540247391694848&showType=3008&utdId=null&clientMarket=huawei

MM comments

Ah. The “mainstream fodder” for a very gullible and manipulated American populace. We call them sheeple, because that is exactly what they are. They are lied to so egregiously, and so fantastically that they believe the narratives that their owners, the PTB tell them.
Such fantasies such as…
"We don't hate the Chinese people, just the Chinese government."
Show such a profound level of ignorance, that it is incomprehensible. That’s like saying “I don’t hate pizza, I just hate eating pizza“. Duh! China is not like the United States. It’s not “lip service”. China is the Chinese people. The government of China is composed of the Chinese people. It’s a flat hierarchy that is “grass roots” from the very smallest hamlets on up.
.
And the inability to understand this most basic attribute of China is to display a profound and stunning lack of knowledge, insight, and understanding of China.
.
That includes not just an understanding of China, but of America as well. The notion that Americans are “free“, and that they stand for the “principles of liberty though democracy” is so profoundly ignorant, and an absolute insult to the founders who established America int he first place.
.
As I have repeatedly stated, the founders not only warned against democracy, but they wrote in the Federalist papers that democracies always turn into oligarchies. And if the oligarchies do not collapse from internal revolt by the citizenry, then they turn into military empires. Empires that historically are destroyed and erased from the surface of the earth.
.
The stupidly is thick in America these days. And trying to talk with an average American is a cross between “The Stepford Wives” and “A Wal-mart shopper”. No matter what side of the political spectrum that they come from. They all parrot what they read…
.
…not what they experience.

The Stepford wives.

But back to my point…

New technologies, and new ways of doing things, can lead to real horrors.

On April 26, 1933, the interior minister for the German state of Prussia issued a decree creating a new secret state police, or Geheime Staats Polizei, abbreviated: Gestapo.

The Gestapo was tasked with stamping out all opposition to Germany’s new Chancellor and the party he brought to power one year earlier.

It operated by collecting tips from ordinary citizens, including even school children. And this network of Gestapo informants changed Germans’ behavior almost overnight.

Even a joke about the ruling party could land you in a Gestapo interrogation room. Talking politics around your children became a dangerous gamble.

According to Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts, 37% of denunciations “arose not from heartfelt political beliefs, but from private conflicts with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.”

For example in one case, a grocery store clerk reported a customer who insisted on receiving the wrong change. The customer was accused of tax fraud.

Another man lent a banned book to his friend, and was quickly denounced by his friend’s wife.

The new Chancellor— who encouraged the behavior — was so shocked by the citizens’ eagerness to rat out their neighbors that he remarked, “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”

That Chancellor, of course, was Adolf Hitler.

The secret police didn’t need wire taps in every home or spies on every street corner. They found an army of willing, eager informants in the general population.

The volume of denunciations was so great, in fact, that the Gestapo actually had to ask people to stop reporting political crimes to them, because they were overwhelmed and found it impossible to process them all.

Obviously Germany in the 1930s is an extreme case, and I’m not saying that the West today is in the same boat. Not even close.

The similarity, however, is how quickly things changed.

In Nazi Germany, the entire culture changed literally within a few months. In early Spring of 1933, people were still civil to one another. By the summer, they were ratting out their friends and neighbors to the secret police.

Similarly, it wasn’t that long ago that people in the west felt free to speak their minds and state an opinion.

Today saying the wrong words can get you fired, cancelled, and your life turned upside down.

For example, lately there’s been a number of so-called “fact checkers,” i.e. self-appointed censors, who are upset about a new app called Clubhouse.

If you haven’t heard of it, Clubhouse allows people to discuss different topics in audio-only chat rooms.

The audio-based content does not allow recording. And that means there is no record of conversations.

As one fact-checker laments:

“...there are no screenshots. There is no way to drag up old Clubhouse posts years later like a user might do on Twitter. There is no way to record conversations—meaning there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all. . . Users on Clubhouse know, or at least believe, that they can openly speak their mind with zero repercussions.”

The horror!

This drives the ‘fact checkers’ bananas. They want people to be afraid to speak their minds. They want people to fear being denounced if they do not adhere to the doctrine of wokeness.

-Simon Black

Our society, no matter where you live, has been growing and expanding. new technologies confront us every day, and as we run head-first into the utilization of technology, and to the adaptation of our lives to fit that monster we create, people become profoundly unhappy.

Unhappy people tend to topple governments.

Unhappy people tend to topple governments.

.

Which is why there is the American idiom about “torches and pitchforks”. And it’s a real thing. The ruling class, no matter where they live, do not want to hang from ropes on scaffolding.

But America has a solution!

It’s called distraction.

Find someone, anyone, and vilify them. Make it so that they are hated and despised to the extent that they are no longer considered to be human, but rather instead  some kind of illness or disease that must be eradicated. And that is the game that the monied elite in Washington DC has been playing with China these last four years.

All prep for a hot “kinetic” war.

American war machine meme about China.

.

It’s the same old, game, and the same old playbook. Same old fun & games. But here I am telling you all on MM…

China.   Does.   Not.   Play.

Asia is unifying, or perhaps best stated, they have already unified.

Any attack anywhere on Asia risks a devastating nuclear salvo that will eliminate America from the face of the earth, and turn the North American continent into a radioactive wasteland where the rest of the world dare not tread. Do not be lulled into the false belief that America is invincible, or that it is blessed by God, or that America has the best, and most modern equipment. None of these lies, and illusions are true.

But it need not be that way.

America can focus on providing for it’s people. Not on blowing up “mud huts”, slaughtering defenseless fields of sheep and donkeys, or picking fights with people who are very, very dangerous.

The biggest failing of the USA is its massive disregard for human life and human wellbeing, a tragedy we inherited from our British forbearers and have yet to cast-off. And to our great misfortune, that anti-life sentiment is deeply rooted in the Federal Government. Ehret exposes some of it; Max Blumenthal's article on the genocidal sadist and Biden admin member Richard Nephew documents such behavior; couple it with Native American policy; mass killing of civilians in WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Central and South America, Southwest Asia, The Balkans, Ukraine, etc., and your damn right we ought to suspect the very worst from that government. Monsters do exist.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 10 2021 21:51 utc | 35

America needs to focus on Americans.

America should focus on its people.

.

Not “lip service”. Not “token efforts”. Not “Blue Ribbon Panels”. But actual programs, spending actual money to raise the standard of living for Americans from the class-feudal lifestyle that it has devolved into, to a modern and healthy society that embraces culture, and differences. Where America will move away from the blue-grey nightmare into a colorful and vivacious active society…

…much like China is today.

Pedestrian bridge in China.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my China index here…

China

.

Articles & Links

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Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke (Full Text)

This is a nice rainy-day read. It’s a classic science fiction story about a “rescue party” that encounters the remains of a civilization. It’s a nice read, and will keep your mind occupied. It is reprinted in full, with no registration, need to provide your credit card (oh, to check to see if you are human; LOL) or CAPTCHA bullshit. If English is not your native language, you can translate it using the buttons on the side. Enjoy.

Rescue Party

by Arthur C. Clarke

Preface by Eric Flint

I'm certain this wasn't the first science fiction story I ever read, because I still remember those vividly. Three novels, all read when I was twelve years old and living in the small town of Shaver Lake (pop. 500) in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California: Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, Tom Godwin's The Survivors and Andre Norton's Star Rangers.

I must have started reading Arthur C. Clarke soon thereafter, though. The two stories that introduced me to him as I remember, anyway were this one and "Jupiter V," and those two stories fixed Clarke permanently as one of the central triad in my own personal pantheon of SF's great writers. (The other two being Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton.)

We chose this one, rather than "Jupiter V," at my request. I wanted this one because, of all the stories ever written in science fiction, this is the one which first demonstrated to me that science fiction could be inspirational as well as fascinating. So I thought at the age of twelve or possibly thirteen. More than four decades have now gone by, and I haven't changed my mind at all.

Who was to blame? For three days Alveron’s thoughts had come back to that question, and still he had found no answer. A creature of a less civilized or a less sensitive race would never have let it torture his mind, and would have satisfied himself with the assurance that no one could be responsible for the working of fate. But Alveron and his kind had been lords of the Universe since the dawn of history, since that far distant age when the Time Barrier had been folded round the cosmos by the unknown powers that lay beyond the Beginning. To them had been given all knowledge and with infinite knowledge went infinite responsibility. If there were mistakes and errors in the administration of the galaxy, the fault lay on the heads of Alveron and his people. And this was no mere mistake: it was one of the greatest tragedies in history.

The crew still knew nothing. Even Rugon, his closest friend and the ship’s deputy captain, had been told only part of the truth. But now the doomed worlds lay less than a billion miles ahead. In a few hours, they would be landing on the third planet.

Once again Alveron read the message from Base; then, with a flick of a tentacle that no human eye could have followed, he pressed the “General Attention” button. Throughout the mile-long cylinder that was the Galactic Survey Ship S9000, creatures of many races laid down their work to listen to the words of their captain.

“I know you have all been wondering,” began Alveron, “why we were ordered to abandon our survey and to proceed at such an acceleration to this region of space. Some of you may realize what this acceleration means. Our ship is on its last voyage: the generators have already been running for sixty hours at Ultimate Overload. We will be very lucky if we return to Base under our own power.

“We are approaching a sun which is about to become a Nova. Detonation will occur in seven hours, with an uncertainty of one hour, leaving us a maximum of only four hours for exploration. There are ten planets in the system about to be destroyed and there is a civilization on the third. That fact was discovered only a few days ago. It is our tragic mission to contact that doomed race and if possible to save some of its members. I know that there is little we can do in so short a time with this single ship. No other machine can possibly reach the system before detonation occurs.”

There was a long pause during which there could have been no sound or movement in the whole of the mighty ship as it sped silently toward the worlds ahead. Alveron knew what his companions were thinking and he tried to answer their unspoken question.

“You will wonder how such a disaster, the greatest of which we have any record, has been allowed to occur. On one point I can reassure you. The fault does not lie with the Survey.

“As you know, with our present fleet of under twelve thousand ships, it is possible to re-examine each of the eight thousand million solar systems in the Galaxy at intervals of about a million years. Most worlds change very little in so short a time as that.

“Less than four hundred thousand years ago, the survey ship S5060 examined the planets of the system we are approaching. It found intelligence on none of them, though the third planet was teeming with animal life and two other worlds had once been inhabited. The usual report was submitted and the system is due for its next examination in six hundred thousand years.

“It now appears that in the incredibly short period since the last survey, intelligent life has appeared in the system. The first intimation of this occurred when unknown radio signals were detected on the planet Kulath in the system X29.35, Y34.76, Z27.93. Bearings were taken on them; they were coming from the system ahead.

“Kulath is two hundred light-years from here, so those radio waves had been on their way for two centuries. Thus for at least that period of time a civilization has existed on one of these worlds a civilization that can generate electromagnetic waves and all that that implies.

“An immediate telescopic examination of the system was made and it was then found that the sun was in the unstable pre-nova stage. Detonation might occur at any moment, and indeed might have done so while the light waves were on their way to Kulath.

“There was a slight delay while the supervelocity scanners on Kulath II were focused on to the system. They showed that the explosion had not yet occurred but was only a few hours away. If Kulath had been a fraction of a light-year further from this sun, we should never have known of its civilization until it had ceased to exist.

“The Administrator of Kulath contacted the Sector Base immediately, and I was ordered to proceed to the system at once. Our object is to save what members we can of the doomed race, if indeed there are any left. But we have assumed that a civilization possessing radio could have protected itself against any rise of temperature that may have already occurred.

“This ship and the two tenders will each explore a section of the planet. Commander Torkalee will take Number One, Commander Orostron Number Two. They will have just under four hours in which to explore this world. At the end of that time, they must be back in the ship. It will be leaving then, with or without them. I will give the two commanders detailed instructions in the control room immediately.

“That is all. We enter atmosphere in two hours.” * * *

On the world once known as Earth the fires were dying out: there was nothing left to burn. The great forests that had swept across the planet like a tidal wave with the passing of the cities were now no more than glowing charcoal and the smoke of their funeral pyres still stained the sky. But the last hours were still to come, for the surface rocks had not yet begun to flow. The continents were dimly visible through the haze, but their outlines meant nothing to the watchers in the approaching ship. The charts they possessed were out of date by a dozen Ice Ages and more deluges than one.

The S9000 had driven past Jupiter and seen at once that no life could exist in those half-gaseous oceans of compressed hydrocarbons, now erupting furiously under the sun’s abnormal heat. Mars and the outer planets they had missed, and Alveron realized that the worlds nearer the sun than Earth would be already melting. It was more than likely, he thought sadly, that the tragedy of this unknown race was already finished. Deep in his heart, he thought it might be better so. The ship could only have carried a few hundred survivors, and the problem of selection had been haunting his mind.

Rugon, Chief of Communications and Deputy Captain, came into the control room. For the last hour he had been striving to detect radiation from Earth, but in vain.

“We’re too late,” he announced gloomily. “I’ve monitored the whole spectrum and the ether’s dead except for our own stations and some two-hundred-year-old programs from Kulath. Nothing in this system is radiating any more.”

He moved toward the giant vision screen with a graceful flowing motion that no mere biped could ever hope to imitate. Alveron said nothing; he had been expecting this news.

One entire wall of the control room was taken up by the screen, a great black rectangle that gave an impression of almost infinite depth. Three of Rugon’s slender control tentacles, useless for heavy work but incredibly swift at all manipulation, flickered over the selector dials and the screen lit up with a thousand points of light. The star field flowed swiftly past as Rugon adjusted the controls, bringing the projector to bear upon the sun itself.

No man of Earth would have recognized the monstrous shape that filled the screen. The sun’s light was white no longer: great violet-blue clouds covered half its surface and from them long streamers of flame were erupting into space. At one point an enormous prominence had reared itself out of the photosphere, far out even into the flickering veils of the corona. It was as though a tree of fire had taken root in the surface of the sun a tree that stood half a million miles high and whose branches were rivers of flame sweeping through space at hundreds of miles a second.

“I suppose,” said Rugon presently, “that you are quite satisfied about the astronomers’ calculations. After all “

“Oh, we’re perfectly safe,” said Alveron confidently. “I’ve spoken to Kulath Observatory and they have been making some additional checks through our own instruments. That uncertainty of an hour includes a private safety margin which they won’t tell me in case I feel tempted to stay any longer.”

He glanced at the instrument board.

“The pilot should have brought us to the atmosphere now. Switch the screen back to the planet, please. Ah, there they go!”

There was a sudden tremor underfoot and a raucous clanging of alarms, instantly stilled. Across the vision screen two slim projectiles dived toward the looming mass of Earth. For a few miles they traveled together, then they separated, one vanishing abruptly as it entered the shadow of the planet.

Slowly the huge mother ship, with its thousand times greater mass, descended after them into the raging storms that already were tearing down the deserted cities of Man. * * *

It was night in the hemisphere over which Orostron drove his tiny command. Like Torkalee, his mission was to photograph and record, and to report progress to the mother ship. The little scout had no room for specimens or passengers. If contact was made with the inhabitants of this world, the S9000 would come at once. There would be no time for parleying. If there was any trouble the rescue would be by force and the explanations could come later.

The ruined land beneath was bathed with an eerie, flickering light, for a great auroral display was raging over half the world. But the image on the vision screen was independent of external light, and it showed clearly a waste of barren rock that seemed never to have known any form of life. Presumably this desert land must come to an end somewhere. Orostron increased his speed to the highest value he dared risk in so dense an atmosphere.

The machine fled on through the storm, and presently the desert of rock began to climb toward the sky. A great mountain range lay ahead, its peaks lost in the smoke-laden clouds. Orostron directed the scanners toward the horizon, and on the vision screen the line of mountains seemed suddenly very close and menacing. He started to climb rapidly. It was difficult to imagine a more unpromising land in which to find civilization and he wondered if it would be wise to change course. He decided against it. Five minutes later, he had his reward.

Miles below lay a decapitated mountain, the whole of its summit sheared away by some tremendous feat of engineering. Rising out of the rock and straddling the artificial plateau was an intricate structure of metal girders, supporting masses of machinery. Orostron brought his ship to a halt and spiraled down toward the mountain.

The slight Doppler blur had now vanished, and the picture on the screen was clear-cut. The latticework was supporting some scores of great metal mirrors, pointing skyward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizontal. They were slightly concave, and each had some complicated mechanism at its focus. There seemed something impressive and purposeful about the great array; every mirror was aimed at precisely the same spot in the sky or beyond.

Orostron turned to his colleagues.

“It looks like some kind of observatory to me,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

Klarten, a multitentacled, tripedal creature from a globular cluster at the edge of the Milky Way, had a different theory.

“That’s communication equipment. Those reflectors are for focusing electromagnetic beams. I’ve seen the same kind of installation on a hundred worlds before. It may even be the station that Kulath picked up though that’s rather unlikely, for the beams would be very narrow from mirrors that size.”

“That would explain why Rugon could detect no radiation before we landed,” added Hansur II, one of the twin beings from the planet Thargon.

Orostron did not agree at all.

“If that is a radio station, it must be built for interplanetary communication. Look at the way the mirrors are pointed. I don’t believe that a race which has only had radio for two centuries can have crossed space. It took my people six thousand years to do it.”

“We managed it in three,” said Hansur II mildly, speaking a few seconds ahead of his twin. Before the inevitable argument could develop, Klarten began to wave his tentacles with excitement. While the others had been talking, he had started the automatic monitor.

“Here it is! Listen!”

He threw a switch, and the little room was filled with a raucous whining sound, continually changing in pitch but nevertheless retaining certain characteristics that were difficult to define.

The four explorers listened intently for a minute; then Orostron said, “Surely that can’t be any form of speech! No creature could produce sounds as quickly as that!”

Hansur I had come to the same conclusion. “That’s a television program. Don’t you think so, Klarten?”

The other agreed.

“Yes, and each of those mirrors seems to be radiating a different program. I wonder where they’re going? If I’m correct, one of the other planets in the system must lie along those beams. We can soon check that.”

Orostron called the S9000 and reported the discovery. Both Rugon and Alveron were greatly excited, and made a quick check of the astronomical records.

The result was surprising and disappointing. None of the other nine planets lay anywhere near the line of transmission. The great mirrors appeared to be pointing blindly into space.

There seemed only one conclusion to be drawn, and Klarten was the first to voice it.

“They had interplanetary communication,” he said. “But the station must be deserted now, and the transmitters no longer controlled. They haven’t been switched off, and are just pointing where they were left.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out,” said Orostron. “I’m going to land.”

He brought the machine slowly down to the level of the great metal mirrors, and past them until it came to rest on the mountain rock. A hundred yards away, a white stone building crouched beneath the maze of steel girders. It was windowless, but there were several doors in the wall facing them.

Orostron watched his companions climb into their protective suits and wished he could follow. But someone had to stay in the machine to keep in touch with the mother ship. Those were Alveron’s instructions, and they were very wise. One never knew what would happen on a world that was being explored for the first time, especially under conditions such as these.

Very cautiously, the three explorers stepped out of the airlock and adjusted the antigravity field of their suits. Then, each with the mode of locomotion peculiar to his race, the little party went toward the building, the Hansur twins leading and Klarten following close behind. His gravity control was apparently giving trouble, for he suddenly fell to the ground, rather to the amusement of his colleagues. Orostron saw them pause for a moment at the nearest door then it opened slowly and they disappeared from sight.

So Orostron waited, with what patience he could, while the storm rose around him and the light of the aurora grew even brighter in the sky. At the agreed times he called the mother ship and received brief acknowledgments from Rugon. He wondered how Torkalee was faring, halfway round the planet, but he could not contact him through the crash and thunder of solar interference.

It did not take Klarten and the Hansurs long to discover that their theories were largely correct. The building was a radio station, and it was utterly deserted. It consisted of one tremendous room with a few small offices leading from it. In the main chamber, row after row of electrical equipment stretched into the distance; lights flickered and winked on hundreds of control panels, and a dull glow came from the elements in a great avenue of vacuum tubes.

But Klarten was not impressed. The first radio sets his race had built were now fossilized in strata a thousand million years old. Man, who had possessed electrical machines for only a few centuries, could not compete with those who had known them for half the lifetime of the Earth.

Nevertheless, the party kept their recorders running as they explored the building. There was still one problem to be solved. The deserted station was broadcasting programs, but where were they coming from? The central switchboard had been quickly located. It was designed to handle scores of programs simultaneously, but the source of those programs was lost in a maze of cables that vanished underground. Back in the S9000, Rugon was trying to analyze the broadcasts and perhaps his researches would reveal their origin. It was impossible to trace cables that might lead across continents.

The party wasted little time at the deserted station. There was nothing they could learn from it, and they were seeking life rather than scientific information. A few minutes later the little ship rose swiftly from the plateau and headed toward the plains that must lie beyond the mountains. Less than three hours were still left to them.

As the array of enigmatic mirrors dropped out of sight, Orostron was struck by a sudden thought. Was it imagination, or had they all moved through a small angle while he had been waiting, as if they were still compensating for the rotation of the Earth? He could not be sure, and he dismissed the matter as unimportant. It would only mean that the directing mechanism was still working, after a fashion.

They discovered the city fifteen minutes later. It was a great, sprawling metropolis, built around a river that had disappeared leaving an ugly scar winding its way among the great buildings and beneath bridges that looked very incongruous now.

Even from the air, the city looked deserted. But only two and a half hours were left there was no time for further exploration. Orostron made his decision, and landed near the largest structure he could see. It seemed reasonable to suppose that some creatures would have sought shelter in the strongest buildings, where they would be safe until the very end.

The deepest caves in the heart of the planet itself would give no protection when the final cataclysm came. Even if this race had reached the outer planets, its doom would only be delayed by the few hours it would take for the ravening wavefronts to cross the Solar System.

Orostron could not know that the city had been deserted not for a few days or weeks, but for over a century. For the culture of cities, which had outlasted so many civilizations had been doomed at last when the helicopter brought universal transportation. Within a few generations the great masses of mankind, knowing that they could reach any part of the globe in a matter of hours, had gone back to the fields and forests for which they had always longed. The new civilization had machines and resources of which earlier ages had never dreamed, but it was essentially rural and no longer bound to the steel and concrete warrens that had dominated the centuries before. Such cities as still remained were specialized centers of research, administration or entertainment; the others had been allowed to decay, where it was too much trouble to destroy them. The dozen or so greatest of all cities, and the ancient university towns, had scarcely changed and would have lasted for many generations to come. But the cities that had been founded on steam and iron and surface transportation had passed with the industries that had nourished them.

And so while Orostron waited in the tender, his colleagues raced through endless empty corridors and deserted halls, taking -innumerable photographs but learning nothing of the creatures who had used these buildings. There were libraries, meeting places, council rooms, thousands of offices all were empty and deep with dust. If they had not seen the radio station on its mountain eyrie, the explorers could well have believed that this world had known no life for centuries.

Through the long minutes of waiting, Orostron tried to imagine where this race could have vanished. Perhaps they had killed themselves knowing that escape was impossible; perhaps they had built great shelters in the bowels of the planet, and even now were cowering in their millions beneath his feet, waiting for the end. He began to fear that he would never know.

It was almost a relief when at last he had to give the order for the return. Soon he would know if Torkalee’s party had been more fortunate. And he was anxious to get back to the mother ship, for as the minutes passed the suspense had become more and more acute. There had always been the thought in his mind: What if the astronomers of Kulath have made a mistake? He would begin to feel happy when the walls of the S9000 were around him. He would be happier still when they were out in space and this ominous sun was shrinking far astern.

As soon as his colleagues had entered the airlock, Orostron hurled his tiny machine into the sky and set the controls to home on the S9000. Then he turned to his friends.

“Well, what have you found?” he asked.

Klarten produced a large roll of canvas and spread it out on the floor.

“This is what they were like,” he said quietly. “Bipeds, with only two arms. They seem to have managed well, in spite of that handicap. Only two eyes as well, unless there are others in the back. We were lucky to find this; it’s about the only thing they left behind.”

The ancient oil painting stared stonily back at the three creatures regarding it so intently. By the irony of fate, its complete worthlessness had saved it from oblivion. When the city had been evacuated, no one had bothered to move Alderman John Richards, 1909-1974. For a century and a half he had been gathering dust while far away from the old cities the new civilization had been rising to heights no earlier culture had ever known.

“That was almost all we found,” said Klarten. “The city must have been deserted for years. I’m afraid our expedition has been a failure. If there are any living beings on this world, they’ve hidden themselves too well for us to find them.”

His commander was forced to agree.

“It was an almost impossible task,” he said. “If we’d had weeks instead of hours we might have succeeded. For all we know, they may even have built shelters under the sea. No one seems to have thought of that.”

He glanced quickly at the indicators and corrected the course.

“We’ll be there in five minutes. Alveron seems to be moving rather quickly. I wonder if Torkalee has found anything.”

The S9000 was hanging a few miles above the seaboard of a blazing continent when Orostron homed upon it. The danger line was thirty minutes away and there was no time to lose. Skillfully, he maneuvered the little ship into its launching tube and the party stepped out of the airlock.

There was a small crowd waiting for them. That was to be expected, but Orostron could see at once that something more than curiosity had brought his friends here. Even before a word was spoken, he knew that something was wrong.

“Torkalee hasn’t returned. He’s lost his party and we’re going to the rescue. Come along to the control room at once.” * * *

From the beginning, Torkalee had been luckier than Orostron. He had followed the zone of twilight, keeping away from the intolerable glare of the sun, until he came to the shores of an inland sea. It was a very recent sea, one of the latest of Man’s works, for the land it covered had been desert less than a century before. In a few hours it would be desert again, for the water was boiling and clouds of steam were rising to the skies. But they could not veil the loveliness of the great white city that overlooked the tideless sea.

Flying machines were still parked neatly round the square in which Torkalee landed. They were disappointingly primitive, though beautifully finished, and depended on rotating airfoils for support. Nowhere was there any sign of life, but the place gave the impression that its inhabitants were not very far away. Lights were still shining from some of the windows.

Torkalee’s three companions lost no time in leaving the machine. Leader of the party, by seniority of rank and race was T’sinadree, who like Alveron himself had been born on one of the ancient planets of the Central Suns. Next came Alarkane, from a race which was one of the youngest in the Universe and took a perverse pride in the fact. Last came one of the strange beings from the system of Palador. It was nameless, like all its kind, for it possessed no identity of its own, being merely a mobile but still dependent cell in the consciousness of its race. Though it and its fellows had long been scattered over the galaxy in the exploration of countless worlds, some unknown link still bound them together as inexorably as the living cells in a human body.

When a creature of Palador spoke, the pronoun it used was always “We.” There was not, nor could there ever be, any first person singular in the language of Palador.

The great doors of the splendid building baffled the explorers, though any human child would have known their secret. T’sinadree wasted no time on them but called Torkalee on his personal transmitter. Then the three hurried aside while their commander maneuvered his machine into the best position. There was a brief burst of intolerable flame; the massive steelwork flickered once at the edge of the visible spectrum and was gone. The stones were still glowing when the eager party hurried into the building, the beams of their light projectors fanning before them.

The torches were not needed. Before them lay a great hall, glowing with light from lines of tubes along the ceiling. On either side, the hall opened out into long corridors, while straight ahead a massive stairway swept majestically toward the upper floors.

For a moment T’sinadree hesitated. Then, since one way was as good as another, he led his companions down the first corridor.

The feeling that life was near had now become very strong. At any moment, it seemed, they might be confronted by the creatures of this world. If they showed hostility and they could scarcely be blamed if they did the paralyzers would be used at once.

The tension was very great as the party entered the first room, and only relaxed when they saw that it held nothing but machines row after row of them, now stilled and silent. Lining the enormous room were thousands of metal filing cabinets, forming a continuous wall as far as the eye could reach. And that was all; there was no furniture, nothing but the cabinets and the mysterious machines.

Alarkane, always the quickest of the three, was already examining the cabinets. Each held many thousand sheets of tough, thin material, perforated with innumerable holes and slots. The Paladorian appropriated one of the cards and Alarkane recorded the scene together with some close-ups of the machines. Then they left. The great room, which had been one of the marvels of the world, meant nothing to them. No living eye would ever again see that wonderful battery of almost human Hollerith analyzers and the five thousand million punched cards holding all that could be recorded on each man, woman and child on the planet.

It was clear that this building had been used very recently. With growing excitement, the explorers hurried on to the next room. This they found to be an enormous library, for millions of books lay all around them on miles and miles of shelving. Here, though the explorers could not know it, were the records of all the laws that Man had ever passed, and all the speeches that had ever been made in his council chambers.

T’sinadree was deciding his plan of action, when Alarkane drew his attention to one of the racks a hundred yards away. It was half empty, unlike all the others. Around it books lay in a tumbled heap on the floor, as if knocked down by someone in frantic haste. The signs were unmistakable. Not long ago, other creatures had been this way. Faint wheel marks were clearly visible on the floor to the acute sense of Alarkane, though the others could see nothing. Alarkane could even detect footprints, but knowing nothing of the creatures that had formed them he could not say which way they led.

The sense of nearness was stronger than ever now, but it was nearness in time, not in space. Alarkane voiced the thoughts of the party.

“Those books must have been valuable, and someone has come to rescue them rather as an afterthought, I should say. That means there must be a place of refuge, possibly not very far away. Perhaps we may be able to find some other clues that will lead us to it.”

T’sinadree agreed; the Paladorian wasn’t enthusiastic.

“That may be so,” it said, “but the refuge may be anywhere on the planet, and we have just two hours left. Let us waste no more time if we hope to rescue these people.”

The party hurried forward once more, pausing only to collect a few books that might be useful to the scientists at Base though it was doubtful if they could ever be translated. They soon found that the great building was composed largely of small rooms, all showing signs of recent occupation. Most of them were in a neat and tidy condition, but one or two were very much the reverse. The explorers were particularly puzzled by one room clearly an office of some kind that appeared to have been completely wrecked. The floor was littered with papers, the furniture had been smashed, and smoke was pouring through the broken windows from the fires outside.

T’sinadree was rather alarmed.

“Surely no dangerous animal could have got into a place like this!” he exclaimed, fingering his paralyzer nervously.

Alarkane did not answer. He began to make that annoying sound which his race called “laughter.” It was several minutes before he would explain what had amused him.

“I don’t think any animal has done it,” he said. “In fact, the explanation is very simple. Suppose you had been working all your life in this room, dealing with endless papers, year after year. And suddenly, you are told that you will never see it again, that your work is finished, and that you can leave it forever. More than that no one will come after you. Everything is finished. How would you make your exit, T’sinadree?”

The other thought for a moment.

“Well, I suppose I’d just tidy things up and leave. That’s what seems to have happened in all the other rooms.”

Alarkane laughed again.

“I’m quite sure you would. But some individuals have a different psychology. I think I should have liked the creature that used this room.”

He did not explain himself further, and his two colleagues puzzled over his words for quite a while before they gave it up.

It came as something of a shock when Torkalee gave the order to return. They had gathered a great deal of information, but had found no clue that might lead them to the missing inhabitants of this world. That problem was as baffling as ever, and now it seemed that it would never be solved. There were only forty minutes left before the S9000 would be departing.

They were halfway back to the tender when they saw the semicircular passage leading down into the depths of the building. Its architectural style was quite different from that used elsewhere, and the gently sloping floor was an irresistible attraction to creatures whose many legs had grown weary of the marble staircases which only bipeds could have built in such profusion. T’sinadree had been the worst sufferer, for he normally employed twelve legs and could use twenty when he was in a hurry, though no one had ever seen him perform this feat.

The party stopped dead and looked down the passageway with a single thought. A tunnel, leading down into the depths of Earth! At its end, they might yet find the people of this world and rescue some of them from their fate. For there was still time to call the mother ship if the need arose.

T’sinadree signaled to his commander and Torkalee brought the little machine immediately overhead. There might not be time for the party to retrace its footsteps through the maze of passages, so meticulously recorded in the Paladorian mind that there was no possibility of going astray. If speed was necessary, Torkalee could blast his way through the dozen floors above their head. In any case, it should not take long to find what lay at the end of the passage.

It took only thirty seconds. The tunnel ended quite abruptly in a very curious cylindrical room with magnificently padded seats along the walls. There was no way out save that by which they had come and it was several seconds before the purpose of the chamber dawned on Alarkane’s mind. It was a pity, he thought, that they would never have time to use this. The thought was suddenly interrupted by a cry from T’sinadree. Alarkane wheeled around, and saw that the entrance had closed silently behind them.

Even in that first moment of panic, Alarkane found himself thinking with some admiration: Whoever they were, they knew how to build automatic machinery!

The Paladorian was the first to speak. It waved one of its tentacles toward the seats.

“We think it would be best to be seated,” it said. The multiplex mind of Palador had already analyzed the situation and knew what was coming.

They did not have long to wait before a low-pitched hum came from a grill overhead, and for the very last time in history a human, even if lifeless, voice was heard on Earth. The words were meaningless, though the trapped explorers could guess their message clearly enough.

“Choose your stations, please, and be seated.”

Simultaneously, a wall panel at one end of the compartment glowed with light. On it was a simple map, consisting of a series of a dozen circles connected by a line. Each of the circles had writing alongside it, and beside the writing were two buttons of different colors.

Alarkane looked questioningly at his leader.

“Don’t touch them,” said T’sinadree. “If we leave the controls alone, the doors may open again.”

He was wrong. The engineers who had designed the automatic subway had assumed that anyone who entered it would naturally wish to go somewhere. If they selected no intermediate station, their destination could only be the end of the line.

There was another pause while the relays and thyratrons waited for their orders. In those thirty seconds, if they had known what to do, the party could have opened the doors and left the subway. But they did not know, and the machines geared to a human psychology acted for them.

The surge of acceleration was not very great; the lavish upholstery was a luxury, not a necessity. Only an almost imperceptible vibration told of the speed at which they were traveling through the bowels of the earth, on a journey the duration of which they could not even guess. And in thirty minutes, the S9000 would be leaving the Solar System.

There was a long silence in the speeding machine. T’sinadree and Alarkane were thinking rapidly. So was the Paladorian, though in a different fashion. The conception of personal death was meaningless to it, for the destruction of a single unit meant no more to the group mind than the loss of a nail-paring to a man. But it could, though with great difficulty, appreciate the plight of individual intelligences such as Alarkane and T’sinadree, and it was anxious to help them if it could.

Alarkane had managed to contact Torkalee with his personal transmitter, though the signal was very weak and seemed to be fading quickly. Rapidly he explained the situation, and almost at once the signals became clearer. Torkalee was following the path of the machine, flying above the ground under which they were speeding to their unknown destination. That was the first indication they had of the fact that they were traveling at nearly a thousand miles an hour, and very soon after that Torkalee was able to give the still more disturbing news that they were rapidly approaching the sea. While they were beneath the land, there was a hope, though a slender one, that they might stop the machine and escape. But under the ocean not all the brains and the machinery in the great mother ship could save them. No one could have devised a more perfect trap.

T’sinadree had been examining the wall map with great attention. Its meaning was obvious, and along the line connecting the circles a tiny spot of light was crawling. It was already halfway to the first of the stations marked.

“I’m going to press one of those buttons,” said T’sinadree at last. “It won’t do any harm, and we may learn something.”

“I agree. Which will you try first?”

“There are only two kinds, and it won’t matter if we try the wrong one first. I suppose one is to start the machine and the other is to stop it.”

Alarkane was not very hopeful.

“It started without any button pressing,” he said. “I think it’s completely automatic and we can’t control it from here at all.”

T’sinadree could not agree.

“These buttons are clearly associated with the stations, and there’s no point in having them unless you can use them to stop yourself. The only question is, which is the right one?”

His analysis was perfectly correct. The machine could be stopped at any intermediate station. They had only been on their way ten minutes, and if they could leave now, no harm would have been done. It was just bad luck that T’sinadree’s first choice was the wrong button.

The little light on the map crawled slowly through the illuminated circle without checking its speed. And at the same time Torkalee called from the ship overhead.

“You have just passed underneath a city and are heading out to sea. There cannot be another stop for nearly a thousand miles.” * * *

Alveron had given up all hope of finding life on this world. The S9000 had roamed over half the planet, never staying long in one place, descending ever and again in an effort to attract attention. There had been no response; Earth seemed utterly dead. If any of its inhabitants were still alive, thought Alveron, they must have hidden themselves in its depths where no help could reach them, though their doom would be nonetheless certain.

Rugon brought news of the disaster. The great ship ceased its fruitless searching and fled back through the storm to the ocean above which Torkalee’s little tender was still following the track of the buried machine.

The scene was truly terrifying. Not since the days when Earth was born had there been such seas as this. Mountains of water were racing before the storm which had now reached velocities of many hundred miles an hour. Even at this distance from the mainland the air was full of flying debris trees, fragments of houses, sheets of metal, anything that had not been anchored to the ground. No airborne machine could have lived for a moment in such a gale. And ever and again even the roar of the wind was drowned as the vast water-mountains met head-on with a crash that seemed to shake the sky.

Fortunately, there had been no serious earthquakes yet. Far beneath the bed of the ocean, the wonderful piece of engineering which had been the World President’s private vacuum-subway was still working perfectly, unaffected by the tumult and destruction above. It would continue to work until the last minute of the Earth’s existence, which, if the astronomers were right, was not much more than fifteen minutes away though precisely how much more Alveron would have given a great deal to know. It would be nearly an hour before the trapped party could reach land and even the slightest hope of rescue.

Alveron’s instructions had been precise, though even without them he would never have dreamed of taking any risks with the great machine that had been entrusted to his care. Had he been human, the decision to abandon the trapped members of his crew would have been desperately hard to make. But he came of a race far more sensitive than Man, a race that so loved the things of the spirit that long ago, and with infinite reluctance, it had taken over control of the Universe since only thus could it be sure that justice was being done. Alveron would need all his superhuman gifts to carry him through the next few hours.

Meanwhile, a mile below the bed of the ocean Alarkane and T’sinadree were very busy indeed with their private communicators. Fifteen minutes is not a long time in which to wind up the affairs of a lifetime. It is indeed, scarcely long enough to dictate more than a few of those farewell messages which at such moments are so much more important than all other matters.

All the while the Paladorian had remained silent and motionless, saying not a word. The other two, resigned to their fate and engrossed in their personal affairs, had given it no thought. They were startled when suddenly it began to address them in its peculiarly passionless voice.

“We perceive that you are making certain arrangements concerning your anticipated destruction. That will probably be unnecessary. Captain Alveron hopes to rescue us if we can stop this machine when we reach land again.”

Both T’sinadree and Alarkane were too surprised to say anything for a moment. Then the latter gasped, “How do you know?”

It was a foolish question, for he remembered at once that there were several Paladorians if one could use the phrase in the S9000, and consequently their companion knew everything that was happening in the mother ship. So he did not wait for an answer but continued, “Alveron can’t do that! He daren’t take such a risk!”

“There will be no risk,” said the Paladorian. “We have told him what to do. It is really very simple.”

Alarkane and T’sinadree looked at their companion with something approaching awe, realizing now what must have happened. In moments of crisis, the single units comprising the Paladorian mind could link together in an organization no less close than that of any physical brain. At such moments they formed an intellect more powerful than any other in the Universe. All ordinary problems could be solved by a few hundred or thousand units. Very rarely, millions would be needed, and on two historic occasions the billions of cells of the entire Paladorian consciousness had been welded together to deal with emergencies that threatened the race. The mind of Palador was one of the greatest mental resources of the Universe; its full force was seldom required, but the knowledge that it was available was supremely comforting to other races. Alarkane wondered how many cells had coordinated to deal with this particular emergency. He also wondered how so trivial an incident had ever come to its attention.

To that question he was never to know the answer, though he might have guessed it had he known that the chillingly remote Paladorian mind possessed an almost human streak of vanity. Long ago, Alarkane had written a book trying to prove that eventually all intelligent races would sacrifice individual consciousness and that one day only group-minds would remain in the Universe. Palador, he had said, was the first of those ultimate intellects, and the vast, dispersed mind had not been displeased.

They had no time to ask any further questions before Alveron himself began to speak through their communicators.

“Alveron calling! We’re staying on this planet until the detonation waves reach it, so we may be able to rescue you. You’re heading toward a city on the coast which you’ll reach in forty minutes at your present speed. If you cannot stop yourselves then, we’re going to blast the tunnel behind and ahead of you to cut off your power. Then we’ll sink a shaft to get you out the chief engineer says he can do it in five minutes with the main projectors. So you should be safe within an hour, unless the sun blows up before.”

“And if that happens, you’ll be destroyed as well! You mustn’t take such a risk!”

“Don’t let that worry you; we’re perfectly safe. When the sun detonates, the explosion wave will take several minutes to rise to its maximum. But apart from that, we’re on the night side of the planet, behind an eight-thousand-mile screen of rock. When the first warning of the explosion comes, we will accelerate out of the Solar System, keeping in the shadow of the planet. Under our maximum drive, we will reach the velocity of light before leaving the cone of shadow, and the sun cannot harm us then.”

T’sinadree was still afraid to hope. Another objection came at once into his mind.

“Yes, but how will you get any warning, here on the night side of the planet?”

“Very easily,” replied Alveron. “This world has a moon which is now visible from this hemisphere. We have telescopes trained on it. If it shows any sudden increase in brilliance, our main drive goes on automatically and we’ll be thrown out of the system.”

The logic was flawless. Alveron, cautious as ever, was taking no chances. It would be many minutes before the eight-thousand-mile shield of rock and metal could be destroyed by the fires of the exploding sun. In that time, the S9000 could have reached the safety of the velocity of light.

Alarkane pressed the second button when they were still several miles from the coast. He did not expect anything to happen then, assuming that the machine could not stop between stations. It seemed too good to be true when, a few minutes later, the machine’s slight vibration died away and they came to a halt.

The doors slid silently apart. Even before they were fully open, the three had left the compartment. They were taking no more chances. Before them a long tunnel stretched into the distance, rising slowly out of sight. They were starting along it when suddenly Alveron’s voice called from the communicators.

“Stay where you are! We’re going to blast!”

The ground shuddered once, and far ahead there came the rumble of falling rock. Again the earth shook and a hundred yards ahead the passageway vanished abruptly. A tremendous vertical shaft had been cut clean through it.

The party hurried forward again until they came to the end of the corridor and stood waiting on its lip. The shaft in which it ended was a full thousand feet across and descended into the earth as far as the torches could throw their beams. Overhead, the storm clouds fled beneath a moon that no man would have recognized, so luridly brilliant was its disk. And, most glorious of all sights, the S9000 floated high above, the great projectors that had drilled this enormous pit still glowing cherry red.

A dark shape detached itself from the mother ship and dropped swiftly toward the ground. Torkalee was returning to collect his friends. A little later, Alveron greeted them in the control room. He waved to the great vision screen and said quietly, “See, we were barely in time.”

The continent below them was slowly settling beneath the mile-high waves that were attacking its coasts. The last that anyone was ever to see of Earth was a great plain, bathed with the silver light of the abnormally brilliant moon. Across its face the waters were pouring in a glittering flood toward a distant range of mountains. The sea had won its final victory, but its triumph would be short-lived for soon sea and land would be no more. Even as the silent party in the control room watched the destruction below, the infinitely greater catastrophe to which this was only the prelude came swiftly upon them.

It was as though dawn had broken suddenly over this moonlit landscape. But it was not dawn: it was only the moon, shining with the brilliance of a second sun. For perhaps thirty seconds that awesome, unnatural light burnt fiercely on the doomed land beneath. Then there came a sudden flashing of indicator lights across the control board. The main drive was on. For a second Alveron glanced at the indicators and checked their information. When he looked again at the screen, Earth was gone.

The magnificent, desperately overstrained generators quietly died when the S9000 was passing the orbit of Persephone. It did not matter, the sun could never harm them now, and although the ship was speeding helplessly out into the lonely night of interstellar space, it would only be a matter of days before rescue came.

There was irony in that. A day ago, they had been the rescuers, going to the aid of a race that now no longer existed. Not for the first time Alveron wondered about the world that had just perished. He tried, in vain, to picture it as it had been in its glory, the streets of its cities thronged with life. Primitive though its people had been, they might have offered much to the Universe. If only they could have made contact! Regret was useless; long before their coming, the people of this world must have buried themselves in its iron heart. And now they and their civilization would remain a mystery for the rest of time.

Alveron was glad when his thoughts were interrupted by Rugon’s entrance. The chief of communications had been very busy ever since the take-off, trying to analyze the programs radiated by the transmitter Orostron had discovered. The problem was not a difficult one, but it demanded the construction of special equipment, and that had taken time.

“Well, what have you found?” asked Alveron.

“Quite a lot,” replied his friend. “There’s something mysterious here, and I don’t understand it.

“It didn’t take long to find how the vision transmissions were built up, and we’ve been able to convert them to suit our own equipment. It seems that there were cameras all over the planet, surveying points of interest. Some of them were apparently in cities, on the tops of very high buildings. The cameras were rotating continuously to give panoramic views. In the programs we’ve recorded there are about twenty different scenes.

“In addition, there are a number of transmissions of a different kind, neither sound nor vision. They seem to be purely scientific possibly instrument readings or something of that sort. All these programs were going out simultaneously on different frequency bands.

“Now there must be a reason for all this. Orostron still thinks that the station simply wasn’t switched off when it was deserted. But these aren’t the sort of programs such a station would normally radiate at all. It was certainly used for interplanetary -relaying Klarten was quite right there. So these people must have crossed space, since none of the other planets had any life at the time of the last survey. Don’t you agree?”

Alveron was following intently.

“Yes, that seems reasonable enough. But it’s also certain that the beam was pointing to none of the other planets. I checked that myself.”

“I know,” said Rugon. “What I want to discover is why a giant interplanetary relay station is busily transmitting pictures of a world about to be destroyed pictures that would be of immense interest to scientists and astronomers. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to arrange all those panoramic cameras. I am convinced that those beams were going somewhere.”

Alveron started up.

“Do you imagine that there might be an outer planet that hasn’t been reported?” he asked. “If so, your theory’s certainly wrong. The beam wasn’t even pointing in the plane of the Solar System. And even if it were just look at this.”

He switched on the vision screen and adjusted the controls. Against the velvet curtain of space was hanging a blue-white sphere, apparently composed of many concentric shells of incandescent gas. Even though its immense distance made all movement invisible, it was clearly expanding at an enormous rate. At its center was a blinding point of light the white dwarf star that the sun had now become.

“You probably don’t realize just how big that sphere is,” said Alveron. “Look at this.”

He increased the magnification until only the center portion of the nova was visible. Close to its heart were two minute condensations, one on either side of the nucleus.

“Those are the two giant planets of the system. They have still managed to retain their existence after a fashion. And they were several hundred million miles from the sun. The nova is still expanding but it’s already twice the size of the Solar System.”

Rugon was silent for a moment.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, rather grudgingly. “You’ve disposed of my first theory. But you still haven’t satisfied me.”

He made several swift circuits of the room before speaking again. Alveron waited patiently. He knew the almost intuitive powers of his friend, who could often solve a problem when mere logic seemed insufficient.

Then, rather slowly, Rugon began to speak again.

“What do you think of this?” he said. “Suppose we’ve completely underestimated this people? Orostron did it once he thought they could never have crossed space, since they’d only known radio for two centuries. Hansur II told me that. Well, Orostron was quite wrong. Perhaps we’re all wrong. I’ve had a look at the material that Klarten brought back from the transmitter. He wasn’t impressed by what he found, but it’s a marvelous achievement for so short a time. There were devices in that station that belonged to civilizations thousands of years older. Alveron, can we follow that beam to see where it leads?”

Alveron said nothing for a full minute. He had been more than half expecting the question, but it was not an easy one to answer. The main generators had gone completely. There was no point in trying to repair them. But there was still power available, and while there was power, anything could be done in time. It would mean a lot of improvisation, and some difficult maneuvers, for the ship still had its enormous initial velocity. Yes, it could be done, and the activity would keep the crew from becoming further depressed, now that the reaction caused by the mission’s failure had started to set in. The news that the nearest heavy repair ship could not reach them for three weeks had also caused a slump in morale.

The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible. Very slowly, over many hours, the great ship began to discard the speed its main drive had given it in as many minutes. In a tremendous curve, millions of miles in radius, the S9000 changed its course and the star fields shifted round it.

The maneuver took three days, but at the end of that time the ship was limping along a course parallel to the beam that had once come from Earth. They were heading out into emptiness, the blazing sphere that had been the sun dwindling slowly behind them. By the standards of interstellar flight, they were almost stationary.

For hours Rugon strained over his instruments, driving his detector beams far ahead into space. There were certainly no planets within many light-years; there was no doubt of that. From time to time Alveron came to see him and always he had to give the same reply: “Nothing to report.” About a fifth of the time Rugon’s intuition let him down badly; he began to wonder if this was such an occasion.

Not until a week later did the needles of the mass-detectors quiver feebly at the ends of their scales. But Rugon said nothing, not even to his captain. He waited until he was sure, and he went on waiting until even the short-range scanners began to react, and to build up the first faint pictures on the vision screen. Still he waited patiently until he could interpret the images. Then, when he knew that his wildest fancy was even less than the truth, he called his colleagues into the control room.

The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the center of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recenter the controls.

After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

“This is the race,” he said softly, “that has known radio for only two centuries the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

“That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realize what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

“To measure the extent of their accomplishment, think of the ages it took us to conquer space, and the longer ages still before we attempted to reach the stars. Even if we were threatened with annihilation, could we have done so much in so short a time? Remember, this is the youngest civilization in the Universe. Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?”

An hour later, Orostron left the crippled mother ship to make contact with the great fleet ahead. As the little torpedo disappeared among the stars, Alveron turned to his friend and made a remark that Rugon was often to remember in the years ahead.

“I wonder what they’ll be like?” he mused. “Will they be nothing but wonderful engineers, with no art or philosophy? They’re going to have such a surprise when Orostron reaches them I expect it will be rather a blow to their pride. It’s funny how all isolated races think they’re the only people in the Universe. But they should be grateful to us; we’re going to save them a good many hundred years of travel.”

Alveron glanced at the Milky Way, lying like a veil of silver mist across the vision screen. He waved toward it with a sweep of a tentacle that embraced the whole circle of the galaxy, from the Central Planets to the lonely suns of the Rim.

“You know,” he said to Rugon, “I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation?” He waved once more toward the star-clouds that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns.

“Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,” he added. “We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.”

Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.

Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.

The End

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Egads! This is the BEST summary of the United States and China relations, and what to expect in the near future, ever written. OMG!

There’s this belief (in the West) that China is so God-darn awful that it “need’s to be put in it’s place”, and that a hot war with it is justified.  American ships can sail freely in the South China Sea, and defend “democracy” in Taiwan, and Hong Kong. You know to stop the evil Chinese! It must happen soon! It must happen Now! Freedom is at stake! Now. Now! NOWWW!

It’s all bullshit.

It’s what you can expect for over four years of massively funded anti-China propaganda barraging the “news” with this nonsense. By now, most sheeple are “foaming at the mouth” ready to “kick some slant-eyed butt”. And the neocons are already planning how they will seize and then cart away the loot from a “ripe for the pickings” China.

Um.

MM readers know better.

A war against China over some nameless islands in the South China Sea to defend for “democracy” and “freedom” will result in nuclear destruction of the United States by the combined forces of Russia, China, and Iran. What ever remains standing will be subjugated in the most horrific manner. As in sacked. As in destroyed, enslaved, and subjugated so that English becomes a forgotten language that no one dares utter.

You would think that people would be aware of this. I mean, where does everyone think their electronics comes from? Silicon valley? Nope. It’s all made in China. Not just your iPhone (outsourced now to India, but the key components are still made in China and shipped to India), but all those fancy electronics in the top end military aircraft and missiles that America uses. F-22 key components. Made in China. iPhone internals. Made in China. Tesla car batteries. Made in China.

You would think that Americans would be aware. But they are not. And the neocons are just ready for a fight.

It will be their last.

I can say “watch out“, and the uneducated will respond “oh, let China try“. But all that bravado becomes meaningless when you haven’t eaten in weeks, your body is covered with pustules and sores, and all the water is radioactive. And you are engaged in a street battle between roving bands of urban youths riding brand new Toyota pickups with M134 GAU-17 Gatling Guns. All over some moldy turnips that rumor says that you hoarded before the war.

These neocons are insane and they believe what they tell each other.

The Rapture, in Christianity, the eschatological (concerned with the last things and Endtime) belief that both living and dead believers will ascend into heaven to meet Jesus Christ at the Second Coming (Parousia).

The belief in the Rapture emerged from the anticipation that Jesus would return to redeem all members of the church. The term rapture, however, appears nowhere in the New Testament. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul wrote that the Lord will come down from heaven and that a trumpet call will precede the rise of “the dead in Christ” (4:16). Thereafter, “we who are still alive and are left will be caught up” (in Latin, rapio, the standard translation of Paul’s original Koine Greek) “together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (4:17). The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) mention Jesus’ return to earth from heaven; e.g., The Gospel According to Mark cites Jesus as foretelling a “ ‘coming in clouds’ with great power and glory” (13:26).

Belief in the Rapture is often connected with a belief in the literal coming of the millennium, the 1,000-year rule of Jesus Christ after his return, as mentioned in chapter 20 of The Revelation to John (also known as The Book of Revelation), although there are also amillennial interpretations of the belief that reject that notion. There is also a divide among pre-tribulationists, who believe that the Rapture will occur before a period of tribulation on earth mentioned in Daniel (12:1) and Matthew (24:21) and preceding the End, and post-tribulationists, those who believe that it will come after that period. Finally, dispensationalism, the notion that God periodically enters into a new covenant with his people, has had some influence on the belief, insofar as some believers in the Rapture consider themselves to be dispensationalists.

Along with the epistles of Paul and the Revelation to John, apocalyptic literature and millennialist thinking have long maintained a hold on the Christian imagination, even when they have been variously interpreted or—in the case of millennialism—even rejected by some of the major figures in the history of Christian theology. The 16th-century movement called Futurism, expounded by the Jesuit Francisco Ribera, stressed the future fulfillment of the prophecy of the End as mentioned in scripture with both the rise of the Antichrist and the return of Christ. Another historical event whose ideas may have had some influence on the later evolution of the idea was the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by Puritans seeking to build a “City upon a Hill” in anticipation of the Second Coming. The evangelical fervour of the Great Awakening (early 18th century) and Second Great Awakening (late 18th to early 19th century) in the United States widely promoted ideas about the millennium, about a new dispensation, and about the imminence of Christ’s return. The most famous of such thinkers was William Miller, whose prediction that the Second Coming would occur in 1843 inspired the subsequent formation of Adventist churches.

The idea of the Rapture persisted through the remainder of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, gaining popularity among some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as well as among some other Christian and even non-Christian new religious movements. During the Cold War, between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly as the threat of nuclear war grew, prophecies about the Rapture gained currency. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the idea was prominent in popular culture, in part because of the millennialist fervour that arose as the year 2000 approached. The so-called “Chick Pamphlets” (illustrated tracts authored by the evangelist Jack Chick) and the Left Behind (1995–2007) novel and movie franchise were two examples of that phenomenon. Meanwhile, Endtime prophecies promoting a specific date for the Rapture—most notably the two dates in 2011 predicted by the American evangelist Harold Camping—proliferated.

-The Rapture

You see, in their mind, world War III is a win-win.

[1] If they push and successfully create strife in the South China Sea, and it is limited to that region, they can capitalize upon it. Make money off it. And it can turn into a long-drawn out quagmire. Or fine money pipeline into their coffers.

[2] If the strife leaves the predetermined area of conflict, no problem. What’s China gonna do? Eh? They are no match for the Great and Powerful US! They USA could “just sit off the coast and launch cruse missiles and plink at the pitiful Chinese as they run from hidy-hole to hidy-hole”.

[3] Even if the worst came about; No problem, either. God has blessed the United States, and then Jesus will come down from heaven and save all the American believers, and let the rest of the earth cook into a poisonous stew of radioactivity and destruction. Good!

They believe!

With Trump in office, and the appointment of key neocon radical fanatics, Their anti-China crusade went mainstream and has most of the Western allied world’s population hating the Chinese. Yeah, it’s destined to dissipate, but right now the PTB are using everything in their power to keep the hate alive. They are keeping this monster, this nightmare illusion, ALIVE!

Oh, baby! This is extremely dangerous.

This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. 

It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. 

The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it — its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government — and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous. 

-The Radical Christian Right

I cannot stress it enough. This kind of thinking is dangerous. And there are some very important people, in key positions in the American government which believes these insane narratives. They believe. They are real believers.

Yikes!

Now, from time to time, I come across something other than one of the major neocon articles that announce plans for the suppression of China, and how America will remain the dominant superpower in the world. They are few and far between. Seriously. But when you find one, it’s not only refreshing but discusses the reality.

Here is one such rare article. Read it slowly. Absorb it carefully. They are not trying to manipulate sheeple. They are not trying to justify anything. They are telling and stating things AS THEY ARE today. Not what they might be, or what they wish to become.

And while they urge you to participate to “spread the word”, they do so out of concern that America is leading the world towards a new “Dark Ages”; one here the world might never recover from.

And they spell it out clearly…

The U.S. is Set on a Path to War with China. What Is to be Done?

Written By KJ Noh

In this meticulously researched exposé, KJ Noh traces the genealogy of U.S. geopolitical strategy in Asia and the Pacific, giving us an inside view of both the realpolitik of U.S. imperial expansion and the architects behind it. Concluding with an analysis of 21st century U.S. total informational warfare, Noh argues that the path to a kinetic war against China has been decades in the making. Once triggered, it could rapidly turn nuclear.

It was a gripping, stunning testimony. Before Congress, a 15 year old volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor.

Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had been killed this way. [1] All the news agencies ran with the story, and the country and Congress were in a total uproar.

There was only one problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent. It was engineered, perjured, coached testimony concocted by PR experts, designed to manufacture consent for a U.S. war on Iraq.

At the time, it was also crystal clear that the claims were absurd—Kuwait had a population of less than 1.5 million at the time, and given its birth rate, would have had a few hundred premature babies a year. It’s inconceivable that over 300 of them could have been clustered in a single hospital on a single day.

Nevertheless, this was the story that was sold to the U.S. people. Representative John Porter stated,

“We have never heard…[such] a record of inhumanity and brutality and sadism…I don’t know how the people of the civilized countries of this world can fail to do everything within their power to remove this scourge from the face of the earth.”

Not long afterward, the U.S. went to war with Iraq.  It would wage war again, 12 years later, doubling down with even more monstrous lies about weapons of mass destruction.

Today, we are facing a similar situation: the U.S. is escalating rapidly towards a shooting war with China, and similar absurd, astonishing, and monstrous lies are being spread. In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in “multi-domain” “hybrid warfare” with China. This is warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement.

On the ground this involves:

  • Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary & secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain); attacks on Ant Financial’s IPO.

  • Legal Warfare, or “lawfare,” including over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30 trillion in “Covid damages”; the long arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive

  • Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change.

  • Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot”), the use of air bases in Taiwan for military surveillance, and plans to station intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery. [2]

  • Civil Subversion: color revolution, urban terror, destabilization and delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization & training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities.

  • Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the U.S. (currently 2700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional” “collectors” and “spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.

  • Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information warfare.
    The stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing independent Hong Kong,” are part of this information warfare.

He left out biological warfare. But we'll give this author a pass on this glaring omission.

This mass propaganda incites people to hate China irrationally and unconditionally, to manufacture consent for war. The U.S. military calls this information warfare, “the firehose of falsehoods” and we are all being drenched with these lies. This is necessary to justify war against an enemy and to curtail any rational discussion or questioning.

Some of the questions that the public are kept from asking are:

    • Are these allegations supported by any facts?

    • Has China threatened us?

    • Is the U.S. at risk from China?

    • Is this war justifiable by any means?

    • Is it legal?

    • Do the citizens of the U.S. want to go to war?

    • Could the U.S. even fight, let alone win a war with China?

A careful, reasoned approach to these questions, would lead one to say, No.

Before we try to play whack-a-mole with the blatant war propaganda, a more useful and clarifying approach is to ask, why is the U.S. telling these lies to go to war?

For this, we have to look at history.

Why The U.S. Is At War: Culture shock and the challenge to supremacy

The earliest European travelers were astonished to discover in China a country, in many ways, far more advanced than the West: a rich, diverse, multi-cultural civilization with sophisticated systems of governance, and vibrant cities built with complex systems of planning and management.

Above all, they marveled at a harmonious multi-religious, multi-ethnic society, free of sectarian strife, and an inclusive merit-based [3] system of political power that selected the most competent people to govern and rule, regardless of creed, color, background, or religion.

[4] This contrasted the Western system of hereditary aristocratic rule within a society torn apart regularly with religious strife.

These ideas of diversity, tolerance, inclusion, and earned—not inherited–privilege, would strongly influence the leaders of the Enlightenment, so much so that Western philosophers such as Voltaire and Leibnitz believed that the Chinese had “perfected moral science,” and that Chinese statecraft was the model for the West to emulate if it wanted to develop into an enlightened civilization.

These discoveries struck a hard blow at Christian and Western supremacy.

Western colonization was built on a foundational belief that the West was more advanced, more evolved—closer to God—than the “barbarous” countries it was invading, subjugating, exploiting, and destroying.

It needed at least the pretense of being more “advanced” to justify its colonial “civilizing mission.”

Reactionary thinkers like Herder—who had never visited China—lashed back rapidly by propagating a theory of the depravity of Chinese: that China was an “immoral land with no honor,” an “embalmed mummy” characterized by stagnation, in contrast with Western “dynamism.”

In addition, the Chinese system of meritocratic government was deeply troubling to a West built on stratified class privilege.

A civilization without hereditary aristocrats was unfathomable and terrifying to the Western ruling class.

Montesquieu, (borrowing from Giovanni Botero) thus concocted the trope that China’s more egalitarian system had to be “despotic”—despotic for him because it threatened the “liberties” (aristocratic privileges) of his class.

Hegel chiseled this canard into the Western consciousness with an armchair theory of “Oriental Despotism,” whereby the Chinese had failed to evolve due to inherent, characterological flaws in its people and its political culture.

Marx chimed in with the “Asiatic mode of production,” and Weber and Wittfogel also reinforced it. These allegations of “despotism”—despite being total distortions of Chinese governance–have infused all Western discourses about China since.

A civilization without hereditary aristocrats was unfathomable and terrifying to the Western ruling class. Montesquieu, (borrowing from Giovanni Botero) thus concocted the trope that China’s more egalitarian system had to be “despotic”—despotic for him because it threatened the “liberties” (aristocratic privileges) of his class. These allegations of “despotism”—despite being total distortions of Chinese governance–have infused all Western discourses about China since.

Enter the Bandits

At the same time, “embalmed” Chinese “inferiority” notwithstanding, the West craved the exquisite consumer goods of China—tea, silk, porcelain—and this created huge trade imbalances.

The Western response to balance the books was narco-trafficking: smuggling in industrial amounts of opium—at its peak, up to 9 million pounds a year.

When China objected and opposed this on sovereign and moral grounds and confiscated the drugs, war was declared.

Reparations were forced, concessions extracted, and the country plundered, looted, and destroyed.

In one show of force to the Chinese, the Summer Palace of the Emperor was sacked by Lord Elgin, which Victor Hugo described thus:

There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world…. All that can be begotten of the imagination…was there…. Build a dream, a dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace…. This edifice, as enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries…. This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned.
All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry…. One of the two victors filled his pockets...the other…filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits [England & France].

This violence, banditry, and racism, justified by the belief in the subhuman nature of the Chinese, became normalized practice against the Chinese over two centuries, and great American fortunes—Perkins, Astor, Forbes, Cabot, Delano (Roosevelt)—and Ivy league institutions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia were built on this extraction and narco-trafficking.

Hewing to the belief that the Chinese were less than human, enterprising Euro-American drug barons pushed opium that addicted 10% of the population, essentially “roofie-ing” an entire nation and stealing its wealth.

Just as U.S. Southern wealth had been built on the decimation of black bodies through the slave trade, U.S. East Coast wealth was built on the destruction of Chinese bodies through the drug trade, in what historian John K. Fairbank described as

“the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times.”

Dehumanization, humiliation, assault, theft, rape, colonization, appropriation–these became the standard Western approach towards China and the Chinese; the Chinese people were “filthy yellow hordes,” an inferior, subhuman race, lacking agency, fit only to be colonized, exploited, enslaved, lynched, erased, and wherever possible, extinguished through race war.

It would get worse.

Cold and Hot war: A Chinaman’s Chance

Inside U.S. territory itself, the mythology of “yellow peril”—originally a German colonial war trope—became pervasive.

Newspaper editor Horace Greeley, argued that the Chinese were “uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order.”

Greeley, a progressive (who employed a young Marx as a reporter), was simply mouthing the platitudes of his day; much worse than rhetoric was the routine violence.

Prefiguring similar present-day fears that Chinese were stealing jobs, wealth, or threatening America, thousands of Chinese were massacred, lynched, set on fire, expelled from their communities in the late 19th Century:

  • In 1871, the LA Chinatown massacre,
  • In 1880, the Denver Yellow Peril pogrom,
  • In 1885 Wyoming Rock Springs massacre,
  • The Issaquah Valley attack,
  • The Arson of Seattle’s Chinatown,
  • The Tacoma riot,
  • In 1886 the Seattle Riot of 1886,
  • The Oregon Hell’s Canyon massacre.

“A Chinaman’s chance” became a common term: to be Chinese was to be subject to sudden death at any time at the whim of white people.

In response, the Chinese hid themselves inside ghettos where they could, fled pogroms, arson, and mass lynchings, and kept their heads down, “eating bitter” and trying to stay alive.

Where they managed to settle down without being killed, they were subjected to cultural erasure, economic blockade, social isolation, a ban on owning property and businesses, and a proscription on marrying and having children, in short, planned elimination.

A minor respite during WWII, when the U.S. allied itself with the Chinese KMT (Kuomintang) against the Japanese gave a small glimmer of reprieve, as local leaders tried to establish breathing space, and the Japanese took on the role of the “bad Asians.”

This lasted until the Chinese communists liberated themselves in 1949, and wrested back their own country.

“China has stood up,” Mao declared, igniting jubilation throughout the third world and sending shockwaves of horror through the colonial west.

This arrant act of self-liberation and self-determination—along with the U.S.’s astonishment that the monstrous KMT fascists they had courted and funded had been trounced–unleashed a hysterical new wave of Sinophobia during the McCarthy era.

High-ranking Congressional committees demanded “Who lost China?”—as if it had been theirs—and purged the State Department of the moderate “China-hands,” who had been sympathetic or informed about China and its political institutions.

A paroxysm of anti-China and anti-Asian hatred would shiver and fester throughout the cold war, burning, stoking and consuming itself through…

  • Ttwo hot wars (the Korean war and the Vietnam war),
  • Counterinsurgencies (Malaya),
  • Politicide (Indonesia), and…

…smoldering on through the Nixon era, and crackling back alive to the flushed, red hot heat of the current moment.

In a country built on settler-colonial racism, this violent, racist, anti-China hatred—one of the most enduring legacies and traditions of the West—is the noxious Petri dish in which this propaganda for war is being cultured and vectored.

To this day, these stereotypes—ideological templates–are readily applied, for example, as regards Covid-19. In the Sinophobic Western press, Covid-19 is allegedly caused by dirty Chinese eating habits, dishonest cover-up, depraved indifference to life, despotic suppression of information, and dangerous intent towards the West.

In a word, the Chinese are dirty, dishonest, depraved, despotic, and dangerous.

Every day, these racist slanders are plastered and repeated, ad nauseam and ad infinitum, in Western outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, or The New York Times, and then catapulted into orbit by Twitter and Facebook.

White supremacy and its attendant anti-Asian fear and hatred are some of the oldest, most enduring, most deep-rooted hatreds in the Western mind.

Underneath the shallow topsoil of civility and liberal tolerance, it festers and simmers in angry, molten layers of the subconscious, quick to flare up in white-hot violence at any perceived slight or challenge to white superiority, and rapidly weaponized as political expediency requires.

Realpolitik: Opening And Closure

Miraculously, during the 70’s, a battered and bruised U.S., humbled from defeats in the Vietnam war, and seeking a realpolitik to untangle the quagmire, decided to open relations with China to counterbalance the Soviet Union.

Despite over a century of hatred, and the containment of the Russians for being an “Asiatic Race,” the U.S. normalized relations with Chinese, and thus began a short, temporary, realist honeymoon, a brief respite from this race-baiting and race hatred.

This idyll was not to last.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, two things became readily apparent: 1) there was no further political need to engage with China, since the primary reason (the threat of the Soviet Union) had gone away, and 2) it was clear for anyone understanding history and geography that China could become a challenger to the United States itself, due to its size, capacity, and dynamism.

Thus the long, unabated, and persistent thread of anti-China hatred—red-scare-yellow-peril-thinking, reinvigorated again with the persistent white fragility about new challenges to supremacy—came back with a vengeance.

Despite continued engagement with China from the Nixon to the Clinton era, Sinophobia remained a silent, underground political force with a tremendous gravitational pull.

Two groups were important in giving these forces concrete shape and form.

The Empire Strikes Back: Yoda And His Jedis

Andrew Marshall, who died last year in March, was often referred to as “Yoda.”

He was the Pentagon’s Oracle, directing its secretive internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, for 42 years, and was top advisor to 12 Secretaries of Defense.

Originally part of an elite group of econometric thinkers at RAND (Herman “Strangelove” Kahn, James Schlesinger, Daniel Ellsberg, Albert Wohlstetter), they worked on game theoretic & stochastic modeling of complex phenomena, and on how to strategize the unthinkable and the insane: how to win at nuclear Armageddon.

Throughout his long tenure at the inner sanctum, Marshall had two key obsessions: U.S. military supremacy, first against the Soviet Union, then after the fall of the USSR, against China.

Post-1991, he became singularly obsessed with preventing China’s rise to power.

Using a deft mixture of threat inflation (through recondite “net” assessments & heterodox “team B” reviews), classified white papers, cryptic pronouncements to the power elite, and the incessant cultivation of a cult of loyalists, Marshall kept the Pentagon’s gravy train running on time, while instilling in his followers a paranoid, “long durée” mindset of endless and moving threat inflation.

Throughout his long tenure at the inner sanctum, Marshall had two key obsessions: U.S. Military supremacy, first against the Soviet Union, then after the fall of the USSR, against China. Post-1991, he became singularly obsessed with preventing China’s rise to power.

Marshall’s proteges, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cohen, Krepinevich, Pillsbury, Herman Kahn, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Michael O’Hanlon, and countless other neocon heavyweights were graduates of “St. Andrew’s Prep School” or the “Church of St. Andrew,” and mentored into Marshall’s world view and strategies.

These ideologues had suckled at the woozy philosophical teat of Leo Strauss (imagining they were imbibing Plato, Hegel, or Kojeve) and graduated from Ivy institutions funded from Chinese opium smuggling.

Marshall fed them solid food, C-rations, and the bloody red meat that cut and sharpened their fangs for ideological and political battle.

In 1992, a fully teethed group of Marshall’s neocon protegés penned the Defense Guidance Planning (DPG) document that came to be known as the “Wolfowitz Doctrine.”

A preposterous, overweening document, embarrassing upon leakage for its hubris, irrationality, and illegality, it was immediately disavowed but not discarded.

A few years later, it was redacted and upgraded into the PNAC (“The Project for a New American Century”)’s Mein Kampf-like document, “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.”

This was, in essence, an unhinged plan for total world domination (“unipolar global dominance”) in all domains of war (“full spectrum dominance”), unfettered by international law or any sense of proportion, rationality, or morality.

Borrowing from the DPG its call for the unencumbered use of aggressive, pre-emptive war, including the use of nuclear and biological warfare, it postulated a “Pearl Harbor-like” incident to operationalize.

Not long after, this doctrine became realized under Rumsfeld and Cheney, bringing us the chaos, murder, tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan and the endless catastrophic wars of the post-Bush years.

Contemporaneously, with the Soviet Union dissolved, and the U.S. pressing NATO right up against the flank of Russia, the U.S. also began to cross-hatch the contours of a containment strategy against an emerging China, the next potential challenger to U.S. global domination.

Marshall and his Jedis began explicit, long term countermoves.

Even as the Middle East continued to spiral into chaos, yet more wide-ranging and ambitious plans were hatched against the Middle Kingdom.

A strategy to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) was initially floated (and later, with the blessing of the CFR, circulated, and eventually implemented).

Aggressive forward bases were planned in the early 2000’s, then built in East Asia along the first island chain, placing deadly and destabilizing strategic weaponry right up against China’s throat and belly.

New alliances and strategies were drawn up, and old alliances reinforced and rekindled, and a dangerously empire-nostalgic Japan was enabled in erasing history and remilitarizing to the hilt as the spear tip against China.

Eventually, as all these pieces fell into place, Hillary Clinton would stage the coming out party: the declaration in 2011, of the “Pacific Pivot/Pivot to Asia” in Foreign Policy Magazine.

Clinton’s debutante declaration was a dog-whistle marvel of cant and obfuscation.

A plan to move 60% of U.S. firepower to encircle and contain China through bases, weaponry, and alliances, while engaging in multi-domain hybrid warfare, was sold as a “historical rebalancing.”

With the blessing of Obama’s cabinet, Marshall’s China threat was finally getting policy primetime.

During this time, another of Marshall’s  busy, brainy proteges, military officer Andrew Krepinevich, started to work out the nuts and bolts of actual war with China.

At the CSBA (Center for Strategic Budgetary Assessment), Krepinevich, under Marshall’s guidance and funding, wrote out the details of the war doctrine against China, “AirSea Battle”—a China-directed counterpart to the Soviet-era “AirLand Battle”—involving decapitating and blinding strikes deep into Chinese territory, and instantiating Marshall’s “revolution in military affairs” for U.S. supremacy in the Western Pacific theater of war.

RAND and the CFR chimed in, rendering into granular and global detail the strategies and order of battle.

Another of Andrew’s powerful proteges was Michael Pillsbury.

A serious operator, Pillsbury had assisted in the creation of the regime change “governmental” NGO known as the NED, the weaponization of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the implementation of politicide in Latin America (known as the Reagan Doctrine), but most importantly, he was credited with initiating the idea of the “China card” in 1973.

Under the good offices of Marshall, Pillsbury published a book called “The Hundred Year Marathon,” scripting a fact-free document of paranoid threat inflation, racist scare-mongering, and orientalist slander that is now standard China doctrine.

In an alphabetic royal flush of Sinophobes (Lighthizer-Mnuchin-Navarro-O’Brien-Pillsbury-Pompeo-Pence-Ross), Pillsbury was the most important “China authority” of Everything Under the Heavens in the Trump Kingdom of Sinophobia.

China Syndrome: Blue team, Red Peril

As the original U.S. reason for allying with Beijing—to counterbalance Moscow—became moot, another group of China-bashers, far-right ideologues with sharp axes to grind from the Cold War also began to crawl out of the cracks.

Calling themselves the “blue team” or “panda sluggers,” they derided the U.S. “panda-hugging” business class who wanted continued engagement with China, seeing China only as a mortal and irreconcilable communist threat.

During the Clinton administration, they formed a loose coalition, coming together with funding under PNAC, using the Washington Times and Weekly Standard as their platforms.

Although the “Blue Team” had no official members, published no formal policy statements, and had no offices—initially meeting in a garage, then at the Tabard Inn on N Street—they included key Congress members and staff, think tankers, journalists, and lobbyists.

Among them, former CIA analyst William C. Triplet and congressional staffer Edward Timperlake went on to write a lurid series of conspiracy books alleging quid-pro-quo between Clinton and China (Year of the Rat; Red Dragon Rising).

This was a bizarro world where Taiwanese lobbyists with Chinese Mafia connections were acting as agents for the PRC government and manipulating the White House.

They also alleged Chinese theft of military secrets, slave labor, the proliferation of WMD to Iran and other “rogue” states, and insinuated that Clinton’s “constructive engagement” was knowingly undermining the U.S. for the benefit of the Chinese.

These allegations put into ink a conspiratorial mythology about a dangerous, corrupt, and belligerent China, echoes that fed into an existing subterranean current of paranoid lies about China.

These “blue team” members, cross-pollinating with Marshall’s proteges, were a rogues gallery of high-powered political operators: Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney,  Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Michael Pillsbury, Bill Gertz, Gary Bauer, Peter Navarro, Elliot Abrams, Richard Scaiffe, John Bolton were among those listed as “members.” Dana Rohrabacher, Tom DeLay, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd were also considered to be fellow travelers.

These people built powerful commissions and institutions focused on attacking China, including the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC), the US-China Security Review Commission.

The Taiwan Security Enhancement Act was also written during this time.

In particular, the CECC appointed itself watchdog of Chinese trade, technology, labor and human rights, saturating Congress with an unending “blue team” litany of Chinese “abuses.”

The most virulent and extreme of all these China hawks was Frank Gaffney, who recycled the alarmist Cold War group, “Committee on the Present Danger,” into the current “Committee on the Present Danger: China,” contending that “there is no hope of coexistence with China.”

Gaffney’s ideology and guiding principles coincide with official positions on China and key U.S. foreign policy; moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech and actions on China reflect his close affiliation and affinity with Gaffney.

What the Pivot is: the Geostrategy of China-bashing

Much of the “blue team’s” ideology and theorizing followed pre-existing currents of ideological posturing and hate-speech but have incorporated sharper geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions.

Western history can be seen as having several inflection points: one was 1492, the advent of the “Columbian Era.”

The Columbian era is the era of sea-faring, sea-power-based Western colonial and imperial empires.

The demise of the Columbian era was foreshadowed by an Oxford geographer in 1904 who put forth what is now known as the “Heartland Theory.”

In a nutshell, it is a land-based theory of power that predicts the end of sea-based powers:

“Who rules East Europe (Eurasia) commands the Heartland; 
who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; 
who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

It also concluded that

“Were the Chinese [to] conquer its territory [of the Russian Empire], they might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom.”

This maxim and the anxiety it provoked was red-lined in Brezinski’s “Grand Chess game”: “No Eurasian challenger should emerge that can dominate Eurasia and thus also challenge U.S. global pre-eminence.”

In 1992, Marshall’s protégé, Paul Wolfowitz formulated the above strands into a formal doctrine, in the above mentioned DPG  (Defense Planning guidance) document:

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union…to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region to generate global power…. The U.S. must…protect a new order that [convinces] potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must…discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

This can be better understood by looking at a map:

This is a map of the world, drawn from a topologist’s eye. It shows relationships, not distances or area.  From this map you can note the following things:

    • China has more borders than any other country in the world.  This also gives it the possibility of connecting with more countries than any other.

    • Blue lines/corridors are oceans: The top two thirds is the “world island” or “pivot state”–it contains most of the world’s population, resources, and wealth, and it can be connected as a single entity through overland routes or short ocean hops.

    • The bottom is the Americas. It is topologically isolated from the world island. As sea lane control becomes less important, it will also lose prominence and relative power if the world island unifies. It’s clear that unifying power will probably arise in China, whose overland paths using high-speed rail, roads, pipelines, and ports can be easily built and connected, in a “new silk road.”

    • The U.S. needs to fracture the world island to maintain its global power. If you color in the places where China is encircled, or where the US is waging war/fracturing societies/creating chaos, this is exactly where the fault lines of the global conflict are, and reveal what U.S. strategy is.

Here is a second map:

CSBA: Shipping Lanes through the South China Sea.

The U.S. has actually surrounded China with 400 military bases, bristling with strategic and tactical weaponry. It also has war-gamed out China’s key vulnerability: the chokepoint of the South China Sea. War in the South China Sea would disrupt $5.3 Trillion of China’s external trade and 77% of China’s oil imports. In this scenario, the U.S. does not have to win a shooting war with China in the South China Sea. The war just has to happen, and the disruption to trade could crash China’s economy.

The U.S. has actually surrounded China with 400 military bases, bristling with strategic and tactical weaponry.

It also has war-gamed out China’s key vulnerability: the chokepoint of the South China Sea.

War in the South China Sea would disrupt $5.3 Trillion of China’s external trade and 77% of China’s oil imports. [5]

In this scenario, the U.S. does not have to win a shooting war with China in the South China Sea.

The war just has to happen, and the disruption to trade could crash China’s economy.

The map shows the shipping lanes that would be disrupted.

China’s first response to the U.S. pivot and encirclement, especially in the South China Sea—its key choke point—was to build defensive military facilities along some of the islands, to deter U..S incursion and to raise the cost of interference.

Its other, much more ambitious response was the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), which constitutes a long overland escape from the encirclement, similar to its “long march” during its encirclement by the fascist KMT.

The BRI travels through Southeast Asia, then overland through Central Asia, to the Mediterranean, and then Europe and Africa. In particular:

    • CMEC (China-Myanmar Economic Corridor) travels through Rakhine State and exits to the Indian Ocean at Kyaukphyu port (bypassing the Strait of Malacca).

    • CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) to Gwadar port transits directly to the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

    • Xinjiang is the key overland route for BRI to exit China to Central Asia, with Iran also a key node.

    • Djibouti at the horn of Africa is the entry node to Africa (the Sahel, and the South)

As it does this, BRI becomes the physical realization of Mackinder’s “heartland” in Eurasia—the “pivot state” connecting the “world island” into a single economic bloc and raising China to the status of the key regional power, accomplishing exactly what Brezinski and Wolfowitz sought to prevent.

Mercator Institute for China Studies: Belt and Road Initiative.

Mindful of this development, and aware of the rapidly ticking biological clock on U.S. power, the U.S. is currently rapidly escalating hostilities in the South China Sea (SCS), most recently with…

  • War games,
  • U2 incursions,
  • Belligerent passages of aircraft carriers,
  • Belligerent guided missile destroyers,
  • Hunter-killer submarines.

China’s response has been to launch “carrier killer” missiles into the region.

Until recently, the U.S. claimed that it was not an interested party to the SCS, just that it was concerned about “Freedom of Navigation.”

Now it is openly taking about blockade and strangulation of China  and outright piracy against Chinese ships through media proxies.

It has also recently conducted drone war exercises for assaulting islands in the South China Sea, with down-to-the-smallest detail precision and preparation.

The U.S. is also going directly after the BRI.

It is sanctioning the Chinese companies alleged to have done construction in the SCS (all the claimants have done construction, including building airfields; China is not unique).

These companies are also involved in construction of the BRI; for example, China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) alone is reportedly involved in 923 projects in 157 countries.

U.S. sanctions are  an explicit attempt to dismantle the BRI.

Likewise, the “Five Eyes” have made moves to block  other “road” of the BRI, its accompanying  “digital silk road” (communications-5G-blockchain infrastructure).

This is yet another of the reasons why Huawei has been targeted for destruction.

The U.S. is also in the process of stationing intermediate range missiles all across the South China Sea, and around the first island chain surrounding China, as well as attempting to press gang South Korea into hosting them.

This is yet another layer of dangerous escalation, and it will prove to be very, very destabilizing.

Twilight of Capitalism

The final dimension to the U.S.-China competition is economic: this is the uncanny fact that China’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” works and outclasses Western neoliberal capitalism by leaps and bounds.

In terms of developing an economy, raising living standards, creating public wealth, serving and meeting its people’s needs, and dealing with crises, China beats the capitalist West hands down.

Even as they claimed that such a state-led economy could never compete against the superior free-market economy of the U.S., the Trump administration has insistently demanded that China dismantle their planned economy in trade negotiations, because of its superior advantages over capitalism.

This was not supposed to be: Clintonite “Panda Huggers” had always justified, hubristically, that their engagement with China would result in China’s liberalization and total transformation—the inevitable, inexorable result of engaging with a superior Western political ideology and economic system.

They also insisted that if China continued as it had with its planned economy and ”autocratic“ ways in a modern era, it would simply fail: it would end up like the Soviet Union or North Korea—it had no choice but to become more Western, more neoliberal, more capitalist.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the market.

China built a system that has brought more than 850 million people out of poverty in a few short decades, ended domestic extreme poverty in 2020, and has already surpassed the U.S. in PPP economy size and healthy life expectancy.

China’s thriving, effective Central government—with a 93.1% approval rate—breaks all Western conceptions of development, governance, legitimacy, and of course, superiority.

With 80% of its top leadership scientists or engineers, China also outranks the U.S. in patents filed, top scientific papers published, and is a world leader in fields such as AI, robotics, quantum computing, 5G, highspeed rail, advanced industrial production, next generation IT, materials science, and sustainable energy development, low-carbon eco-cities, and reforestation.

It has also pledged to go carbon neutral by 2060, essentially giving the world an outside chance to still beat global warming—despite being a historical carbon creditor.

With its scientific leadership, whole-of-society public health strategies, and its valuing of every human life, it has also shown that it can organize to defeat a mass pandemic in weeks—and by overriding capitalist markets whenever and wherever it sees fit.

Meanwhile the U.S. still struggles with the largest number of cases and deaths from Covid-19—a death rate 200 times that of China’s—and is incapable of preventing Covid-19 among its own top leadership.

To boot, first in 2008, and then in 2020, the U.S. neoliberal capitalist economy was shown up to be a jacked-up deck of cards, rescued only by massive Chinese debt-purchasing and endless printing of fiat money.

In contrast, China has demonstrated that it has developed an alternative, non-Western, non-capitalist model of development—without war, invasion, colonization, slavery, regime change, primitive accumulation—that the world can emulate and follow.

Once you realize that, you understand why the U.S. ruling classes are so desperate to erase China and its example:

China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial.

As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment, subservience, and expropriation.

It also offers a model of state-led ecological development.

All this signals new possibilities of hope and transformation for the world.

The ruling classes in the West will go to war to prevent this.

China offers a threatening alternative model of development that is non-capitalist, non-Western, and non-colonial. As such, it undermines the West’s neocolonial domination of the Third World and its debt-trap-based forced underdevelopment, subservience, and expropriation.

Where Does This All End?

Despite China’s assurances that it does not want war, hot or cold, that it seeks win-win cooperation and co-existence with all countries, and that it disdains hegemony, the U.S. continually escalates, provokes, and threatens China, all the while dismantling off-ramps channels of communication and global institutions for cooperation and de-escalation.

The conclusion to draw is hard, but obvious: if things continue as they have, this can only lead to direct military confrontation and kinetic war.

Doubling down on racism, sexism, capitalism, and militarism, the Democratic regime not only silences demands for viable reform and abolition by the Sandernistas, BLM, and Me Too, but also ignores the non-interventionist, peace-demanding wishes of the majority of voters, dismissing their demands for a better system and less violent foreign policy.

Biden’s doctrine toward China will be a continuation of the noxious arc of history and planning begun by Marshall in the late 1970s. The think tank advising Biden on foreign policy, CNAS, a near-rhyming clone to PNAC, has grandfathered in most of existing anti-China doctrine, and has mapped out in obsessive detail, the next steps of a highly destructive and dangerous strategy of confrontation with China.

The key difference is that Biden’s regime  will “unite” countries more skillfully against China, pivot away from Trump’s neomercantilism towards a more “globalist” approach, and likely implement some revised version of the TPP, the 12 nation economic bloc against China.

Here are some key points to understand:

  • Escalation to war is bipartisan: there is no lesser evil here. The racist, capitalist, imperial ruling classes cannot and will not tolerate a rising or equal China in a multi-polar world. They would rather see the end of the world than an end to capitalism or white supremacy.

  • One subset of this group believes that they can actually win a war against China, or at the very least force its subjugation to the U.S. This submission will not happen, given the actual balance of forces and Chinese determination to resist.

  • The U.S. wants global supremacy but if the ruling class can’t have ordered supremacy, they are not averse to global disintegration and chaos. Proteges of Hayek and Leo Strauss, they thrive on “revolutionary disorder.” One fallback model of U.S. supremacy is to plunge the rest of the world back into the dark ages through hybrid warfare—while the U.S. controls the key systems of communication, information, surveillance, finance, rent extraction, along with the corridors of maritime transport.

  • There is a third group of elite hawks who are millenarian Christians. Although a minority, they hold powerful positions. These believe in the salvation and rapture of the faithful as existing “contradictions” are heightened into Armageddon. These are religious zealots with no brakes or constraints on their appetite for war.

  • War, if it happens, would rapidly turn nuclear. The U.S. no longer has “overmatch” in conventional weapons, and no longer subscribes to deterrence. Instead, its declaratory policy allows nuclear weapons to be used against “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks.” [6] Since the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. has explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China, and threatens “intolerable damage” in response to “non-nuclear or nuclear aggression.” [7] The Chinese have disavowed nuclear first strike—their nuclear capacity is currently minimal and purely defensive—but in case of war the US military could easily resort to the use of low-yield nuclear weapons[iii] or even decapitating nuclear first strikes [8] to overcome its conventional weaknesses.  China’s deterrence would then have to shift to “hair trigger,” “launch on warning.” This means that war could rapidly escalate to large scale nuclear strikes, which many scientists predict would result in nuclear winter, dooming most forms of organic life on the planet.

  • Modern “democracies” require constant media manipulation and propaganda, to manufacture consent for war. As a result, we are living in time of total deceit, as Orwell put it:  “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…. Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” William Casey, CIA director summarized this succinctly: “We’ll know when our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” [9] 

War, if it happens, could rapidly turn nuclear. Since the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, the U.S. has explicitly prepared for nuclear war with China, and threatens “intolerable damage” in response to “non-nuclear or nuclear aggression.”

What Then, Is To Be Done?

Our work is cut out for us: “In war, the first casualty is truth.”

Our task is to prevent the first casualty, challenge the lies; the second, to organize and work for peace.

As we approach elections, the possibility of an October surprise increases. Remember:

  • Information war precedes, justifies, and enables kinetic war, therefore you must think critically and defensively; do not take anything attacking China at face value.

  • Evaluate everything for a) source b) logic, sense, rationality c) bracket & evaluate emotional triggers or trigger words d) look at counter-evidence/arguments

  • Make your own judgments, draw your own conclusions: seek truth from facts

Don’t be fooled by the engineering of “truthiness”:

Stories and lies seem credible when they are 1) repeated incessantly 2) resemble pre-existing stories (especially ones that are projected from our own disowned flaws), 3) have some tiny grain of plausibility mixed in 4) seem coherent or manufacture coherence through multiple sources, and 5) tug at your heartstrings.

This means that we have to:

  • Watch out for memes and repetition: watch out for stories that seem self-replicating, self-distributing, repetitive, and create an echo chamber—qualities that  make them seem real and convincing even when they are lies. Even debunked stories serve as compost for more lies. Remember also that U.S. social media is handmaiden to the war machine—the worst is Twitter [10]—it promotes war propaganda and routinely purges counter-narratives.

  • Distinguish the coherence and validation of a story that has multiple sources of verification from planted-and-echo-chambered-stories (for example, anything about China connected to WUC (World Uyghur Congress)-Adrian Zenz–ASPI-Nathan Ruser-nexus; the Lausan-Jacobin-Nation-DemocracyNow-tendency; or The Guardian-NYTimes-Washington Post-CFR-cabal or other combinations thereof). Outlets like these are not channels of independent verification; they are often a set of single sourced memes skillfully distributed out and repeated through different channels, part of the fire hose [11] strategy of war propaganda.

  • Watch out for emotional trigger words: “genocide,” “slavery,” “concentration camp,” “trafficking,” “sterilization,” “theft/IP theft,” “espionage,” “cyber warfare,” attributed without any proof. These are trigger words designed to bypass critical evaluation, appealing to your emotions: fear, pity, and outrage.

  • Watch out for projection and gaslighting: the U.S. has a long history of slave and prison slave labor [12], of Third World debt-traps, of mistreating/torturing/killing Muslims, of genociding Indigenous peoples, of mass incarceration, of police brutality, of cultural genocide, mass sterilization, medical testing without consent [13]. If you see these words or allegations alleged against China, especially in a context where it makes no sense, evaluate [14] whether it seems real because there is actual proof, or because it is a convenient projection of the U.S./West’s own disowned violence, criminality, and brutality.

  • Speak up and simply call out the propaganda for what it is: lies to enable war and war-profiteering. But don’t get trapped in the weeds of debunking—they will spread a 1000 new lies before you’ve refuted a single one: “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth”—cut it off at the root.

  • Do not allow yourself to be silenced. Be prepared to be criticized as a “human rights denier.” Not having truth on their side, this is what the worst human rights abusers will always resort to: shut the f*ck up [or else].  Don’t be intimated, and don’t let them silence you. Make your voice heard!

  • Last but not least, organize! Despair is not an option!  The following are good places to start:

https://peacepivot.org/

https://www.codepink.org/china

https://www.nocoldwar.org/

https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/china/

Endnotes:

[1] Amnesty International Iraq/Occupied Kuwait Human Rights Violations, MDE 14/16/90: p56 https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE140161990ENGLISH.PDF

[2] For a possible missile placement map, see Barrie, Elleman, Nouwens: The End of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty: Implications for Asia, P31 Map 2.2 https://www.iiss.org/-/media/files/publications/rsa-2020/rsa20-chapter-2—the-end-of-the-intermediate-range-nuclear-forces-treaty-implications-for-asia.pdf

[3] For example, the German Jesuit Missionary, Adam Schall was appointed to high bureaucratic office in the court of the Ching Dynasty

[4] Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste (1741), Brookes, Richard (ed.), The General History of China, 3rd ed., Vols. I, II, III, & IV, London: J. Watts.

& Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste (1735), Description Geographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique, et Physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise [A Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political, and Physical Description of the Empire of China and of Chinese Tartary], Vol. I, II, III, & IV, Paris: P.-G. le Mercier.

[5] Department of Defense China Military Power Report, p133  https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF

[6] 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, p21.  https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872886/-1/-1/1/2018-NUCLEAR-POSTURE-REVIEW-FINAL-REPORT.PDF

[7] 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, p32.  https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872886/-1/-1/1/2018-NUCLEAR-POSTURE-REVIEW-FINAL-REPORT.PDF

[8]2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, pp54-55  https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872886/-1/-1/1/2018-NUCLEAR-POSTURE-REVIEW-FINAL-REPORT.PDF

Also, Chinese PLA assessment: http://www.81.cn/jfjbmap/content/2019-06/20/content_236472.htm

[9] Ray McGovern, Russia Gate’s Last Gasp, Consortium News https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/29/ray-mcgovern-russiagates-last-gasp/

[10] As news of horrific assaults by HK rioters on journalists spread through the mediasphere on June 12th, within hours, Twitter shut down 170,000 accounts on the ground that they were “promoting narratives favorable to the CPC”: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/information-operations-june-2020.html. According to the Guardian, “The major themes of the tweets were that that Hong Kong protesters were violent, and the US was interfering with the protests; accusations about Guo; the Taiwan election; and praise of China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic”—which turned out to be true. Twitter coordinates with ASPI, a key source of anti-China propaganda.

[11] RAND offers a good analysis of this technique here, although it fails to mention that this is what is being used against China by the West: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf

[12] For example, ASPI makes unfounded allegations of Chinese slave labor while being funded by US corporations that are confirmed to use US prison slave labor

[13] For example, the NY Times concocted an article on “non-consensual” Chinese vaccine testing, which doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.  Among other things, it confounds the risk profiles of Western m-RNA & ADV-vectored vaccines that have never been approved for human use, with the time-tested inactivated vaccines that the Chinese are using.

[14] Some good resources are available at Qiao Collective:

https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/education/xinjiang

https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/articles/sinophobia-inc

The Grayzone: https://thegrayzone.com/tag/uighurs/

Popular Resistance: https://popularresistance.org/xinjiang-and-uyghurs-what-youre-not-being-told/

World Affairs Blog:  https://worldaffairs.blog/2020/09/20/uyghur-xinjiang-explained-in-four-minutes/

Roderick Day:  https://threader.app/thread/1287411708374454273

Comments and Conclusions

When I passed this on to some friend to review, they had some interesting things to say. Such as this…

This is a good article, but an important part is missing. China is not the same China, and the world is not the same world anyone. The United States and the West can no longer do what they please anymore. The price they have to pay for a war with China would be more than they or the world can afford. If it is not for that reason, China would have ceased to exist long ago.

-Han Dongping

Well, maybe if if the United States was lead with reason, was led by knowledge and skills, and was led by those with the best interests of the American people in their minds.

But that is not the case, America is lead by different kinds of people. And man, oh man, do they think differently…

To be sure, the world as we know it will have its end (2 Peter 3:10; Revelation 21:1). But when it ends it will be replaced by a new heaven and new earth. The Noahic covenant seems to rule out universal devastation short of Christ’s coming. 

Thus, nuclear war is the opening salvo to enable the return of Jesus Christ our savior and Lord.

But, let us beware of presuming that the day of the Lord will come with a shower of nuclear warheads only. My own feeling is that the crack at Christ’s coming will make our weapons seem like maypops and firecrackers. 

Woe to us if we fornicate and proselytize prior to invoking his return! 

Even if we succeed, we will be found on the wrong side at his appearing: only the peacemakers are sons of God (Matthew 5:9). There is but one way, and only one way, to “hasten” his appearing: “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). 

We must pledge to use nuclear weapons only to hasten the arrival of Heaven on Earth. Not to use it for any other purpose. We must engage in war under the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savor. For according to 1 Timothy 2:1-4, the peace after war makes the best pathway for evangelism, not the war itself.

And they view things quite differently.

And I shake my head in disbelief.

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Using the MWI to explain the unexplainable, the supernatural, and the strange.

Hello everyone. Did you know that I died?  Yup. I did. But, you know, I didn’t really die. I just experienced a sudden death event that was short duration and then snapped to a nearby world-line.

Strange, eh? Yeah it was.

In 1992 I was living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I loved it there. Rural. Lush. Friendly. Great catfish. Easy going. Warm. Fragrant. Great place to live. But the people couldn’t drive for shit. I mean it. The road would be straight as an arrow for miles and miles and miles, and sure as shit, someone would drive off the road and hit the only tree for miles around.

Or, maybe it’s because of the “The Drive-Thru Daiquiri stands” in Louisiana, eh?

Drive-through.

Anyways, I’m in the car with my wife (at the time) and we are at an intersection. As I recall we had one of our cats with us. Probably taking it to or from the vet in it’s car-carrier. We drive down the twisty rural road and go to the intersection of one of the major highways in Mississippi.

I look left, and I look right, and suddenly I’m dizzy. An emergency slide occurs. Next three seconds, I’m reliving the moment. I put my foot on the brake hard. And a tractor trailer flies right in front of me.

We (my wife and I) died.

But we didn’t.

That is an event that I want to stress. And that I want to discuss right now. And you can say that it was my imagination, or that my guardian angel was by my side, or that I am reading too much into it, I can tell you that I know what happened and the mechanisms involved.

I died.

A tractor-trailer rig was flying down the road and hit me square on the drivers side and smashed my body into a bag of jelly and bones, and completely wiped out my wife next to me. Bam! Swoosh!

Restart button.

The world, the universe, the MWI is not at all what you think, and you have far better control on what will happen in your life than you believe.

…

There was a Star Trek (The Next Generation) Episode that rings a bell here…

Here’s some science fiction to get us started in this journey…

A temporal causality loop, also known as a causality loop or a repeating time loop, is a type of phenomenon whereby a specific moment in time repeats itself continually inside an independent fragment of time. (TNG: "Cause and Effect"; VOY: "Coda", "Q2", DIS: "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad")

Ai! It’s science fiction. But you know, it can be useful to understand (sort of) what is going on.

The following is an article titled "Cause and Effect: The Star Trek: TNG Episode That Stuck with Me" or the by-line "How one time loop stayed with a fan long after the Enterprise escaped." It was written by Christina Griffith on 16DEC20. Reprinted as found. All credit to the author. Edited to fit this venue.

It’s a Monday in the spring of 1992, and I’m 12 years old. I finished my homework, rushed downstairs to park myself on the couch in front of the TV, and flipped on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

THE ENTERPRISE IS EXPLODING. The bridge is in chaos: the starboard nacelle has taken a direct hit, casualty reports are coming in from all over the ship, a warp core breach is imminent, and Captain Picard is shouting “All hands abandon ship! All hands abandon sh-”

BOOM. Theme.

What the hell just happened?

This is the frenetic opening of “Cause and Effect,” the 18th episode of the 5th season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. During the decades of seemingly endless syndication, I caught the odd episode here or there, but I don’t recall ever seeing this one in its entirety again. And yet, that imagery of the shaking bridge being slowly engulfed by 90’s-era CGI flames and the pieces of the Enterprise blasting away into empty space again and again stuck with me long into adulthood. There are few programs that I can vividly recall the experience of the very first watch. What was it about this particular episode that got to me?

The Enterprise being destroyed is the most in-media-res opening possible. Translated to “in the middle of things,” what we’ve actually just witnessed is “the end of things,” if this were a linear story. But it’s not. After the credits, the episode picks up at a familiar poker game. We assume we are at beginning as we follow Dr. Crusher through a seemingly routine day that includes minor incidents of déjà vu and odd phenomenon until Worf reports they have encountered a temporal disturbance off the port bow. 

I knew it, thinks 12-year-old me, fists clenched. Of course, the way out must be time travel! There’s an alternative timeline or a paradox we must avoid to prevent the ship’s inevitable destruction. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a show next week — and we know there is. 

This is not actually a time travel episode, at least not for our protagonists. This is a time-loop, a repetition of the same events (usually over 24 hours) in which the characters are trapped. It is often referred to as the Groundhog Day trope after the movie of the same name, which coincidentally was also released in 1992, though this plot device does pre-date the film. 

The oldest generally accepted example is The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, written in 1904 by British Major-General Ernest Dunlop Swinton under the amusing pseudonym Lt. Backsight Forethought. In this story, the protagonist dreams over and over of the same battle, learning more about tactics each time until the mission is successful. In some incarnations of the time-loop, characters can change prior events at will, like in the 1965 Japanese novel The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Some stories use the time-loop as a trap within which the characters are deliberately being punished and must right a wrong to escape. There is even, of course, an entire Christmas-themed subgenre. 

It is the storytelling that makes this episode so ingenious. You might think watching the same day unfold over and over would be unbearably repetitive. Fortunately, director Jonathan Frakes and writer Brandon Braga construct a puzzle of a plot that builds on the subtle changes in each repetition as the characters realize what the audience already knows and generates increasing suspense even as events repeat themselves.

The magic of this trope is that its conditions are flexible. While time-travel in the Star Trek universe has rules and prerequisites, time-loops can be magical in nature, divine intervention, a curse, necessary to “fix” someone or something, or require discovering the loop’s trigger to escape it. The trope’s namesake-movie famously addressed neither the cause nor nature of Phil Connor’s never-ending Groundhog Day. 

But this is science-fiction, so the explanation is half the fun! As the bridge officers report to deal with the temporal distortion, the tension was palpable for 12-year-old-me: I was about to see how the Enterprise is destroyed or how it is saved. However, the mood on the bridge is lo-key, as no one seems particularly concerned about this deceptively inconsequential sounding “highly localized distortion of the space-time continuum.”

It just looks like a nondescript space cloud… then the power drops out. You can hear it in Troi’s voice when she says, “We have to get out of here, now.” She is only that definitive when things are serious. And then it emerges: a ship from the midst of the distortion. They can’t move, the helm won’t respond. Shields are inoperative. No response to hails. Impact in 36 seconds. Riker suggests depressurizing the shuttle bay and Data suggests the tractor beam. They engage the tractor beam, but as the mystery ship is deflected, it strikes the nacelle. 

In the ensuing chaos, Data’s eerily calm monotone narrates each failure:

“Initiating an emergency core shutdown!”
“Emergency shutdown is unsuccessful. We are losing antimatter containment.”
“We have to eject the core!”
“Ejection systems are offline. Core breach is imminent.”

(I would like to pause here because 12-year-old-me wants this addressed. This is a Galaxy-Class Starship, the flagship of the Federation. Why is it that, while sailing through space all day long, the computer doesn’t suffer a single malfunction until the very moment the ship faces what could be just a minor inconvenience, and then invariably the shields stop functioning, the helm doesn’t respond, the warp engines can’t be shut down, and for some reason the ejection system is offline, and now we are facing death?)

At this point in my re-watch, I distinctly remembered what disturbed me so very much about this scene. It was the sound. As the inertial dampeners fail and the Enterprise careens out of control in space, it emits a noise: a terrible groan that could only come from a 640-meter long, 460-meter wide tritanium-hulled starship whose spinning bulk is stressed past maximum tolerances as its warp core self-destructs. If a machine could scream, this is what it would sound like. 

Yes, I know that in space, no one can hear anything scream, not even a machine. 

The Enterprise explodes, the screen goes dark, and we return to our poker game to do it all over again. 

What the temporal disturbance does for our time-loop is ground the experience in spacetime principles that ensure when our characters relive the day, they have no knowledge of the day that already occurred. It is a causality-loop, where the event resets time itself. It makes that moment in the observation room briefing when Riker asks if they could have had this same conversation a dozen times and Geordi confirms, “We could have been trapped here for hours, days, maybe years,” so disconcerting. 

When the crew does manage to breach the causality-loop with that vital information needed to avoid the collision, we don’t have a sitcom-like reset. We were never at the beginning of the story; in fact, the Enterprise has been missing for nearly 18 days. The U.S.S. Bozeman, captained by Frasier himself, has unfortunately gotten the worst of the temporal distortion. Believed lost in 2278, it has traveled 90 years in that same 18 days. 

In those moments just before the Enterprise was destroyed, I watched in terror as every option was stripped away until there was but one decision to be made, and the wrong call, even if it seemed right, would doom the ship for eternity. To be trapped forever reliving the same choice without knowing seemed more horror than science fiction. 

The elements that come together in this episode—ingenious use of the plot device, well-crafted storytelling, and smart directing— coalesce with just the right effects and acting skill to deliver an unnerving, dark, though ultimately triumphant experience. 

Stories that don’t fit conventional understanding

Here’s some stories that I have collected on the internet. They are, I believe true, as viewed by the person telling and relating the story. Other people have experienced what I have experienced, and it is only because of my role within the MAJ and our benefactors that I have some degree of insight as to what is going on (and some examples where I don’t).

I place it here for thoughtful consideration.

Examples of World-line slides that I collected from the internet.

We will begin with a narrative that describes something similar to what I experienced so long ago. A guy died, but then didn’t.

Death

So this actually happened last week… It just took me some time to come to terms with it…

I got a phone call from my next door neighbor late in the evening asking if I can help him move a mattress into his upstairs. His mom is ill and has a big heavy sleep number bed. I of course ran over to help because they’re great neighbors.

I get over there and his friend, who is also a priest, was there to help. I helped them figure out how to separate the mattress from the bed so we could fit it up stairs. We get it all moved up and back in place when my neighbor asks if I can help them move an armoire upstairs too. I think nothing of it and we pull it out of his travel trailer and start bringing it up the front stairs of his house.

This is where I died. The front stairs are 11 steps. I was on the lower end of the armoire about 6 steps up when my neighbor and his friend lose a handle on the armoire and it comes crashing down on me and I fall backwards towards the pavement…

I then wake up in my dining room to my phone ringing and my wife asking me if I’m going to answer the phone. It’s my neighbor asking me if I can help move a bed upstairs for his mom…

I go over there and meet his priest friend again, as this has been the first time I met him. I say I can help with the bed but I cannot help with the armoire. My neighbor was like “how’d you know about the armoire?”. I then proceeded to tell them I’m pretty sure I just died.

I spent the next hour talking with the priest.

He had so many questions. My neighbor didn’t believe it until I described the upstairs bedroom in perfect detail down to the metal mattress frame on the floor and the intricate headboard leaning against the wall and I had never been upstairs in their house before.

The priest asked me what I saw after I died. I told him I never actually died. Before it happened I woke up at my dining room table.

TL;DR… I experienced my death but woke up alive about 20 minutes earlier in my life.

Accident

And here’s another example, from another person.

My mom and I were on the highway driving home, and there was a semi truck in the lane next to us. Suddenly the semi swerved in to our lane. Luckily my mom was able to get out of the way before it hit us, but soon after I began feeling strangely. The entire right side of my face felt hot and sticky, I tasted blood, and smelled the very pungent scent of gasoline. Then my head and right arm started to ache really badly, and I couldn’t feel my legs. Just as soon as the pain started to worsen, it went away, replaced with a cold eerie chill. I told my mom about this and she couldn’t come up with an explanation. I think I was feeling the pain in another timeline where my mom wasn’t able to avoid that semi.

Signpost

Here’s yet another…

So I work for a joinery company and was delivering a load to a construction site about an hour away from work, and whenever I’m out and about, I just play reddit compilation videos through my headphones.

I was about 8 minutes into a video when in the middle of the town at a red light, with a bad feeling of deja vu. the video started buffering. I thought it was odd since I had good reception but was just going to wait it out. The light went green, and the video played just long enough to say the word “wait” and started buffering again. I couldn’t see anything at all, The road was clear, but I thought I’d listen, looked left, then right again and there was a massive semi at Speed that appeared out of nowhere and ran the red light. It would have taken out the drivers side of the cab, and I’d have been toast if I didn’t wait. Definitely reminded me of my own mortality.

A redo

And yet another example, only from a bystander.

This technically happened last night, but I was just starting a graveyard shift and am only now getting it all down.

I work at a gas station chain with only numbers in its name. We’re just outside of a large chunk of suburbs- none if that “middle of nowhere”, like we aren’t exactly near any other businesses but we are rarely completely dead for hours at a time.

It was just past midnight, and with everything going on in the US right now not a lot of things other than gas stations and bars are open at night anymore so it was a slower evening.

I was the only one in the store and a car pulled up to one if the 2 double-sided pumps out front. Pretty standard white four door. I’m not great with car brands but it was a little nicer, like upper middle class and probably only a few years old.

A woman gets out and starts walking towards our door like she’s in a daze. Legit this woman looked like she saw a ghost. She wanders up, sort of freezes at the door for a second with a thousand yard stare before opening it and coming in. She didn’t go looking for anything, didn’t start shopping, just sort of stood inside for what felt like ages.

Again, bars are still open so I think maybe she’s a little drunk or had a rough night or something so I give the usual “Welcome to ‘gas station’ let me know if you need any help finding anything” and she finally notices me and immediately asks me the weirdest damn question I have ever been asked on the job. “You can see me right?”

“Yeah”. Like what else do you say? She breaks down crying in the middle of my store so I’m already headed around the corner to see what’s up. I have my cellphone out incase I need to call the cops or something for her.

I get her to sit down on a nearby pallet of soda and I’m grabbing her a bottle of water and after she catches her breath a little she tells me “I thought I had died”. Again I’m thinking maybe she is on something but she’s a middle aged woman who looks like a standard local suburban housewife. We’re a pretty boring township without your average junkies like you’d find closer to the cities.

So she asks if she can call her husband to pick her up and wait with me. She has her own phone and does so, not really telling him anything either just where she is at and if he can come get her. He says he’ll call an uber and be there as soon as possible.

We’re waiting, so far nobody else has showed up, so I’m keeping most of my attention on her- and eventually she starts to explain to me-

“I was driving home from dinner with my coworkers and as I’m driving through (nearby intersection I recognized) a truck ran a redlight and hit me.” Now, her car is still at the pump without a scratch on it. She goes on to say she remembers her car being pushed into a pole, going airborne, and then nothing.

I tried to calm her down letting her know that her car is out front and it looks fine, but she insisted that she completely blacked out, woke up in an ambulance for a split second, passed out again, and then woke up again in the driver seat of her car- at the intersection waiting for the light to change, perfectly fine.

This whole thing freaked her out so badly that she drove to the nearest anything (us) just so she could get out of the car.

Husband eventually showed up to get her. He asked if I had any idea what happened and even though she sort of explained to me I just shrugged because no, I had no idea what was happening anymore. She reluctantly got into the passenger seat of the car and he drove them back home.

That was hours ago, after which I worked an entire shift at the station trying to wrap my head around what the absolute hell I had just witnessed.

World-line slide

What about this one…

Do you guys know the whole theory about how when people die in one time line, they shift into another? I think that may have happened to me.

Back in early July of this year, my family (M45, F54, Me:19, B16), S(13) were going on a road trip to Montana to visit our grandparents. Prior to the trip, I had a horrible, horrible feeling about going. I kept having flashes of car accidents in my head, and I was sure that we were going to get in one if we left. It was so strange, because I have a pretty severe anxiety disorder, but this didn’t feel like my anxiety at all, and I never have anxiety about road trips: I love them!!

So we left Saturday of that week, I had told my parents I had a bad feeling about driving up there, but they dismissed me as being anxious, but I had never felt so certain about something in my life. Getting into that car felt like signing my death sentence. So we get about 6 hours in, and at this point, I start to think I was being ridiculous, and a wave of calmness just washes over me. This is where shit gets strange. My dad passes an underpass and everything just shifts. I feel like I saw everything in slow motion for a whole 4 or so minutes. My parents were joking beforehand, but their faces moved so slowly, and then the light in the car started to shift. This was the scary part because I thought I must have been going insane. For a few seconds, there was a huge illumination of light into our car, and I looked at my family, and could not tell who they were or what they meant to me. And then it’s like everything just came back. The light shifted back, and I knew who everyone was, but it felt like something imperceptible had changed.

I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the past few minutes, and when I reached back to remember; I saw blood, our car and another minivan in shambles on the side of the highway right beyond the underpass, and mangled bodies. I remembered sensations I should not have known: what spattered brain matter looks like, the smell of something burning, the way I couldn’t breathe. But this never happened? Yet I remember that the car in front of us had switched lanes even though there was a truck in front of us, realized it at the last second, and hit us with a lateral impact.

I have no history of psychosis, and I have never been in any sort of car accident. This wasn’t PTSD, and I have never had anxiety over being in the car in any sort of way prior to this. And maybe I could have just brushed it off, but I still think about it when I’m driving in my own car. And it’s made me a more cautious driver. I don’t know what happened, it was just a weird situation, and I remember having the distinct feeling in that moment that I had died in some sense. I am not a spiritually sensitive person by any means, I am a scientist at heart, but this truly was something I cannot explain. And I fully accept that I might be reading to much into this, and for some reason, I imagined an event that never happened, but I thought I would share anyway.

Accident

I was driving about 50 mph, and a car ran a stop sign on an on ramp and pulled out right in front of me. I remember bracing for impact and then I was about 300 yards down the highway and I saw the car at the ramp in my rearview, just about to pull out. –Chaithecat

Blink and you are elsewhere

But you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone needs to have a near-death experience…

This is only a small thing, but it still confuses the hell out of me and I can’t think of any explanation.

I was playing fetch with my dog in my living room. I threw the ball, she’d bring it back, you get it. My dog dropped the ball on my foot and waited whilst I leant down to pick it up, but then I blinked and it was gone.

I quickly checked under the sofa, thinking she’d nudged it under there or I’d accidentally kicked it, but it was nowhere to be seen. My dog was still staring at the spot where she dropped it and when it disappeared she looked just as confused as I was and jumped round looking for it.

I scoured the whole room (which wasn’t very big) and eventually found it on the opposite side of the room in the middle of the floor, even after I’d looked everywhere. We only had this one particular ball at the time, so we couldn’t have mistaken it for another one.

Not particularly exciting, but I can’t think of any explanation. My dog was just happy to have her ball back at least.

Doggie Mysteries

Dogs can be a trip…

About 30 seconds ago I was sitting on the couch, as my dog walked by to go sit on her bed we have behind the “L” part of the sectional. She had something small caught in her throat last night, I think a popcorn shell, so I was paying attention to her breathing just to make sure she got it out.

For a few minutes she was breathing fine, and then what sounded like a light snore started happening. This is semi-normal for her depending on what position she’s laying in, so I didn’t bother to go over and check on her. That went on for about 5 minutes, until the most disgusting(and to my now realization, terrifying) snore/cough/wheezing sound started happening. I go over to her to make sure she’s okay, and the exact moment I looked at her bed the sound stoped ‘mid-breath’ and she wasn’t there.

She was outside with my parents, had been for around 30 minutes. There’s no way to get out of the room without walking right past me. I don’t know who’s fucking dog I saw, and what was making that creepy ass sound 5 feet away from me, but I’m going to be staying outside for the rest of the day and hiring an exorcist.

A Slide

And this one…

My dad drank out of the same black cup everyday. One day he filled up a different white cup. I asked him what gives and he claimed to always have used that cup. I asked the rest of my family and they all said the same thing.

Slide to a different world-line template

As is this one…

I dropped my phone in the kitchen and I looked to grab it off of the floor but it wasn’t there. I heard it hit the floor but I couldn’t find it. It was in the middle of the room too, there was no way it could’ve gone more than 3 feet away from me. I checked under everything and went through the entire house looking for it but it was gone. I had my mom call my phone and it said that my line was disconnected. I checked the Find My IPhone app and it said it couldn’t find my phone because it couldn’t find a signal. That was 4 years ago, and we still haven’t found it. It’s like it hit the ground and immediately disappeared afterwards.

Shared memories of a different world-line

And check out this one…

My husband recently took an overnights job to help us out during covid. He’s only been there about two weeks and works evenings/overnights, 9pm-6am.

Last night was no different, he left home around 8:15pm. Our daughter, age 11, and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11pm, I heard keys in my backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home. I creep out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve, walks down the hall, says hi to our daughter as he passes the living room, and goes upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss and left again.

We finished our movie and went to bed. In the morning when he got home I made a joking comment about him forgetting his knee sleeve. He was genuinely confused as I recalled the previous night. Our daughter confirmed everything I said and he still was acting confused. I pulled up our security motion camera on my phone to show him when he popped in quick. But there was no footage from the night before, or any other night, of him coming home after he’s left for work.

My daughter and I both heard him, saw him, and I touched him. But he was never home during that time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened that night. We seriously have no idea what happened.

Memory wipe

And check out this one…

The year was 2011. I was in med school while my brother joined engineering college in same city.my brother is 3 years younger to me.

One day i asked him to come to my hostel as it was his free day from college.(he used to come in his free day as he missed family )

We were chatting and having foods while he suddenly asked me about a girl.

Convo

Bro- do you remember nisha(altered name for obvious reason)?

Me-nisha,who??

Bro-it seems like you have forgotten her.good for you.

Me(visibly confused)-which nisha you are talking about?

Bro(still playing)- don’t try so hard brother.you know exactly about whom i am taking about. Leave it if that’s still hurting you.i shouldn’t have bring her up.

Me(thinking that he is pulling my leg,i started to play along)- yeah i remember.i forgot her.it was bitter.i am not in touch with her.

Bro-it is not like that you can be in touch with her anyway..

Me(trying to play along)- yeah.she is probably married by now.

Bro(visibly confused)- now what nisha are you talking about???

Me-exactly the nisha you are talking about..

Bro-leave it then..

Me-yeah..

After 30 or so minutes after lunch is over

Bro-do you really not remember her?nisha?

Me(tired of this game,agitated)- bro stop this game it’s not funny anymore.i am tired of this stupid game.

Bro-what game ?

Me-i don’t really know nisha.who is she?

Bro-forget it.

And he left for the day…

I asked mom after few days about nisha.she was distraught when i asked about her.after few mon she told me that she was my gf while i was in school.she was my brothers best friend. she died in a car accident few years back.

I was dumbfounded.i don’t even recall her name,face,memory .nothing..

Her memory is totally wiped out from me.

I was disturbed and went back to home where mom showed me a pic where i was with a girl and my brother.i don’t even remember the girl.

In some cases of ptsd selective amnesia happens.but that repressed memory can be triggered by related memory.but in this case i didn’t even recall her.i was agitated because i don’t remember her.

Till this day i don’t recall anything.according to family, we were close.i didn’t try to ask her family or any other people because it seems insensitive..

World-line slide

Check out this one…

Me (M26) and my girlfriend (F25) have been living together in an apartment for two and a half years. Everything has been normal until quarantine started (around 4 weeks ago), when I started noticing some odd things.

For instance, for the last three weeks or so, my GF has been putting sugar in her morning coffee, while throughout our entire relationship she’s always been very much against it. It may seem like a small detail, but she’s always been complaining about how I don’t know what real coffee is since I put quite a lot of sugar. On the first day that I saw her drinking coffee with sugar I asked her why would she do that, and she looked at me weirded out and said something like “What are you talking about? I’ve always been putting sugar in my coffee”. I felt a bit confused for a moment but then we started talking about some other things, so I didn’t think anymore about it until the morning after, when she did the exactly same thing, and had once again the same reaction.

Fast forward a few days and another odd thing happened. We were having sex and she suddenly suggested a sex pose that we had already tried once, but it had gone wrong and it hurt her a lot so we had simply decided not to try it anymore. Naturally, I was very surprised with her suggestion, and reminded her about the time when it went wrong, and she just completely dismissed it, saying that i probably mixed her up with some ex-girlfriend or that I was just tripping. We then did the pose and we actually enjoyed it.

Today, the weirdest thing happened, which is the reason I’m writing this post. In the afternoon, I was working at home (I’m employed as a PhD student at the computer science department of a university), when my gf asked me what’s up with a guy who I’ve never heard of before. I asked her who is she referring to and she said “Well, it’s that colleague of yours who you always talk about, the one from the company where you are employed at”. I froze, and asked her to repeat, and she said the exactly same thing all over again. Then I told her that I don’t work at any company nor have I ever worked at any company, since I started a PhD straight after my Master degree. At this point, she also completely froze and we were just staring at each other completely confused and shocked for a few moments. She then asked me wtf is going on and I reminded her about the coffee thing and about the sex pose and that I don’t know anymore what is going on. At this point, she started crying too and asked what is wrong with us.

Nor she, nor me nor anyone in both families have ever had any mental problems in the past. We don’t know what to do about this.

Can anyone explain what’s wrong with us?

Yah. It’s all pretty crazy.

But all of the above examples can be explained as either intentional, or accidental slides or cross-dimensional effects.

Some examples of slides

Here’s some examples of what the slides or pre-birth world-line template switches work.

In the first example is a “slide”. You actually “fall off” your pre-birth world-line template, or the template map that you have been following and onto a new map, a new template. It diagrammatically looks something a little bit like this…

.

I have described slides in other posts. But in this post I also bring up “Glitches” and “jumps”. These are mini-changes to the world-line path that may or may not result in a slide to a new map.

And here’s an example of a “glitch” or a “jump”.

.

I really do not know why these things happen, or the mechanisms involved. I just know that they do happen, but are not an “everyday” occurrence. In a person’s life, it might only happen once in a “blue moon”.

The easiest explanation for a “almost death” is that it just wasn’t your time. But that’s a pretty lazy answer. Don’t you think? But it’s the most reasonable answer that I can think of.

As far as “glitches”, “jumps”, and “accidental slides” go, I just haven’t much of a clue. There are “holes” in our reality that open and close, and sometimes we, or things, fall through them.

And as far as I am concerned, obviously, I was “pulled out of harms way” intentionally in an “emergency slide”. The mechanism and what was going on, well… I haven’t a clue.

Let’s look at some other events which might be misunderstandings, examples of elements within our MWI, or something else. In any event, they could be “head scratchers”…

Hello Son

So, this happened about seven or eight years ago. My husband and I were laying in the bed one night, watching television. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a child in the doorway of our bedroom. Thinking it was our only child at the time, I tapped my hubby and said “Hey, shhhh b look, but I think Connor is going to try to scare us ! He turns and looks and this child walked into our room. I can’t explain it, bc it was one of those moments that seemed … somehow different. We watched in silence, soon realizing that this child was NOT out son. He toddles in, head slightly tilted back, curls bouncing and diaper squish squishing as he goes to the end of our bed.. we see his head go down (like he was crouching) and when we got up to look- he was gone. I looked at chris (my husband) and said “ Did we just see a ghost?!” Then, almost as an after thought, I said “well, we know if we have another baby, and he has curls, that he was here before he was born.” We both laugh, bc We were not trying for another baby at the time. Fascinated, we go to check on our son, and he was fast asleep. A few months later.. I’m pregnant. (Surprise!) So fast forward aNd our new baby, Liam, is two. He toddles in the room, head titled slightly back and curls bouncing, and it hit me like a bucket of ice water.. holy crap, this is the baby that came to visit us! I mean, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind.. now, on top of that, whenever Liam is staying the night elsewhere (like with my parents) he comes to visit me in my sleep .. for example- one time he came and just smiled at me while I was taking a nap.. He was in a little red shirt, and his hair was cut short (he left with it long) the next day I go to pick the kiddos up from mom, and lo and behold- his hair is freshly shorn and he is wearing a little red shirt. I asked my mom “did he wear this yesterday?” And she replies “oh, yeah he did, but he insisted on wearing it today, so he is..”. So, I look at him and say “did you go see momma yesterday in mommas dreams” he just looked at me (he was four) all big blue eyes and serious, and nodded his head.

So that’s my glitch in the matrix story. One of many, but the most profound. Our son, I guess, travels astral, and even stopped to see us before he was born. I would know those curls anywhere. the fact that my husband witnessed it with me makes it even more weird, but utterly fascinating. Thanks for reading and forgive typos please

Message

My mom died 13 years ago. About four years ago my dad was on vacation in Arizona with his girlfriend. He said he was up watching tv and the hotel phone rang.

He answered it and said it was my moms voice saying “I’m ok” he said he said “Cass?” And he said the phone was crackly and said tell HEATHER (me) I am ok” he said his girlfriend was confused why the phone ring.

He immediately called me even though it was late and he was crying. My dad doesn’t believe in the supernatural but still to this day can’t explain that call.

Message through time

Three days ago I was having conversation with my father and he was telling me about his university life. Basically my dad came from nothing, he had a very difficult up bringing and went to the worst school and high school in our city. When it was time for him to join university, my grandfather passed away leaving my dad to take care for the rest of the family as he was the oldest son. He took a wrong a major because of the wrong advices of the people and how he regrets that to this day. The courses were taught in English which is a second language for us and how he didn’t even know the language. My dad told me that it was the darkest times in his life and he just wanted to run away and was even thinking of taking his own life. Now very recently he got his masters in English literature and he was telling me that he didn’t think it would be ever possible for him. My dad just recently finished this degree at an age of 55.

The next morning my dad had to drive to this town because his distant relatives live there and they are struggling financially, my dad is very a kind soul and he wanted to help them . The town is 3 hours drive away. He usually takes public transport but didn’t because of recent crisis. He drove there and my mom was worried so we decided we will keep calling him after every hour to check. Well i decided to call him , now keep in mind because it’s highway network signals get very weak. He told me to wait and parked at a nearby restaurant it was like a check point for trucks. I don’t know what came over me but I started crying and went on to tell him how proud i was of him, i just babbled and kept saying that he shouldn’t think he is lacking because he is not. He was an amazing father and a great person to look up to.

You guys my dad started crying he told me that he will talk to me when he returns. Well he returned and he just hugged me and was telling me that how 30 years ago he was visiting the same town and it was the time when he was at his lowest. He was visiting the same relatives and he was in a bus which stopped at a petrol station. He called his mother and when he picked the phone without even dialling he heard my voice. It was me telling him the exact same thing which I just said yesterday. He said that he didn’t even called my grandmother, he just stood there and cried. It gave him strength to keep fighting. He said he just now realized it was me whose voice he heard.

My parents are now taking this as sign from God who helped my dad when he thought no one was there for him.

World-line switch

I am a bit shocked.

I had a very good friend who crafted small jewellery and I have a few pieces from her. I got a pair of earrings more than 8 years ago and lost one of it after wearing them just a couple of times.

I always told her she had to craft a replacement but unfortunately she got very sick and died of cancer very quickly, she never had the chance to craft anything else.

I kept the single earring in a little box with some other small random memories and trinkets.

I am now moving to my own place and checking the memories in this little box, both earrings are there and I can’t explain when or how or why.

Probably in other universe my own me lost the unique earring she had.

World-line glitch

This is my first post, so bear with me, but after reading many other glitch stories, I wanted to share mine here.

In early December 2015, my now ex-boyfriend’s mother passed away in the home following surgery and other health problems related to her heart (she was born with a rare condition). Unfortunately she went into cardiac arrest and we were unable to save her, so the event in and of itself was extremely traumatic and unexpected.

A couple of nights later, we decided to go see some friends who wanted to offer their condolences to my ex; everyone loved his mom. We were all sitting in our friends’ living room watching tv and, to be honest, they were really trying to distract us from everything.

One friend was just being her goofy self and I was taking Snapchat videos and I DISTINCTLY remember taking a video of (let’s call her) Amy… I saved the video, but when I looked at my screen to watch it, it was not Amy…. it was a grainy video with a background that appeared to be outside and 100000% not in a living room, but on the screen was my ex’s mom…

She said the words, “I’m okay baby. I’m okay” and multiple other friends saw it on my phone before it disappeared. She looked young and vibrant and has a huge smile on her face. Someone had tossed my phone to another friend across the couch to see and the video then disappeared. When we watched the original video back immediately after, my ex’s mom was gone. It was Amy in the video again just like I saw it while recording it in the first place.

My ex and his mom had a very close relationship, best friends really, so when we saw her on my screen letting him know she was okay… it was astounding.

I saw it first and everyone noticed i was visibly upset. I cannot imagine what went through my ex’s mind and heart when he saw that, but to this day, it’s something we talk about and something he shares with new friends… something we simply cannot explain other than her coming thru in a glitch to let us know she was okay.

Visit to the past

I live in a very small town. We have a small grocery store, hardware store, you know the drill. I was done getting groceries and hopped in my car to head home. As I pulled up to the end of the driveway of the store, blinker on to get onto the main road, I see a big, white, lifted Chevy pickup driving toward me that I need to wait for. I watch it as drives closer to me, remarking to myself that it looks so similar to my husband’s, just older and rusted around the edges. It even has the same black emblem and large iron cross bumper. As the truck goes past me my jaw nearly fell open. Staring at me intently was a man almost identical to my husband… but with a longer, greying beard, and grey hair around the ears. I quickly gathered myself together and pulled out behind the truck and up to the stop sign that followed. He was staring at me still in his side mirror. Glancing away and then staring at me again. He took off like a shot the first chance he got, and I tried to follow to see which direction he took, but a car was coming and I couldn’t get out behind him in time. The truck sped off toward my road, but I don’t know if he turned in that direction or not.

I know that’s a little crazy, but I couldn’t help feeling the total connection I feel with my husband when I saw his reflection in that side mirror staring at me. It gives me goosebumps to think about it because it was like he knew that I was me, and I was the wrong age, and that he needed to get out of there before i could follow. I got home and my husband was there, working in his woodshop. I told him about it and he chuckled and asked if he looked hot when he was old. I mean…. he did if it was really him!

Disappearing gal

So mobile alert . This happened two days ago.

I was at my home because of quarantine and according to me i was sleeping.

When i woke up my mom was looking at me having a very shocked and worried expression and tears in her eyes. She asked me where the hell i was and i said that i was sleeping right here in my bed. She didn’t believe me said she checked and i wasn’t there.

So apparently, my family woke up in the morning and i didn’t come for breakfast, my dad came into my room and just saw the blanket and pillow (i do sleep with blanket on face). Then my mom came to wake me up and took the blanket off no one was there . Then she panicked and told my dad. They searched the entire house and tried calling me nothing worked. Then they asked the neighbours if they had seen me leaving but neighbours couldn’t help as well. My mom was very afraid at that point and they called the police and that’s when my dad had went to file the report and i woke up.

We called my dad and told him i was back and he wanted an explanation and I couldn’t give one. I said i was just sleeping and then i woke up and this whole thing has happened.

I wanted to make it clear that i do sleep with blanket covering my entire body and my mom did made it clear that she took the blanket off and no one was there. We all are very shaken rn.

Strange ghosts

Let me preface this by saying there has always been creepy shit happening around me and I have several stories of my Dad’s old house which myself and my siblings all agree is haunted as fuck. I also had my dead best friend visit me twice which was nice.

So this evening, my partner (42 M) and I (30 F) were upstairs sorting laundry, when his daughter (17) called us downstairs as dinner was ready.

I was heading down the stairs, my partner right behind me, literally two steps behind me.

He did his usual thing of tickling the back of my neck as we walked.

The bottom of our stairs is wooden so you can hear when somebody steps onto it from the carpeted stairs. When we got to the bottom, my feet hit the floor as usual. I turned to ask him something and he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t fucking there.

I totally froze for a second and looked up the stairs and there he was. On the top step, pale and shaking.

Asked him what the fuck just happened and he kept saying

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I was behind you and before I hit the bottom, the next step took me back upstairs!”

We are very freaked out. Didn’t say shit to our girl as she is already leery of this stuff although he and I are somewhat used to it.

I am trying to get the courage to leave my laptop recording audio overnight because there definitely is SOMETHING weird happening.

EDITED TO ADD

I was JUST talking to my partner about the jump while we were cleaning our bedroom and the second he made a joke about “Spooks A-Poppin'” our bedroom door and bathroom door just slammed shut one after the other.

I’m chalking it up to our bedroom window being open a crack…I don’t want to think of alternatives.

FURTHER UPDATE

To the people messaging me saying my relationship is “yikes” and to join certain subs (Female Dating Strategy) I appreciate the concern.

To the other eejit who messaged calling my partner a sexual deviant, kindly relax and focus in your own relationship, if you have one. We are together 11years. I’m second Mom to the kids.

Not every relationship with an age gap is abusive. Not every relationship with an age gap is coercive.

I love him and the kids more than anything, and I would DO anything for my family.

So please, I appreciate the concern, but don’t assume he is abusive or that I was “groomed” as one lovely person messaged.

And finally, to the person who asked me why I would want to be “fake Mom” to his kids- I’m sorry that’s how you view my life from this one small snippet I posted and I hope you are content in your own life.

Goin’ to California

Back story, this is important later: for about 9 months or so I was planning to move to California last September. Plans fell through do to financial reasons and other opportunities had come my way.

This happened to me while I was at work closing, so I was completely alone. A customer came in, he was maybe in his early 60’s (I’m 21). I wouldn’t say he looked like me, But he was definitely dressed similar to me, and that’s how I’d expect myself to dress at that age. Kinda old man surfy SoCal vibes. But this guy says “man I need some caffeine, I know it’s late but I’ve been consuming that stuff daily since I was a little kid.” I told him “ME TOO! Since I was about 8 I started drinking coffee” which is a fact about me. This guy continues to talk about how he loves the music I was playing in the store, etc. Then out of the blue this guy says “so I have to ask, why’d you choose not to move to California?”…. I did not mention California to this man at all, I have never met this man, I don’t know who he is or how he knew. None of my coworkers, or really anyone beside my family knew about my plans for California. I served him his drink, and as he walked out he said “you’ll go, maybe not now, but you love that place”… Again, I never spoke about California to him, but he knew I was planning to move there and he knew I loved that place. He walked out and I have not seen him since. I asked my parents and anyone who knew about my plans if they had told anyone, more specifically an older man. They all said no per my request to keep it on the down low. To this day I am still in awe.

Seeing with better eyesight

For a bit of context, my eyesight is horrible, even half a foot in front of my face is nothing but blurry color. Yesterday my mom and brother picked me up to go to an appointment. I was running a little late, so didn’t have time to put my contacts in/ do my makeup and was getting ready on the drive.

So while mom was driving I was in the passenger seat with the mirror down. I took off my glasses to apply my eyeshadow. My brother, who was sitting behind me, asked me a question and I turned to look back at him. When I turned my head back around, I quickly finished my eyeshadow and shut the mirror.

I was looking out my window at the farmland just off the road and thinking how beautiful it was when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t put my glasses back on, they were sitting on the dashboard. As soon as I had the realization, my perfect vision went back to being just blurred colors. It was instant, like flipping a switch on my sight. It was so shocking that I yelled “Holy shit!”

My outburst startled my mom and brother, so I told them what had just happened and they said they believed me but couldn’t think of a rational reason for it. We tried to figure it out for the rest of the drive but honestly couldn’t. Tbh, if there’s some secret to magically fixing my eyesight that I accidentally stumbled upon, then I wish I could find it again!

Complex

This just happened, and my heart is still beating like crazy.

I was chilling on the couch, scrolling through instagram, when I heard my cat jumping down from his bed. He usually wants to go outside after sleeping, so I looked at him and said «you wanna go outside, buddy?» with my annoying cat-voice. He just looked at me, not answering, like a normal cat. I was ready to go let him out, but looked back at my phone for just a second. That’s when it hit me. I let him outside a few hours ago. I turned my head to look back at him in confusion, but he wasnt there.

I went to the front door, and yep, he was outside and came running when I opened the door. I have no idea what just happened

Alice in wonderland effect

This happened a few days ago. My husband and I were at home, neither of us were intoxicated etc, just a normal evening. For reference, I’m 5’8″ and my husband is 5’7″; we’ve been together for years and know very well what the other looks like head on. I had gone to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and something felt off. I wasn’t sure what until my husband asked if I was taller than usual. I was flat footed and barefoot, but realized my viewpoint was as if I was on my tiptoes – I could see the top of the fridge, and my hips were above the kitchen counter. I turned to face my husband and he seemed much shorter to me than usual; our eyes are usually pretty close to even but they seemed much lower than mine. He says he felt like his height didn’t change at all, just mine.

Understandably, we were both freaked out and were wandering around our apartment trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, everything felt right again and I returned to the kitchen; I could no longer see the top of the fridge and the counter was back even with my hips. My husband returned, and both of us looked “right” again to the other. It was like once we couldn’t see each other anymore, it fixed itself.

I’ve heard of alice in wonderland syndrome before, but for it to happen where someone else can see it seems impossible. Has anyone else experienced anything like this or have any ideas?

Unspoken communication

Visited my BF’s parents in a city where I had never been before. We sat around in the kitchen talking and then his mother asked me to get her her scissors. I got up, went to the guest room dresser, opened the second drawer and got them out. There was no way I could have known where they were.

Consciousness sharing / Transposition

We were all completely sober , quick preface.

I’m currently driving home from my lunch break so I’m using Siri to talk hopefully this makes sense. So back in the summer we had a huge friend trip to Lake Powell. For anyone that has been there you know it’s absolutely beautiful, anyways we were boating through the canyons and going deeper and deeper into the canyons lake Powell.

At one point I thought in my mind something along the lines of “damn, this place is so beautiful it almost looks fake or like it was designed to look this way by something” when I started saying that in my mind, a friend turned around to me and said “dude, it feels like we’re in a movie and we are looking at movie props, it looks so fake” and I turned around and looked and and said “dude what the fuck did you just say? I was thinking the EXACT SAME THING.”

We were both freaking out about it but then it got a little freakier. We were sitting at the back of the boat looking at our 10 or so friends standing up while the boat was slowly going through the canyons, and as I watched them looking at the scenery I experienced an altered state of conscience. The best way to describe it is the façade of the human experience was dropped and all of a sudden my friends looked like gods or angelic beings experiencing “earth” and just enjoying the moment.

My friend turned to me and said, “dude, look at our friends, they’re so beautiful and alive, they look like angels!” And I knew at that moment we were both experiencing the same thing.

The best way to describe what we saw, is it looked like we placed ourselves in a video game and were enjoying what we created. It’s super hard to describe this experience. If you’ve seen maze runner, you know how they make you forget everything before you go into the maze but yet you had an existence before? It felt like that! That nature of reality teased us and slightly withdrew, and we saw our friends and this earth for what it could truly be for a brief moment in time

EDIT #1. I heard a story of a man who experienced something similar where at random times he also would “tap in” to this outside reality whilst being sober. He came up with a theory that human consciousness and our Brains can act like a Needle finding the groove on a vinyl record. Once we tune it specifically and find ourselves in this “groove” music can be played, or in other words, we can start experiencing some fascinating things. I have to find where I read this though, but supposedly it happens randomly to a lot of people!

Superpowers

I worked at Applebee’s and an older coworker told me he’d gotten in a car accident that left him with a scar and some brain damage. So he had memory problems, but also said he’d developed powers. He said he could get inside people’s heads and feel exactly what they were feeling, and could even influence their feelings, and also influence the objects around him. This seemed bizarre to me, and I thought him looney because of his brain damage. Well, a few weeks later we had a busy shift, and some customers pissed him off. I asked what was wrong and he shouted that they were assholes and gestured with his arm up in the air. At that instant on a table several feet away, everything flew off of it–plates, cups, napkin holder–everything! They hit the seat and wall, and I stood there shocked because no else was nearby. He didn’t even notice. I told him later, and he was embarrassed, saying when he got angry he couldnt control his powers. The guy got fired soon after and I never saw him again

Premonitions

One more and this one has happened to other people. You can even search this one up to hear their stories too. It’s dreams of 9/11, before it happened. It was 1999 and I had a dream about a plane and 2 tall buildings. A plane crashed into one. The next plane I’m on it, and talking to an older lady across from me. Next thing I know I’m out of the plane and I see it crash into the other building. Then there was an odd shaped building and a plane crashes near that too. A dream like that for me at 11yrs old was odd. Did I dream of 9/11? It still haunts me. Same year, I dreamt of a train crash, deadly one, it derailed badly. Woke in a cold sweat. Got up, go to living room, my mom turns the news on, then we both see a train accident, exactly what I just saw in my dream. I was so shocked, I wouldn’t speak that day. My mom even called a counselor to come over, but I still wouldn’t speak. And no, that news wasn’t on while I was asleep. It was breaking news. And it happened in another country

Meeting dead people

A beautiful thing happened to me a week after my dad died. I had slept at my mums house with my 2 youngest kids to keep my mum company, we all slept in the living room, I was on the couch and the kids were on the sofa bed. I was dreaming that I woke up and my dad was standing over me smiling. I told him he looked like one of my brothers and he just smiled wider but didn’t speak. I could see all this from above like I wasn’t looking out of my eyes but watching from above. When I woke up I was in the exact position I had been in in my dream and my kids were too. Its probably nothing just my subconscious showing me what I wanted to be real, but I like to think it was real and he was showing me he was still there.

A visit from Dad

Not too long after my dad died, I was sleeping on the couch and my mom on the floor of the living room. She suddenly woke up and saw my dad standing off to the side watching me. She called his name and he looked over at her and disappeared. Story 2: I graduated college a month after my brother died. My brother was a very silly and goofy person by nature. As I was walking with my classmates to our seats at the beginning of the ceremony my mom took a video of me and mentioned that my brother was here with us. I don’t think my brother ever went to my campus before he died either. When we looked back to the video we see the screen just contorting going every which direction until filming was stopped. It seemed like my brother was just trying to mess with me one last time.

Loss of a loved one

The only “supernatural” thing thats happen to me and I don’t quite know if its my psyche or really happened. My half brother who i was quite close with took his life nearly 11 years ago now. I was absolutely devastated when I found out the next day. The night before (when he was dieing) i had this absolute horribly bad feeling in my chest and i kept saying to my husband “something doesn’t feel right….something really bad is happening. I forever regret not calling family members to check on them all and have tremendous guilt over it. I feel like God was trying to tell me and I just didn’t realize.

So what is going on?

Answer: “Many things”.

When I generate a flat terrain topographical map to illustrate the pre-birth world-line template, I just describe it as a simple frame of dots connected by lines. In reality, there are “other things” also present. Maybe best described as a kind of “cloud like” area that pulls, tugs, or alters the movement through certain sections of MWI travel.

I will cover all that later on.

I guess the point is that humans don’t really understand our reality very well.

Oh. We think that we do, but we do not. And if we pay attention and listen to the experiences of others, we can see elements of our reality and the lives that we live.

I have some insight as to what could possibly be going on, but I do not have all the answers. Perhaps some astute MM reader might do some sleuthing and come up with some ideas or conclusions where I cannot provide insight.

In any event, I do hope that you enjoyed this post.

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Some rambling thoughts on what my MAJestic purpose(s) were. Because on the surface nothing really makes sense.

This article is a bit of a ramble-on meandering stream of disjointed thoughts and wanderings. It concerns the WTF concept and idea that the USN would take a Naval Aviator, implant them, train them to interface with an artifice, and then let them wander about the United States as an “average Joe” experiencing life. It makes no sense, and then to be “retired” in the manner that I have (previously) described, adds complexity to a really basic question. What was this all about?

And yes, I have mentioned all this before.

Nothing makes sense

I described my experiences. I described my travels. I described my work experience. I described how the systems worked. I described my “retirement”, and I described what I know of our benefactors, and their understanding of the universe. I’ve described it all.

But yet none of it makes sense.

I mean, I can understand that it doesn’t make sense to “sheeple”. They are automatons that are born and bred to serve. But it just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, come on, even the bullshit narratives of “Space Marines”, and “Reptilians” make better sense.

There’s no clear cut answers.

Instead, all I find myself doing is writing reams upon reams of lore here on MM. And I seem to be driven to describe things related to how the universe works, and how thoughts work, and the quantum aspects of our associations within this nursery that the human species seems to be so damn attached to.

What’s the point?

What’s the point?

I am reminded of a scene from the Woody Allen movie “Annie Hall”.

Annie Hall is one of the truest, most bittersweet romances on film. In it, Allen plays a thinly disguised version of himself: Alvy Singer, a successful--if neurotic--television comedian living in Manhattan. 

Annie (the wholesomely luminous Dianne Keaton) is a Midwestern transplant who dabbles in photography and sings in small clubs. 

When the two meet, the sparks are immediate--if repressed. 

Alone in her apartment for the first time, Alvy and Annie navigate a minefield of self-conscious "is-this-person-someone-I'd-want-to-get-involved-with?" conversation. 

As they speak, subtitles flash their unspoken thoughts: the likes of "I'm not smart enough for him" and "I sound like a jerk." 

Despite all their caution, they connect, and we're swept up in the flush of their new romance. 

Allen's antic sensibility shines here in a series of flashbacks to Alvy's childhood, growing up, quite literally, under a rumbling roller coaster. 

His boisterous Jewish family's dinner table shares a split screen with the WASP-y Hall's tight-lipped holiday table, one Alvy has joined for the first time. 

His position as outsider is uncontestable he looks down the table and sizes up Annie's "Grammy Hall" as "a classic Jew-hater." The relationship arcs, as does Annie's growing desire for independence. 

It quickly becomes clear that the two are on separate tracks, as what was once endearing becomes annoying. 

Annie Hall embraces Allen's central themes--his love affair with New York (and hatred of Los Angeles), how impossible relationships are, and his fear of death. 

But their balance is just right, the chemistry between Allen's worry-wart Alvy and Keaton's gangly, loopy Annie is one of the screen's best pairings. It couldn't be more engaging. 

--Susan Benson

In the scene a young Woody Allen is seeing a (school) psychologist because he doesn’t seem to be interested in anything. No matter what his parents or his teachers do, he just cannot get motivated. The dialog goes like this…

Indeed.

If the universe is going to expand in a hundred trillion, billion years, and then all collapse upon it’s self a trillion, trillion leaders later…

….What’s the point?

Yeah. The movie is a trip. If you haven’t seen it, go ahead and watch it. It’s pretty bizarre, and I must of watched it about four times while in University.

Alvy Singer:  You know, even as a kid, I always went for the wrong women. I think that's my problem. When my mother took me to see Snow White, everyone fell in love with Snow White. I immediately fell for the Wicked Queen.

So, all jokes aside, I’ve been wondering about all this.

Nothing makes sense to me.

The harsh retirement just doesn’t seem to fit. The purposes, as I understand it to be doesn’t seem to fit either. I mean (to say), “Anchoring world-lines”, heck! Most people don’t even know what the population of the United States is, and I’m supposed to describe a role in manipulation of world-line clusters?

When I lived in Arkansas, they actually thought that Boston was a city outside of Kentucky. I kid you not. They didn’t even know how many inches were in a foot, or how many inches were in a meter for goodness sakes!

And yet, I am to try to explain all this…!

And what I do end up explaining is so fundamental simple that it defies the imagination the I would be tasked to write on about it. Like “time” for instance, or the relation of the non-physical to the physical. Or how different species think differently, or even the very nature of thoughts! All of these things are so obvious that it doesn’t make sense that I would configured as some sort of tool to disseminate this information.

The point is really clear.

Why am I tasked to explain the outrageously simple to my fellow humans via this venue?

After all, and it seems quite clear right now, that the PTB that rule over the levers of power (that ultimately control MAJ) do not give a flying fuck about Americans, humanity, knowledge or spirit. They just do not care.

They. Just. Do. Not Care.

So it makes little sense (to me) that they would allow or approve of my “retirement”, yet at the same time making it so that I must continually and passionately  discharge, and de-gorge my “knowledge” to the public. They do not care. They make no money off of it.

Why set me to full-on gouge?

Questions

An influencer asked this question…

“Likewise, something doesn't sit right with me when the Gov takes its best, brightest, and most competitive aviators & engineers, put's 'em through a brutal career including war, implants, and obscene responsibilities, and then turns around and wants to put 'em in the garbage disposal when they go to retire.  That is really bizarre.  Maybe you can write more about that one of these days. “

Indeed. And I pretty much responded much like this…

Indeed, to me it seems like America and many of it’s agencies are run by psychopathic idiots or… perhaps (better yet)  sycophants appointed by psychopathic idiots. It really seems that way.

What was my purpose?

What was it? To anchor world-lines?

Well, if that was the case, perhaps the MAJestic leadership could have found more “average” folk to perform that “heavy lifting”. It seems that in that particular role, being average was a mandated requirement. So it just doesn’t seem that the performance criteria was all that well mapped out … if that was the sole objective.

Perhaps THIS is the sole objective. THIS, right now, all this…..

Maybe this MM is the sole accumulation of over forty years in MAJestic. Maybe my purpose is to (for what ever reason)  is to help the human species understand their place in a universe that is way outside of their ability to grasp. Maybe its to help give a little nudge towards some pretty fundamental understandings that most humans haven’t a clue about. Maybe…

Maybe…

Or, maybe not.

Really. What’s the point of a mechanic realizes that thoughts can bend reality? What benefit does mankind obtain when a Uber Driver knows that time is nothing more than the accumulation of world-line travels? What benefit to mankind is it that there are different kinds of sentience, and that there are approved archetypes? How important is it that a carpenter, a computer technician, an accountant, a bus driver, and a housewife understands that we humans are growing and learning inside a policed nursery?

Nothing, I must add, really is all that clear.

The entire internet is filled with hordes of folk that are selling “snake oil” to a gullible audience. Some of it is “magic crystals”, some of it is “advice about reptilians”, some of it is “how to get rich”, while others talk about other things…

Ai!

And then to top it all off…

…what about my retirement. I mean, I get it. MAJ outsources the retirement. Just take the “best and brightest” and then when you are finished your toss them out into the dumpster with no fanfare. I mean, that’s the “American Way”, as illustrated in such timeless classic movies and “Office space” and “Joe vs the Volcano“.

But seriously, do you do that to people who you have invested millions, of not billions of dollars, on?

It’s like the spoiled, petulant child that pulls a temper tantrum and destroys the massive big-screen television by throwing an iPad at it. Everything is gone and wasted, and the child continues in complete oblivion as to the value and worth of the loss.

A discussion with a friend

I was having a discussion with a friend, not too long ago. In it we were talking about certain people we knew, and certain bosses. And one of the things that kept on cropping up was the idea that there are these people, bosses, people in power, that have zero ability to emote or see the consequences of their acitions.

As my friend said…

"A guy works for twenty years. You know his family, you see him day in and day out. you go through good times and bad times together. Then well, you need to cut head count. So you fire him. And that's that. And suddenly he no longer exists."

And there is no remorse. No compassion. No guilt. No understanding. It’s almost like you press the DEL key and Poof! all your association with him is gone in a nano-second.

Yeah. We know that these people abound.

What is so absolutely frightening is just how common it is in the United States today that they exist, and that they are thriving within enormous positions of absolute power.

Merit advancement only so far

It appears that advancement through merit only goes so far. Then you hit a “glass ceiling”, and you just cannot pass through that barrier. For above you lies the realm of the “special” people, and you do not belong there.

In that realm, other rules apply.

It’s sort of like this…

It seems like you must work really hard to be promoted though merit to get anywhere in America today. Then when you have achieved so much, there is this invisible glass ceiling that you hit. And no matter what you do, you cannot break through that invisible barrier.

Now above that barrier are the “anointed ones”. These are the people who are appointed by the upper-level bosses. We often don’t know what the appointment criteria is because many of them are absolutely clueless. I call them “the toadies”.

And of course, the “Bosses” are over all.

And that is how it appears the United States works today.

Sorry to say.

That is the impression that I get.

Answers

And with that impression comes some answers. You see, as long as you believe that the systems in place for control, power and advancement are the same for everyone, then my story and my experience makes no sense.

But, when you come to the conclusion that the leadership is stratified, and that each strata has it’s own set of systems for advancement, control, monitoring and understandings, then EVERYTHING falls into place. The toadies could care less about the underlings below them. They no more care about them than a cow cares about ants in the grass. Check off some boxes, and move on. No need to stop and take heed.

And when I look at things in that manner, it all makes sense. Everything makes sense.

The US elite, as the stupidest ruling class in the world, won't be able to stop relative or absolute decline.

Yup! Main reason is because the American ruling class is one that does not deserve to be in that class. Just look at the top layer of people in that class. They are no more than mouthpieces having memorized buzz words and cliches, who got to where they are because of the stupidity of a dumbified populace. Oh, the same can be said of the rest of the so-called West.

-Posted by: Oriental Voice | Mar 3 2021 19:28 utc | 35

And you can pretty much see the overall scheme of things. Right?

The Leadership are appointees

Yup, and they put their sycophant toadies in top levels of their organizations.

Here's a nice rambling rant along these lines, more or less from the Burning Platform blog. It is titled The ship of Theseus.  Reprinted as found. All credit to the author. Edited to fit this venue, and I do believe that it's a pretty good read.

“Here is a rule to remember in the future when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not ‘This is misfortune’, but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Somewhere between elementary school and fifth grade my parents bought a townhouse in a brand-new community built on a former farm field in East Windsor. The development was named Twin Rivers and it sat about a half a mile from Exit 8 of the New Jersey Turnpike. The project was designed to capitalize on commuters to NYC fifty miles to the north and young Boomer families fleeing the urban jungle of the late 1960’s.

The word townhouse makes it sound sophisticated, but it was just a plywood box in a long string of plywood boxes banged out under the Mid-Atlantic sun by the last of the old-school tradesmen that dominated the sprawl of suburbia; Italian masons, Polish plumbers, Piney carpenters. In the field in front of my house they built a monstrosity of a school, a squatting, gold, geodesic dome fixed to the ground like a cross between a UFO and a Bucky Fuller fever dream.

It was called the Ethel McKnight School after a local teacher who had served the community for over 45 years. For her efforts she received, as a token of respect and admiration, the world’s noisiest, hottest, asbestos-sprayed middle school, named in her honor.

We’d moved in from our former residence at Northgate Garden Apartments which featured no gardens and served as a gate to an endless plain of potato farms that happened to be to the north. We were, by today’s standards, fairly low on the economic ladder and the new home in a slightly nicer location was a mark of my parent’s upward mobility. It cost them a whopping twenty-seven thousand dollars and it was a stripped-down minimalist dwelling, but it had two floors and basement with a backyard-not much larger than a one car garage surrounded by fence to separate from the neighbors on either side.

I had my own room; my parents had a bigger one with its own bathroom and from the moment they moved in they went at it, one project after another to turn it into our own home. I spent most of my time in those first couple of months before school started exploring my surroundings. At the end of the row of houses that marked Bennington Drive was a freshly dug lake filled with murky brown water and snapping turtles. All of the streets had historical names based on the American Revolution as a way of giving some history to what was otherwise a brand-new town.

The place was saturated with history. I regularly picked up jasper arrowheads and grooved axes pecked from river cobbles in the adjoining field, ancient relics turned up by brand new activity and I kept them lined neatly on the shelves above my desk. Sometimes I’d turn up white, lead musket balls and verdigris colonial coppers, bits of broken Delftware, and blackened silver shoe buckles, wondering about the people who’d left them behind and where they’d gone. Just up the road was the site of Washington’s decisive blow against the retreating British columns at the battle of Monmouth, and on the other side of Route 1 to the west was Princeton where my own ancestors had fought so long ago.

And everywhere you looked there were scores of granite monuments and weathered memorial plaques commemorating one famous colonial figure or another. Washington Slept Here was an actual sign planted in the middle of Quaker Bridge Road, rooted beside a massive oak tree that had stood there for at least three centuries until it was removed years later, disappeared into the bowels of some State of New Jersey storage locker, the tree soon to follow to make room for more lanes, for more cars.

My father had taken a job with a Wall Street helping to integrate a computer language for business named COBOL into the mainframe computers that were just beginning to come on line. He took the bus every morning to Port Authority and in the evenings my mother and I would drive to the parking lot of Mom’s Peppermill and wait for him to climb off the orange and black striped Suburban Express, his pant cuffs filled with pale yellow punched tape chads.

Those years were, for me at least, the idyllic American childhood. I rode my bike, a blue Schwinn Stingray Deluxe with a banana seat and a sissy bar to deliver The Trenton Times to a couple dozen customers every morning of the week and twice that number on Sundays. I don’t remember how much I earned, it couldn’t have been much, but I remember having money of my own, of being able to buy a slice of pizza- only thirty-five cents, that I recall- and a cold 8 oz. Coca-Cola in the green glass bottle for another dime.

I held on to some of the change I earned, Mercury dimes and Standing Liberty quarters, not because they were made of silver, but because they looked like Roman coins to me; classic, beautiful. I didn’t like the Roosevelt dimes because they had little ridges, called reeding, that ran around the perimeter and because right down the road there was a gigantic sculpture of his head in the town bearing his name right on the edge of Lake Etra and every time we passed by it to go to the lumber yard, I’d look at his baleful stare, looking out across the lily pads like he was watching a bobber waiting for a strike.

I could never understand why they’d put that pensive face on a coin instead of the graceful Mercury with his winged cap and I have held a strange grudge ever since. And so, I grew up there for a time, solitary mostly, studiously aware of the world around me, imbued by the long trail of people that had been here before me, their artifacts and statues scattered about.

In the field between our home and the school was an old MIG, a captured North Korean jet stripped down to nothing more than the fuselage and canopy, dropped there on a small concrete pad by the local VFW post for kids to climb on. The skin was a sun-scorched olive drab and on each wing, there was a faded red start that vibrated in contrast to the rest. It was pretty big to an 11-year-old and I’d seen more than a few kids take a bad fall from the wings, divots of kid skin dug out on the raised rivets and bolts, heads split open climbing in and out of the derelict cockpit, little tufts of children’s hair sprouting from every metal snag.

Beyond that sat my school, its gilded dome oddly reminiscent of the shells on the giant snappers that lurked in the muddy lake beside it. I could walk across the field in a couple of minutes and be home before the rest of the kids finished filling the seats on the bus each afternoon. That year featured a lot of fragmented memories, some of which were clear as day to me half a century later while others remain concealed by a darkness that never abates.

At night the radio in my room played a mix of AM music that came in clear as a bell, 77 WABC and Cousin Brucie playing a constant mix of the greatest music I had ever heard; Black Magic Woman, The Long and Winding Road, Your Song, Green-Eyed Lady and The Tears of a Clown. The songs were always about some kind of love, but there was an innocence to it that fit the time, from I Want You Back sung by a kid my own age, to the heartbreaking words of a much older lady who’d lost out again in One Last Bell to Answer.

I would listen to those tunes, memorizing every line and then just before I fell asleep, I’d turn the dial to WOR and listen to Jean Shepherd from the opening music, the trumpet trill from some far off race track that led into the heart pumping tempo of Authur Fiedler and the Boston Pops knocking out one minute and fifty-seven seconds of Richard Stauss’ Bahn Frei Polka. He’d shill for a few minutes for his sponsor, General Tires (sooner or later you’ll own General) and then he’d launch into yet another nightly shaggy dog story from his own childhood in far off Gary, Indiana, an impossibly wonderful and far off place from my darkened bedroom in central New Jersey.

A few years later my parents moved us again. My mother had taken a course in bookkeeping at Trenton State College and began to do work for a string of shady businesses along Route 130. A banana importer with a name right out of a Scorcese movie and an aluminum siding sales company that morphed into an above ground swimming pool company when the weather warmed up. There was a retired boxer and sometime mentioned in the newspapers Gambino associate that had a couple of car washes and a TV rental outfit that did an early version of the check cashing business on the side and half dozen others besides.

I have no idea if my mother knew about the kind of work she was doing but there’s no way she couldn’t and now, looking back on her life through the rearview mirror of the years since she died, there’s no doubt that she was both smart enough and shrewd enough to parlay that skill set to our benefit. She had been born into abject poverty moving as she described it, from pillar to post her entire life until she met my father and fell in love. My father for his part continued to please his employers with his acumen and capacity to solve complex problems simply.

Eventually my parents, who’d married as teenagers and with nothing, bought a beautiful home in Princeton where I spent my teenage years attending a celebrated prep school and reaping the benefits of the American dream come to fruition. I went from memorizing the times tables and dressing like a pilgrim each Autumn, to learning Latin that I cannot forget even though I cannot use it; bo, bis, bit, bamus, bantus, bantur. I, isti, it, imus, istus, erunt.

My parents, descended from 11 generations of impoverished founders that struggled from the first colonies on the edge of the Hudson and the Millstone and through the centuries that followed, had finally reached the Promised Land. Where they had spent their lives sitting down to supper in the kitchen, we could now eat our dinner in the dining room.

Plutarch told the story of ship which sailed under Theseus and the youth of Athens, returned from Crete and continued to sail until the time of Demetrious Phalereus. And in that time whenever the boards would rot or the oars grow old, each piece was replaced one by one, over time until no part of that original ship remained, but that ship appeared to all who looked upon it to be the same as she ever was from the outside.

Philosophers Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Hobbes and Locke have revisited the question over time, questioning that it either was or was not the same ship and thus the paradox arose. Old things go away, and once the living die. What was real becomes a memory, and then is forgotten, leaving little more than shards and fragments from which we can only surmise at their original purpose.

I did not turn out as my mother had hoped. I did well in school, nearly aced the SAT’s bound for an Ivy League education and shot for the gold ring but I chose to follow another path and enlisted in the Army to become a paratrooper, just like my uncle had. I wanted to serve my country like the long line of men in my family who’d gone before me, fighting and sometimes dying in places like Pleiku and Anzio, Kasserine and The Somme, Fredricksburg and Trenton.

I had, like all those singers I had listened to on the radio in my room at night, fallen in love, not with a girl but with my country, or at least the image I had of it in my mind. All of those trips to the Shore with its salty air and thundering waves and the moonlit drives home through the Pine Barrens, the picnics at Washington’s Crossing on the Delaware, the sight of New York City rising in the distance like some modern Camelot on those day trips my father would take us on, to see the museums and shop at Macy’s and FAO Schwartz, they all added up to something much bigger than any ambition my mother may have had for me.

And I followed it along gladly, expectantly, filled with pride, resolute. The tales told by my relatives under the apple tree in my grandparent’s yard while the sky dimmed and lightning bugs glowed, the hikes up to Bowman’s Tower not far from the old glassworks where my great-grandfather drowned, the camp-outs in backyards, the squirrel hunts with .22’s and later, frosty mugs of Stewart’s root beer brought to you on a tray they’d hook to the driver’s side window while you sat on the big leather seats in the big green Dodge and listening to the gentle sound of a parent’s laughter on a Summer night, they weighed more than the Universe in the balance of life as I rode the scale from the bottom to the top and back down again.

Near the end of my grandfather’s life, he told me that he was ready to go. He said that he had outgrown his time and I joked with him that he had years left, even at 95. I have spent my lifetime in love with my country but that is not the same thing as it once was. I feel like that woman singing that song about having one less bell to answer, one less egg to fry. I don’t choke up at the National Anthem anymore and the military haircut I have worn my entire adult life has grown out like the old man banging the drum in The Spirit of ’76, not out of fashion, but because no one will cut my hair unless I wear a mask.

I have become an anachronism in the country of my birth and every part of the contract I had between what I was taught to respect and uphold, to serve and protect has been breached and in bad faith, not by me, but my own government, by my own people. They have moved on to some other place while I march on to the beat of a different drummer, another time. It’s not easy to become an anachronism, but I understand my grandfather’s words now in a way I could never have known then.

I drove into Boston with my son today to visit a friend and to look at a greenhouse to dismantle and bring back home. It has been a good while since I have left the farm, never mind visit a city, but it was a shock to me. Everyone wearing their masks, resignedly, in complete capitulation to some obscene diktat that makes a mockery of everything I have ever believed about freedom, about liberty.

It broke my heart, not for me, but for the future my children will inherit. And though I kept it to myself the entire drive home, I could not help but wish for another outcome, a different course that we could have taken somewhere along the way. But this is our time and so I will make the very best of it that I can so that my children will have the kind of memories I have before they too discover those truths that everyone must at some point face.

America is the ship of Theseus. For all appearances it resembles the country in which I was born, in which my father and his father before him were born, grew up, lived and prospered in, but it has been replaced, board by board, nail by nail, until it is a paradox built of nothing more than memories of what it once was.

…

Oh isn’t that the truth?

Yes it is.

And people are getting FED UP with the United States today. Consider this rant by Frank Scott…

Ring Out The Old: Ring In The Old

By Frank Scott

While our sacred democracy was allegedly being served by a stupid attempt to unsuccessfully impeach an ex-president for the second time and essentially tell more than 70 million Americans that they might as well vote for Pavlov, FDR, Hitler or Oprah Winfrey since any alleged exercise of supposed freedom on their part would be meaningless in the rape of language we call a democracy.

You know, the one with a billionaire class getting richer by the second and Americans across the board sinking lower by the minute.

But enough good news, let’s move on to the even better signs of our political economic progress against logic, morality and majority rule, something that vanished in practice the moment our euro ancestors arrived and the people who’d lived here for millennia were brutally forced out of their homelands.

The world’s most expensive medical wealth-care system has killed more than 500,000 Americans while we’re being told that China has only created protection for its people that makes us look like bloodthirsty private profit fanatics because it is run by authoritarians and isn’t a sacred democracy like ours.

You know, the one where your vote and mine are equal to the vote of any billionaire, if you believe nose picking is a way to perform a self lobotomy or you are a venture capitalist interested in a start up called Butt Coin which operates on a revolutionary AI system (Amoral Intelligence) called Blockhead.

Its stock just went up 23 billion points ten minutes ago so college graduates should start investing and show just how good your education was and how strong your belief is in capitalist democracy.

After all, how can any formally indoctrinated American not appreciate the incredible logic of our free market in which milk is more expensive than gasoline.

What could make more economic sense?

Milk comes from a cow, which produces more of it on a daily basis while petroleum takes millions of years to reproduce its supply. Even without consideration of either ones affect on the environment, that makes at least as much sense as nose picking self-lobotomies.

Or are you one of those deplorables concerned about our environment and the market green profit ventures said to be our only hope for useless long-term change to save humanity and not just its upper classes?

Who is most responsible for creating the destruction of nature reduced to a branding title of Climate Change?

A menacing American socialist gang has pointed out that the wealthiest billion people on earth produce 60% of greenhouse gases while the poorest billion produce only 5%.

But who can trust a murderous institution like The National Academy of Sciences?

Worse, another unholy representative of global communism reports that the tens of trillions of dollars in debt carried by earth residents collectively – whether we like it or not – represent a threat to the entire human race while the 2,000 richest people on earth have amassed more wealth than 4.5 billon human beings combined.

But who can believe a communist conglomeration of the richest institutions on earth and calling itself The World Bank?

Both institutions were talking about something much bigger than the egocentric American chosen people mythology since we play a major role in creating that inequality but also suffering it, with a public debt of 19 trillion and private debt of 27 trillion.

And if we believe, as too many of us still do, in what consciousness control and its professional staff of mind managers tell us, it’s all due to greedy union labor getting far too much in wages, salaries and pensions while a struggling investor class has to wait anxious moments for their deliveries of pet food, cosmetics, weapons, bitcoins, jewelry, and leisure wear.

And this with union membership which has been dwindling for the past forty years under assault by minority capital while the affluent top ten percent has seen its wealth skyrocket with the support of that same minority.

Isn’t the free market a marvel of democracy?

Yes, if you are among those who find rape a cost effective form of dating that avoids dinner and a movie and gets right to the sex.

While pondering this, be sure to participate in a round of democratic marketing called the 2022 elections with requests for money…

… the real stuff of our financially sacred democracy…

… coming along with any and all messages about how we need to elect progressives or regressives to maintain the system of two party politics that makes sure the capitalist market continues…

…setting us against one another to prevent us from ever uniting as a people…

…and not a collection of reduced-to-less-than human minorities who compete with one another across identity groups with common interest…

….hidden by the tiniest minority in the country: the incredibly richest of the rich and their wealthy – and diverse –   servant class.

The warfare state continues without the fiery if intellectually empty rhetoric of the last president replaced by the most recent who quietly, if he had any idea what the hell was going on, presided over another bombing of a foreign country- Syria- to protect American lives.

Those not yet reduced to total brain death under the abuse of consciousness by anti-social corporate and personal media might well ask: what the hell are Americans doing in Syria?

And if there are Syrians in America does Syria now have the right to bomb America in their defense?

But logic has no place in our government market where laws of political supply and demand assure continued profits for the tiny ruling minority and its well-paid servants in corporate business.

The real menace, we are warned by the triumphant sector of the ruling class representing the best educated bigots in America, are terrifying groups with names that make them sound like gay dance troupes.

Of course the horrible fears we are taught to react to when told of blood thirsty white supremacist* groups like the “Proud Boys” are nothing compared to the corporate investor class which would never dream of attacking our revered national capital: they already own it.

Make no mistake, the new team at the helm of our titanic ship of state isn’t nearly as dumb, domestically, as the last egotist led cabal with a leader who at least spoke like a populist while acting like a pampered rich brat.

But the warfare state in which Israel exercises far more power in our sacred democracy than the average American citizen, will continue and hundreds of billions of our tax dollars will be rubber stamped by a hired staff of corporadoes in order to fend off alleged menaces like China…

… which has ended urban poverty in a population of more than 850 million…

… three times greater than our total, while we suffer rising poverty among millions of families in a population of less than 330 million.

Quick, more bombs, death rays, drones, and especially propaganda from our free press which is available for a price, like the bombs, pet food, health care, entertainment, sports and democracy like no other in the world.

We have a new board of directors which still serves the same corporation with an experienced if nearly addle pated leader replacing the most dangerous one ever…

…in that he bluntly acted as the boorish at best murderous at worst executive of an imperial danger to humanity…

…masked as a democracy by psycho-neurotic therapists and other professionals.

Every few years we are indulged in moving from fundamentalist theologians of the market-church to fundamentalist economists of the church-market and we call that belief system our democracy.

Who else can perform self-lobotomies and pay more for milk than gasoline?

Just wait until the pandemic is overcome, more likely if we asked China to help us organize a more cooperative…

…than individualistic gang of identity groups, each with beliefs that it transcends humanity…

…and will best be served by accepting slavery as long as it works in the house and not in the fields.

No wonder China is such a menace to the gods of capital when it ought to be a lesson to the people of earth.

Especially Americans who are propagandized by their mind managers to mind too many other people’s business in imperial fashion while being told it’s all about democracy.

You know, like cheap gas, self-lobotomies and all that other good stuff.

The real thing and the demand for it is growing, worldwide, and the sooner we end our alienated domination and begin working together as members of the one and only human race, the better for the future.

And that future cannot be run, as it still is, for the benefit of private profit but for the public good.

*White supremacist and white privilege are among the favorite all-encompassing labels attached to lesser beings by people of higher intellectual and moral awareness made obvious by the fact that they are all members of the more privileged bigot class.

email: fpscott@gmail.com Frank Scott writes  political commentary and satire which appears online at the blog Legalienate  http://legalienate.blogspot.com)  

Brilliant!

But what about today?

It’s one thing, me writing about my experiences and the seemingly disjointed, and off-scale, way that I was “retired”, and another thing entirely about how you (the reader) and your friends and family deal with this situation. Yes, the USA is sinking. And yes, 2020 was a God-awful year. And ye, there are so many things going on…

…and the “news’ is amplifying everything to a fever pitch WTF? What is going on?

I’ll tell you. Listen up.

They want you IN A STATE OF PANIC. Then, while you are in a “reactive” and “receptive” mode, they can do what ever they want. Just like the shock after the 9-11 event, had George Bush create the largest police state in history, and clamp down all all the bill of rights. When people are scared, or in a state of panic, they are easily led; easily manipulated.

The corrupt leadership, the PTB and their toadies want this.

Please do not feel that way. It’s not as bad as it appears. Not by a long shot.
So, one of the first things that you MUST do is stop reading “news”. Alternative, Right, Left, Foreign. What ever. Please stop. It’s got so much bullshit that no one is getting accurate and timely information. And much of that is exactly that lies, distortions and just plain bullshit.
Look back through history, did any of the howling and screeching narrative come to pass?
  • Y2K. When your toaster would burn your house down. Your radio would start yelling at you.
  • 3G radiation. Yes. that dangerous 3G radiation would cause you to have radiation burns on your brain, seizures, and cancer.
  • Mad Cow. Yup, one day you are eating a hamburger, the next moment you go to work and don’t know how to turn on your computer.
  • WMD. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, one of the largest armies in the world, and desperately wants to kill American infidels!
  • TikTok. Watching cat videos is a forms of sly mind control. Before you know it, they will take over our “democracy”!

And now…

  • COVID Vaccine. It’s dangerous, and can cause cancer. It’s a way to alter DNA and turn Americans into mind-controlled robot sheeple!

Hey! I’ve got news for you all. Most Americans are already “mind controlled sheeple”. So don’t get all hot and bothered about it. Ok?

The ruling class wants the citizenry in a state of panic.

That is what is going on.

For you to survive this period of time you need to be calm, and frosty. You need to be able to know and see what is going on, and do so as a third-person observer so that you can handle the changes as they arrive. Don’t be the freaked out pet that starts running across a busy four lane intersection in panic. Be alert, be aware. Be calm.

The Lathe of Heaven

America is collapsing, and it’s every-person for themself. Or so it appears…
There was this movie called The Lathe of Heaven. It’s based on a science fiction story by Ursula K. Le Guin.
 
In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George’s dreams for his own purposes.
 
So get this… when this guy falls asleep, his dreams are so strong that he switches world-lines and arrives on the reality that he dreamed about. Yikes! And of course if he has a nightmare he wakes up to a nightmare, and if he has a happy dream, he wakes up to a happy life.
Well, this guy sees what is happening and decides to hypnotize him and thus be able to manually control what the world will become… all with good intentions, don’t you know. But of course, everything goes to shit.
In so many ways this resembles the world that we are inhabiting right now. Big, rich and powerful people are controlling things, and others are trying to sound the alarm. All of it is like a slow-motion car wreck and it’s terrifying. It really is. Our lives, our mental health, our families, our incomes are all disrupted. We don’t know what to do and we are going and moving towards a panic state.
You are in this state right now.
And it is awful.
A must see for science fiction fans - be careful what you dream about Dilip12 
March 2001

I had public television on several days ago (March 10, 2001) and "Lathe of Heaven" was starting on their series "Movies Worth Taping". I'm glad I happened to turn the TV on, as it was a movie well worth watching! It was made in 1987 as the first made-for-public-TV film, and is based on a novel by Ursula Le Guin.

This movie explores the notion of "effective dreaming", where one's dreams actually come true. It explores the strange dreams of George Orr (Bruce Davison). When he has these dreams, he wakes to find that his dreamt-up situations are now not only reality, but other people suddenly have adapted as if this reality has been with the world for some time.

George is traumatized by these dreams, and seeks the help of Dr. William Haber (Kevin Conway). Dr. Haber's intentions are good, to harness the power of these effective dreams to the betterment of the world, but he clearly abuses the doctor-patient relationship and hypnotizes George to have specific kinds of dreams. One motto of this film might be "be careful what you dream about"!

I found the special effects sometimes interesting, but often heavy-handed and not so smoothly executed. The setting, sometime in the near future in Portland, Oregon, was inexplicably dreary, beyond the rain that the city is well known for. The character development could have been stronger, with ancillary characters like Dr. Haber's secretary and the very few others seeming to be made out of cardboard and lacking emotion. George and Heather LeLache (Margaret Avery), however, enjoyed more solid and believable depictions.

In spite of these criticisms, the film was an exciting journey into inner space that indulges us to think about deep philosophical questions.

What is reality?

Are there parallel realities?

What is or should be knowable about the nature of existence (to me reminiscent a bit of "2010", one of my favorite science fiction films)?

What happens if we dream each other into or out of reality?

"The greatest good for the greatest number" or rights of the individual?

Can we design a utopia or will we be doomed to experience accidents we never considered that render such a proposed utopia much less than ideal?
“The Lathe of Heaven” doesn’t have the fresh and exciting visual effects of earlier science fiction films like “2001” or later ones, but is an interesting film that is a must see for science fiction fans.
Interesting look at the consequences of playing god. 

maochichi
22 June 2000

This was finally re-shown here on OPB in Portland during the spring membership drive after it's first and only showing in 1980 or so (apparently it was the most requested show of all time) and it is a rather effective piece of science fiction.

George Orr, a simple man by most standards, has dreams that change the world, and after overdosing on drugs trying to quell these dreams, he is charged to the care of Dr. Haber -- a well meaning and philanthropic therapist. Dr. Haber recognizes George's ability to change the future via dreaming of alternate realities, and he adopts a plan to create a perfect world by suggesting dreams of ridding humanity of the scourges that plague it (overpopulation, racism, war, etc) to George through hypnosis.

The world created by George and Dr. Haber is alternately perfect and irrevocably flawed as it is soon revealed that the consequences fixing one problem that plagues humanity only creates another equally serious dilemma. George in his simplicity realizes that there is no "perfect world", and that the meaning of human existence is not necessarily to create a perfect world, a concept that Dr. Haber fails to grasp.
If there is one movie that I can suggest best represents what is going on TODAY, it is this movie.
It really is.
Powerful, rich people. People who have evolved to be something else (other than human) and want to redo, remake the world into their idea of utopia are pushing all the buttons, and removing all the stops to make it happen. They are purposely inciting panic. They are purposely trying to alter the thinking patterns of people.
The good news is that it is all an illusion.
It really is. Sure things are happening, but what is happening regarding you, and your family will not, and does not resemble the narrative that you are reading about.

Step by step

So the first thing that you must do is turn off “THE NOISE”. Stop the “news” feeds and all that nonsense. It’s not gonna be as bad as everyone with a microphone is yelling about.
Second thing. Go to my post about Hemi-sync. Download one or all of the files. Put them on a player, and lie in bed and listen to them. Why? Well all this howling noise is moving your center of consciousness about. It is no longer centered on the pineal gland. It is off somewhere else. The hemi-sync will recenter it to where you need it to be.
It might take two or three sessions to get the effect, but I guarantee that the first session WILL ABSOLUTELY make a difference and you will see and feel the difference. You won’t be so caught up and your panic will be way, way down.
I am not saying that there is nothing to worry about. I am not saying that you need not be concerned. What I am saying is that your family needs you right now.
They need you to be alert, strong, composed and in control. You must fake it, show a good happy face. And show some leadership. You have a role and this is the time for you to shine.
When you are in a plane you don’t want to hear the airline pilot screaming into the microphone…
..."we're all going to die!".
No. You want to hear (in a calm, clear and confident voice) …
"...hello folks, we have a minor technical alert. It's probably nothing. But the policy is to land at the nearest airport. Sorry for the delay."
Remember the key take aways…

The Take Aways

The “ruling class” running the entire Western group of nations (led by America) is all in a state of collapse, or barring that, an organized and function intentional state of disorder. They are typing to induce change to happen, and it is frightening. And part of this change is to induce panic. They want the people to react on emotion, and not by reason.
It’s not right. It’s not fair. It’s not pleasant.
But that’s the way it is.
And if you want to see exactly what is going on, then watch the 197
0’s movie “The Lathe of Heaven”.
A Science Fiction Classic reclaimed from the vaults. 

Klaatu-1812 August 2000

Last night I got a chance to see one of my favorite SF movies, and it only took 20 years.

Back in 1978, I was working at a mom-and-pop bookstore in Dallas called Taylors. One day one of the customers bought a book by Ursula K. LeGuin: "The Lathe of Heaven". I told her that she was one of my favorite authors, and that I loved the book. She said that she was involved in the production of a film of the book that was to be done locally.

Early in 1980 it was aired. Bruce Davison (recently the Senator in "X-men") played the protagonist, George Orr. And various Metroplex locations stood in for Portland in the near-future year of 2002. City Hall (later the OCP HQ in "Robocop"), Reunion Arena and the Water Gardens in FW (previously used in "Logan's Run").

George Orr has a problem: dreams. He doesn't want to have any. He takes drugs to try and thwart his unconscious so that he can sleep but not dream. Because if he does dream a special kind of dream, an "effective" dream, it changes reality "all the way back to the Stone Age".

Dr. William Haber is an oneirologist: a dream specialist. He doesn't believe George's story, of course. He thinks that George is sick, not cursed. He eventually comes around to the realization that George is right. A power struggle ensues to decide who will be in charge of deciding who gets to make the decisions of how to use this power.

The story touches on race relations, psychology, Taoism and more. And all on a miniscule budget of 250K.

An added bonus was the addition of interviews with Bruce Davison and Ms. LeGuin, the latter with Bill Moyers. She rarely does interviews, and it was wonderful hearing her add little behind-the-scenes details and commenting on the story and film. Since my understanding of Taoism is limited to readings of "The Tao of Pooh", I didn't realize the use of Taoism until I heard UKL mention it.

If I had had 90 bucks to blow on a KERA membership, I could have gotten the video from them. In fact, the on-air weasel said that the tape was "only available through public TV". If you check amazon.com, as I did last night, you will find that this is a bald-faced lie: TLoH will be released on VHS and DVD later this month, with the interviews and all.

The only thing that burned my butt about the film that I saw last night was the one change they made. Originally, they used Ringo Starr's version of the Beatles tune "A Little Help from My Friends". The new version has a different cover version. One of the reviews on amazon.com stated that this was because it would cost too much to get the rights from Michael Jackson, who now owns the entire Beatle catalog. This doesn't work. IMHO, MJ would get money no matter who did it.

Uncle Steve says check it out.

Panic to war

Why does the ruling class want Americans and their subservient nations to be in a state of panic?

It was a gripping, stunning testimony. Before Congress, a 15 year old volunteer nurse, Nayirah, struggled to compose her trembling voice, barely holding back tears, as she testified that marauding soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die on the floor.

Later, Amnesty International confirmed authoritatively that 312 babies had been killed this way. [1] All the news agencies ran with the story, and the country and Congress were in a total uproar.

There was only one problem: it was completely, utterly, totally fraudulent. It was engineered, perjured, coached testimony concocted by PR experts, designed to manufacture consent for a U.S. war on Iraq.

At the time, it was also crystal clear that the claims were absurd—Kuwait had a population of less than 1.5 million at the time, and given its birth rate, would have had a few hundred premature babies a year. It’s inconceivable that over 300 of them could have been clustered in a single hospital on a single day.

Nevertheless, this was the story that was sold to the U.S. people. Representative John Porter stated, “We have never heard…[such] a record of inhumanity and brutality and sadism…I don’t know how the people of the civilized countries of this world can fail to do everything within their power to remove this scourge from the face of the earth.”

Not long afterward, the U.S. went to war with Iraq.  It would wage war again, 12 years later, doubling down with even more monstrous lies about weapons of mass destruction.

Today, we are facing a similar situation: the U.S. is escalating rapidly towards a shooting war with China, and similar absurd, astonishing, and monstrous lies are being spread. In fact, the U.S. is already engaged in “multi-domain” “hybrid warfare” with China. This is warfare just below the threshold of direct military engagement. On the ground this involves:

  • Economic Warfare: trade sanctions and tariff war, as well as technological warfare: attempted seizure of Chinese companies (TikTok); attacks on China’s international 5G contracts; sanctions on the primary & secondary supply chains of key sectors of Chinese industry (e.g. Huawei’s semiconductor supply chain); attacks on Ant Financial’s IPO.

  • Legal Warfare, or “lawfare,” including over 380 anti-China bills in Congress, and 14 individual and state lawsuits against China for over $30 trillion in “Covid damages”; the long arm “legal” kidnapping of Huawei’s executive

  • Diplomatic Warfare, including consulate shutdowns, harassment of diplomats, breaching of diplomatic pouches and compounds, and calls for regime change.

  • Military Brinksmanship and posturing in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan straits; complete encirclement of China with strategic weapons, surveillance, and 400 offensive bases (“The Pacific Pivot”), the use of air bases in Taiwan for military surveillance, and plans to station intermediate range nuclear missiles all along China’s periphery. [2]

  • Civil Subversion: color revolution, urban terror, destabilization and delegitimation operations in Hong Kong (and other places where China has interests), including millions of dollars of funneled for organization & training, and encrypted communications infrastructure built to coordinate anti-government activities.

  • Academic Warfare: through the FBI’s China Initiative, every 10 hours a case is opened against a Chinese student or researcher in the U.S. (currently 2700 cases) and all Chinese students are considered potential “non-traditional” “collectors” and “spies” involved in a “thousand grains of sand” collection strategy.

  • Information Warfare: last but not least, we are seeing total Information warfare.
    The stories about so-called “massive human rights abuses,” “Chinese concentration camps,” “Chinese-made-and-released Covid,” “China has harmed us economically,” “China has stolen its way to the top,” “China is oppressing independent Hong Kong,” are part of this information warfare.

This mass propaganda incites people to hate China irrationally and unconditionally, to manufacture consent for war. The U.S. military calls this information warfare, “the firehose of falsehoods” and we are all being drenched with these lies. This is necessary to justify war against an enemy and to curtail any rational discussion or questioning.

Some of the questions that the public are kept from asking are:

  • Are these allegations supported by any facts?

  • Has China threatened us? Is the U.S. at risk from China?

  • Is this war justifiable by any means? Is it legal?

  • Do the citizens of the U.S. want to go to war? Could the U.S. even fight, let alone win a war with China?

A careful, reasoned approach to these questions, would lead one to say, No.

Before we try to play whack-a-mole with the blatant war propaganda, a more useful and clarifying approach is to ask, why is the U.S. telling these lies to go to war?

War and change

It’s a dangerous path and very, very dangerous game that the PTB are playing. Emotional manipulation, economic squeeze, followed by tyrannical suppression so that a hot war can distract and eliminate threats.

One fallback model of U.S. supremacy is to plunge the rest of the world back into the dark ages through hybrid warfare—while the U.S. controls the key systems of communication, information, surveillance, finance, rent extraction, along with the corridors of maritime transport.

Um. It will not go as planned. It really won’t.

Stay frosty you all.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my SHTF index…

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Synchronicities and affirmation prayer campaigns. How to sort out what is going on when we live in a world where everyone is trying to control our mind.

In this article we will look at an important part of prayer affirmation campaigns. And that is an element known as “synchronicity”. Now, “synchronicity” may or may not be part of the “sign posts” or “feedback loops” that your soul established for your consciousness to take note of. This is because synchronicity is often a direct answer or feedback to individual affirmations within a campaign.

A Personal Example

You know…

Yeah, you know that where I live now is sort of like a Chinese version of (the American television show) “Mayberry RFD”. It’s got that lower pace of life, a much more relaxed, laid back attitude, and a far calmer “feeling” to it. It’s not so hurried, upsetting, radical or drastic as what America (or any larger city) is today.

It’s actually a little bit like this as far as “feeling” goes…

Evenings in Zhuhai, China feel a little bit like this. Where all the neighbors come out in the evening. they play with the kids, or just hang out. They drink beer and eat chicken, or just laze about. It’s an easy and fine pace of life.

.

Ah, but sure. China does not resemble the “Deep South” in America. It’s totally and completely different. It has modern and advanced transportation, brand new and impressive buildings, High technology, and parks everywhere.

No. China does not physically resemble The small town of Grady, or Mayberry.

Zhuhai, China

.

But yet it does have the same “feeling“.

Yet, how, just how can I say that it resembles a scene from the movie “Doc Hollywood”?

Sometimes, heck – many times, the things that we wish for or want are not direct one-on-one comparisons. And this is a good example of that.

What I wanted, and asked for (And still maintain) in my personal affirmation campaigns;

  • I have a calm and relaxed pace of life in a beautiful area that is family friendly, stress free, clean, and full of fresh air and lush greenery.

I know, that it’s not for everyone, but heck, I live a “retired” life and I want a slower pace of life. Don’t you know. I want and maintain, a life where I eat food without being in a rush, where I say hi to all the neighbors and they all know me, and where the air is fresh, the trees are lush, the flowers are fragrant, and the neighborhood is safe.

Look at what I specified (in the affirmation above)…

  • Calm and relaxed pace of life.
  • Beautiful Area.
  • Family friendly environment.
  • Stress free.
  • Clean.
  • Full of fresh air.
  • Clean, neat and tidy.
  • With lush greenery.

You see, that I KNEW when (certain specific affirmations) were manifesting when there were elements of synchronicity that would crop up. In this particular example, Chinese words describing Zhuhai would manifest “all over the place”. As in advertisements, on Tiktok videos, on WeChat message, and the like.

Look at the above key “bullet points”.

And yes… I would start reading and seeing the same Chinese wording all… over… the place…

  • 平静和轻松的生活节奏。
  • 美丽的地区。
  • 家庭友好的环境。
  • 无压力。
  • 清洁。
  • 充满新鲜空气。
  • 干净、整洁、整洁。
  • 郁郁葱葱的绿色植物。

And it wasn’t one statement here, and then seven months later another. No. It was all of them, over and over within a very short span of time. Just a few days.

Suddenly the same words that I described in my affirmations, manifested physically within my life.

The people, and the interactions between them resembled a Chinese version of “small town” America.

.

Anyways…

Back to the point at hand.

What you want, but not what you specify…

it can be pretty confusing you know. That on one hand, if you specify things explicitly (within your prayer affirmations) that there will usually be some kind of unexpected or unforeseen system, condition, event or person that would rise up and surprise you.

You can be very specific in your affirmations. And your results will be just as specific. They will evolve from the point in time, and the world-line that you make them in.

.

While on the other hand, the best and most satisfying results were ones that were NOT explicitly specified, but rather “imaged” as a ultimate desire.

In the personal example above, I could have been very specific…

  • I live in the rural Southern States of America. The town is small, and relaxed, and doesn’t have direct interstate highway access. It is rather back-wards and isolated.

And I probably would have eventually gotten exactly what I specified. I might have ended up in New Iberia, Louisiana or some other deep Southern town / small city.

You can always be very specific during an affirmation prayer campaign. And if so, you will get exactly what you asked for.

.

And, is that bad?

Well…

Sometimes when you ask for really, very explicit things, you will automatically slide off your pre-birth world-line template. And where you end up might have all sorts of consequences that you might not be ready for.

In the movie “Doc Hollywood”, the main character literally crashes into the small town of Grady by destroying the local Judge’s fence while being helped by the town constable.

.

Why not? Why didn’t I do that? Why did I allow my affirmation to be so “broad based” and “open ended”?

When you conduct a prayer / affirmation campaign it STARTS at the point in time (upon the world-line) where you are presently. It doesn’t back-track a few months or years early. It starts when you start the campaign.

Which means that  the conditions of your life, at the time you start the campaign, are the initial starting conditions that the prayer / affirmations build upon.

The orange line running left to right is your life-line path. This is the route that you have been taking. Now, you have this GOAL that your affirmation / prayers define. Depending on WHEN you start your affirmations will determine exactly what your goal will manifest as.

.

So, for me, when I started my campaign I had already visited numerous locations all over the world. I had been to China. I had been to Japan. I had traveled all over the United States. So when I started my campaign, the best-fit solutions for my end goals resembled the closest opportunities based from my experiences. Which was China.

Perhaps, if I had not experienced China, and instead spent the majority of my life in Los Angles, New York City, or Chicago the results would have manifested differently…

Your life and experiences at the time of your initial affirmation prayer campaign will determine how your goals will manifest in your life.

.

Doc Hollywood
Benjamin Stone is a young doctor driving to L.A., where he is interviewing for a high-paying job as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. He gets off the highway to avoid a traffic jam, but gets lost and ends up crashing into a fence in the small town of Grady. He is sentenced to 32 hours of community service at the local hospital. All he wants is to serve the sentence, get his car fixed and get moving, but gradually the locals become attached to the new doctor, and he falls for the pretty ambulance driver, Lou. Will he leave? 

-Written by Sami Al-Taher <staher2000@yahoo.com>

What is “synchronicity”?

So what about this “synchronicity”? What is it, and why is it important, and why (for goodness sakes) am I devoting an entire article to it?

Well, for starters, it is considered to be nonsense by the “experts”, and fundamental to understand ourselves by “spiritualists”.

Synchronicity is a phenomenon in which people interpret two separate—and seemingly unrelated—experiences as being meaningfully intertwined, even though there is no evidence that one led to the other or that the two events are linked in any other causal way. 

Though many people perceive signs or spiritual meaning in synchronistic events, most scientists believe that such events are more likely coincidences that only seem meaningful due to aspects of human thinking such as confirmation bias.

-Psychology Today

Some would say that coincidences are random, but if we look carefully into our lives, we realize it is not so. No matter what the “experts” say.

Some people believe that synchronicities can be guides when we do not know what to choose or what to change in our lives. It is like someone from above hears our silent prayers and talks to us through other people, images or events. As a matter of fact, Einstein described coincidences as being “God’s way of remaining unknown”.

Spiritual individuals may interpret coincidences as signs from God or the universe. However, there is no way to scientifically test these beliefs. While seeing coincidences as signs can provide a sense of purpose, following them too closely can lead to ignoring critical evidence. It’s best to weigh common sense, intuition, and verifiable facts when interpreting coincidences.

-Psychology Today

Synchronicity connects the material world to the spiritual world. It does so  through symbols. These symbols are not always understood but they do arise from the collective unconscious.

Remember; nothing is by chance. It is the direct result of our thoughts.

And for us, those who take an active and proactive role in shaping our future though prayer / affirmation campaigns, we can USE synchronicity as one (of many ways) to validate that we are “on the right track” and on the way towards our goals.

Examples of synchronicity in your life

In general, synchronicity is a very, very personal event. It is only something the YOU notice that the rest of the world seems oblivious to.

1)    The same numbers keep showing up over and over in your life.

2)    You have met someone out of the blue who talked about an event or said some sentences which in fact sounded like answers to that you have been asking yourself recently.

3)    Perfect timing! Things happen for you just when you need them most.

4)    Help and support appear in your life when you expect less from people you never met before.

In 1983, when I was dating my first wife she took a moment to pray. I didn't know what she was praying about. But right after she prayed, the DJ on the radio interrupted the song he was playing. He changed the song to one that was about "getting married and living happily ever after." He said on the air that he was so very sorry for interrupting the song and the music rotation schedule, but that he felt a strong urge to change the song to the one that he played.

And yes. You guessed it. My future-wife had prayed for "a sign" that would give her direction to get married to me or not.

Of course,the “experts” believe that all this is just coincidence, or that we are reading too much into what we observe. But that is not true at all.

The list of synchronicities can be endless and subjective as synchronicity is a rather complex phenomenon. These are a few general examples that we all experience at a certain point in our lives.

The best way to recognize your synchronicities is to “think less and feel more”, listen to your intuition. By being in tune with your inner voice, you can understand the outer signs easier.

Intuition is usually validated by an external “magic” or unusual event.

Therefore, if you seek an answer and you randomly read a sentence in a newspaper or watch a video related to your current situation, you will feel a revelation. Then you should ask yourself if that is the answer you were waiting for.

How can you use synchronicities?

The great value in synchronicities is that they can help us track our progress and goals within an affirmation / prayer campaign.

They act as a “wake up call”, or “alarm” for us to TAKE NOTICE that we have arrived [1] at a certain point of time, [2] a certain place, or [3] a goal has been fulfilled.

Synchronicities are like a big large sign that tells you that you have arrived at a specific point in time or a specific objective.

What inspired this post…

It began with  a comment…

First let me thank you big time for this.
Its good to read more about the technical side of prayers.

You already stated that you will have some more follow up posts and my guess is it involves synchronicities. And when you re going to do that one, and please don't feel in a rush, but Please include why they mean that someone performed a slide.

And if I may say so how its possible that I have had a lot of them after about a week into my pause on 2 occasions already. And I specifically tried to avoid causing a slide.

And my prayers in general have relative small improvements over my current life. And when it comes to my far out prayer, i still asked that it only materializes if its able without causing any strife or danger.

And besides that probably false positive I told you about a couple months ago , nothing shows up about that one. Yet.

Big thanks again. It feels good that you took the time and effort to write this.

And I hope my fellow MM readers find value in it too.

So…

What do I mean when I say that “someone has performed a slide…”

Slides and Synchronicities.

Now a “slide” is an event that describes moving off your pre-birth world-line template onto a new world-line terrain.

It can roughly be described as…

  • Playing golf. Where you hit a ball and it goes off the fairway, and goes into the woods.
  • Driving on a road. Where you leave the highway, and take a “short cut” that ends up being a bumpy dirt road.
  • Flying on a plane to Paris, France, and when it finally lands, you find yourself in Zambia, Africa.
  • Going to eat a nice cheap dinner, and walking into an exclusive very-expensive high-end dining establishment.

If you map out your life-line, and you plot the highest probability paths that your life can take you, with the life and decisions you actually made, you would end up with a two dimensional topographical surface. This surface for all people is typically known as the pre-birth world-line template.

A “slide” happens when the world-line that you target, or that you end up going to is NOT on that topographic surface.

You “slide” off that map, and enter another map; a totally different map.

Now, the good news (or bad, depending on your point of view) is that you will automatically migrate back to your original world-line. It’s biologically encoded to the physical body that you inhabit. So, if you want to have an exceptional life, when your pre-birth world-line template would not allow you, you would need to keep on a steady and active affirmation prayer campaign(s) for the rest of your life.

A slide will take you onto “unknown” territory. It is a realm that your physical body is not pre-programmed to accept.

  • A slide will take you where your affirmation prayers lead you.
  • A slide can be an easier or harsher life. There is no way to determine which.
  • A slide happens automatically, and the only way for you to control it is to add “navigation affirmations” within your prayer campaign.

And while you might have to pass through all sorts of things, events, encounters and adventures to get there (your targeted objective that lies off the pre-birth world-line template) there will come a point in time when you will have arrived at your destination.

Now, destinations can be obtained anywhere. Most commonly they occur upon the pre-birth world-line template.

But when you get off the template, even for slight detours or deviations, you will know because you will experience Synchronicities.

What are Synchronicities according to Metallicman?

Synchronicities are echoes of similar world-lines that lie off of your present world-line topography.

Not helpful?

I know.

The best way that I can describe this is visually.

In the picture above you see three different topographical world-line templates. The very first one is the pre-birth world-line template that you were born into. You can see the life-line that you have taken in the goldenrod color. You were following the normal life and then you had a slide.

The slide took you off your pre-birth world-line template.

And then placed you on a completely new “map” with completely different topography.

Now, you will notice that upon your pre-birth world-line template were some goals that you want (Well, I used my own personal goals from the personal narrative that I presented earlier.)

  • Lush green
  • Relaxed clean
  • Calm pleasant

None of them were present simultaneously on your one individual world-line.  This was your pre-birth world-line template. They were present, but not all at one place. Not at one place at one time.

But they are on the new world-line template topographical surface that you slid towards.

The slide took you to a new topographical “map”. And it took you directly to your objectives; a place, a world-line, where all the criteria that you prayed for were present simultaneously on one world-line.

Now, you will notice another world-line topographic surface that lies “nearby” your own. You have never visited it. But it too has the criteria and goals that you have established in your affirmation prayers. But they too are not simultaneously located on one particular world-line.

The key here, and the point here, is that synchronicities are the “echoes” of your targets manifesting when you have arrived at a given world-line. When you have “arrived”, you will start seeing synchronicities that only you will notice.

In the picture above, I denoted the area of where your goals would manifest as a wide dispersed group of world-lines. This is the brown oval in the top and the bottom world-line topographical maps.

And then in the middle map you see that the points are all present; the goals are all present in on set world-line. The brown lines converge to that point.

This converging of goals manifests as synchronicities.

Yes, Synchronicities are a sign that you have arrived and your goals have been attained.

Synchronicities are meaningful coincidences.

Here's a story that I found on the internet. All credit to the author, and edited to fit this venue.  It's a very illustrative story...

I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my 20s, and for roughly half of my decade-long tenure there I kept hearing a call to quit and become a freelance writer, a decision I largely ignored for years because it was Scary Stuff.

However, after years of trying to ignore this call, the signs pointing toward it took on a whole new tack. This is how it began:

I was driving home from work one day, listening to a song on the radio called “Desperado,” by the Eagles, and as I pulled up to the curb in front of my house, the last line I heard before I turned off the car was “Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, she’ll beat you if she’s able; the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet.” I turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped my foot onto the curb, and there at my left foot was a playing card—the Queen of Hearts.

I just sat there utterly dumbfounded, and wondering, of course, what it meant?

When I mentioned the incident to a friend that evening, she said, with an extravagant quality of assuredness, that when you’re on the right path, the universe winks and nods at you from time to time, to let you know. She also said that once you start noticing these little cosmic cairns, once you understand that you’re on a path at all, you’ll begin to see them everywhere. It’s what happened, she reminded me, when I bought my Toyota and suddenly started seeing Toyotas everywhere.

I didn’t know I was even on a path, I told her, much less whether it was the right one. I simply found myself unable to make heads or tails of the episode, and ended up filing it under “Unexplained Phenomena,” along with esp, deja vu, spoon-bending, water-witching, spontaneous remission, and certain incomprehensible acts of human forgiveness.

But even more remarkable than finding that Queen card when I did, was that over the next two years, as I searched for a sense of clarity (and courage) about this call, I found five more Queen playing cards, in incredibly improbable locations all around the country: a sidewalk in Cincinnati, a conference room in Santa Fe, a sand dune in Cannon Beach Oregon, a mountain wilderness in Colorado six miles from the nearest trailhead. The whole thing made the Twilight Zone seem like Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

And every time I found another Queen card, the sheer unbelievability of it took another giant step forward, and eventually, it went so far beyond the laws of probability that I only barely hesitate to say that it’s impossible there was nothing more going on here than a statistical aberration. This was orchestrated by something with wits. Which shot my rational view of the universe pretty much to hell.

I come from a family of scientists, detectives, journalists, non-fiction writers, and New Yorkers—and you don’t get a more cynical bunch than this—and this stuff just doesn’t happen in our universe. And yet, though the phenomenon became more inscrutable with each find, in a way it also began making more and more sense. A pattern—more, a passageway—seemed to emerge.

I came to understand that this rather profound administering of chance was directing me toward something both my writing and my life needed at that time: more heart, less head. More intuition, less intellect. More of the inner life, the emotional life, the life of the senses. More listening. More of what Carl Jung referred to as the anima, the force of the feminine in a man’s life. And the Queen, of course, is the archetype of powerful feminine energy, which I felt myself being compelled toward by the kind of meaningful coincidence Jung called synchronicity.

Of course, he offers his ideas and thoughts to what it is all about…

Synchronicities are events connected to one another not by strict cause-and-effect, but by what in classical times were known as sympathies, by the belief that an acausal relationship exists between events on the inside and the outside of ourselves, crosstalk between mind and matter—which is governed by a certain species of attraction.

Jung believed that synchronicities mirror deep psychological processes, carry messages the way dreams do, and take on meaning and provide guidance to the degree they correspond to emotional states and inner experiences.

For example, you’re trying to decide whether to say yes or no to a particular opportunity and while driving on the freeway someone suddenly cuts in front of you and you notice the bumper sticker: Just Do It!

Or you’re struggling to focus your energies, not spread yourself so thin and scatter your interests and attentions among too many projects, and while taking photographs one afternoon, you drop your wide-angle lens and shatter it.

You can derive meaning from “just a coincidence” when an external event matches up with an event on the inside. It doesn’t always. You might be sitting in a waiting room, for instance, reading a magazine article about George Gershwin, when the receptionist sticks her head out the door and calls for the next patient, a Mr. Gershwin, and as outlandish as this may seem to you, if it finds no hook on the inside, it’s not a synchronicity, only an amazing coincidence. If it means something to you, however, then it’s amazing and potentially instructive.

A synchronicity is a coincidence that has an analog in the psyche, and depending on how you understand it, it can inform you, primarily through intuition and emotion, how near or far you are from what Carlos Castaneda calls “the path with heart.” Among shamanic cultures, says anthropologist Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman, synchronicities are considered “a kind of homing beacon analogous to a radio directional signal indicating that the right procedures and methods are being employed.”

Like anything, you look at things through the lens of your very own personal experience. You might be a scientist, and you look at it from that view point. You might be a sociologist, and you look at it through that view point. You might be religious and so you look at it through that point of view.

It doesn’t mean that there is a right, or a wrong way of looking at things. Only a personal understanding of the events that you can accept.

Synchronicities are minor miracles, little mysteries that point to a bigger one, perhaps a central one, of which we’re all a part. In contemplating synchronicities, don’t just marvel at the laws of probability, but wonder at their meaning. 

“The primary reality of synchronicities is emotional, not intellectual,” says Mark Holland, co-author of Synchronicity. “The reason they’re there is to make us feel something, and the feeling that our lives are rich and worth our reflection comes in part from our sense of the depth and mystery of life.”

In fact, maybe the most important thing synchronicities offer is astonishment. How often, after all, in the course of a day or a week or a month, do you find yourself thunderstruck, flabbergasted at life, amazed by its finesse? Synchronicities are like the glimpse of a wild animal seldom seen, the discovery of an arrowhead or a geode, the return of your purse by some good Samaritan. Far removed from the mundaneness that seems to characterize such a vast portion of daily life, they help reconnect you to your sense of awe, and given the tyranny of the commonplace, what a service!

No one has been able to fully explain synchronicity, so perhaps you should simply accept it as a wild card and an ordering principle, the height of absurdity and the depth of profundity, and a crack in the door through which you can catch sight of the universe and its mysterious ways.

There are no clear answers.

However, if you look at synchronicity as the obtainment of a goal that you have presented within your affirmation /prayer campaign, then you can accept the fact that you are “one the right track”, that things are falling in place, and that your affirmations are working.

An important point

Synchronicity does not automatically happen when you achieve a goal. You cannot plan for it unless you specifically add it to your affirmation / prayers. You cannot keep rowing a boat waiting for the fish to leap out of the water and tell you that this is the best fishing spot. It doesn’t work that way.

What Synchronicity means.

Synchronicity seems to be associated with “goal attainment” ONLY when otherwise you might miss, ignore, or overlook the situation that you find yourself in. It’s almost like a sign on the road that says “go no further, you have reached the end of the road”. It’s a way or a system to tells us that we reached our goals, and now know where we are and what to do next.

Pay attention to it.

Do you want more?

Ai! I have many more posts like this in my prayer affirmation Index here… Intention and Prayer Campaigns

Intention Campaigns

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The mechanism of how your thoughts are able to navigate the MWI and select appropriate world-lines. What you need to do and how to accomplish it.

This article is part of my prayer / intention campaign sub-index. In it we discuss how you can change your life by your thoughts. And, in this particular article, we look at the mechanism(s) involved. We look at just how a consciousness is able to navigate. This is a rather deep conversation, and certainly more involved than what I have been saying in the past. That “thoughts create reality“. Here we talk about how and why it works that way.

It all began with a simple question;

...Another thing I noticed and perhaps this is of value to my fellow MM.

Six months ago when starting my first prayer campaign MM style I started to feel tired of praying after about 3 weeks already. And my former prayer style was just as long So it wasn't the change in style. Just tired after years of relentless prayer I guess. As a result my other 2 campaigns I still go through all my rituals and prayers but as a robot So to speak. So much less intensity in the words.

Yet I have seen lots of things manifesting.

It seems one can go through prayers by just saying them out loud even when you don't feel like it much sometimes.

Is that the case? And if so, how come just talking to other people when saying you are gonna do things doesn't cause that to happen. Whats the technical difference.

Or has my brain been primed by my previous years of prayer?

Would love your take on it MM and some readers too I think.

The point here is the basic question;

If thoughts change the reality, why does vocalizing them out loud appear to have an effect, when thinking about them in silence doesn't?

And we will answer it here.

To understand how affirmation prayers work, you need to look at the way things work. Forget about Newtonian science. You need to look at Quantum science for answers.

You Must vocalize or write down your thoughts.

You just cannot think things and expect them to happen.

Yes. I know. I know. I have repeatedly stated that what you think causes your desires to manifest. And yes, that is the general outline of how it works, but that is not the “operation manual”. You need to perform a physical action regarding those thoughts to use them to navigate.

You must either [1] vocalize or [2] write the thoughts down. You must do something physically to connect the thoughts to your reality. Other techniques might include the display of pictures that you can view while you are thinking about things. You need a physical connection.

You need to physically write and vocalize your navigation direction for it to work.

Otherwise NOTHING will happen.

Thoughts alone will not cause things to happen. Wishing for things to happen will not make them happen. Worrying about things will not cause them to manifest. You MUST do something physically.

You must do something physically

It has been my experience that if you write things down in a list, and then read them out verbally (not silently), the system will work.

You can also use rituals, create talismans, generate electronic mechanisms that operate in the physical to generate physical navigation movements.

You can create a “vision board”. The creation of the vision board will have the same effect as reading a verbal affirmation. And the viewing of the board, will contribute to that effect. (The contribution magnitude will be lesser than the actual creation of the board.) So viewing a vision board isn’t as effective as creating one.

Recommendation for best results

I recommend that [1] you generate a list of affirmations, and [2] that you read them out loud in a campaign, that [3] consists of an on/off cycle for the best effects.

The pre-birth world-line template

The most important thing that you must understand is that our consciousness is foreign to this universe.

Our consciousness did not evolve in THIS universe. It evolved in a different universe. 

Thus it is alien. It doesn't fit here.

This universe is something that the consciousness USES for it's own purposes.

I know that that opens up a ton-load of questions. Answers to that and their implications are “above my pay grade”, but I do have some thoughts. I can cover them later on if you wish.

Our consciousness comes from soul.

Soul creates a smaller part of itself. This part is known as "consciousness" and it is used to travel outside of the "Heaven" universe.

Again. The “soul” does not exist here; in this (apparent) universe. The soul occupies an entirely separate universe. One which I refer to as “The Heaven Universe”.

The Soul creates a consciousness.

It ejects that consciousness into a “transport tube”; a kind of tunnel.

This tunnel is a mechanism for the consciousness to move from one universe to another.

Then the consciousness arrives in the “reality” universe.

Being foreign, there is really nothing that our consciousness is able to do in this “reality” universe. It is like water and oil. They just do not interact together well.

The only thing that our consciousness is able to do is generate thoughts. That is it.

Like a sun generates light, or how a flame creates sparks. The consciousness is able to create the same kinds of "stuff" that it is comprised of. This is what thoughts are.

Thoughts are a form of the same kind of constructions as one's consciousness is.

And this reality universe (as I like to call it), consists of a near infinite number of fixed world-lines.

The "Heaven" universe is completely different from the "reality" universe.

In fact, it is almost like the "reality" universe is an "artificial"  construct of some type.

The "reality" universe consists of an infinite number of static moments in time, or what I call "world-lines".

All that our soul can do, is inject our consciousness into a body. Then, once the consciousness is there, the thoughts that the consciousness has navigates to the next world-line based on the highest-probability occurrence. This highest-probability of occurrence is a pre-established vector that the consciousness follows independent of thought.

We call this the “world-line pre-birth template”.

It is the fated direction that your life will unfold towards as your consciousness rides the physical body life-time. It is critically important in what your life will present to you to experience. (At least that is what your very own soul expects.)

You could be an infant, brain-dead in a vegetative state, or mind dulled by drugs and abuse, but the vector path of the life that you will live will be following the pre-mapped out “pre-birth world-line template”. It is the system that your soul establishes for your consciousness. It is the way for your consciousness to obtain experiences.

How to navigate the world-lines

Well, thoughts are the ONLY thing that the consciousness can create.

And thoughts act like a magnet to the most similar world-lines. The thoughts form a “shape” or better yet, a “profile” that surrounds the consciousness. And the consciousness automatically moves towards the world-lines that match that profile.

This is a basic activity that describes MOVEMENT UPON the pre-birth world-line template.

But it does not describe movement off the pre-birth world-line template. That requires a different mechanism for movement. (A similar mechanism, but fundamentally different.)

So thoughts alone, without any further actions, can navigate upon the pre-birth world-line template. It is what is known as a “fated life”.

So if you rely on your thoughts alone to navigate, you will find that your life seems to be “fated”. That you might wish and yearn for things, but they never materialize. You might think about that nice guy or gal at the coffeehouse, but nothing will really manifest. Your life will just follow your pre-mapped out life.

Your thoughts might move you close to certain areas, but it won’t take you to where you want to go.

Movement off the Pre-Birth World-line Template

If this situation describes you…

That you think, wish and dream for things, but they never materialize. It seems that your life is fated to some degree.

Then, you are “trapped” following the pre-birth world-line template.

If you do not want to follow the fated life that has been provided to you, then you will need to incorporate additional measures to navigate the MWI. You will need to navigate off the pre-birth world-line template.

There are two main techniques to do so.

  • Verbal Affirmations
  • Slides

Quick recap

There are three techniques in total.

  • Thoughts alone (dreams, wishes, desires, plans and obsessions).
  • Verbal affirmations (Written goals, and verbalizing them aloud.)
  • Slides.

Let’s talk about the systems that take you off your “fated life”…

Verbal Affirmations

You must physically say, write down, or illustrate your dreams and wishes and desires to navigate using this method. This connection; between thoughts  and action is the most fundamental  way that you can move upon your pre-birth world-line template.

  • You can move upon the “fated” pre-birth world-line template.
  • You can move “nearby” to your targets that might lie off the pre-birth world-line template, but are not that too “far distant”.

Now in illustration, for illustration and descriptive purposes, I have illustrated the pre-birth world-line template as a “flat sheet” showing a matrix of world-lines connected by highest probability routes. In reality, it’s not really flat. It actually looks like a thick slab. And the world-lines that lie upon this sheet actually are (instead) embedded within this slab.

So movement, most movement, whether directed by thoughts alone, or by verbal affirmations will lie within the “pre-birth world-line template” slab.

To move about off the pre-defined vector path (as defined by the pre-birth world-line template) you need to navigate further than what the (default) pre-birth world-line template allows.

That requires actual physical activity, or physically associated thoughts.

You see, our consciousness moves in a cyclic fashion following a sine curve. One half the time it is in wave form, in which is it moving from world-line to world-line. The other half of the time it is in particle form where it occupies the physical body.

  • It is ONLY when it is in wave form that the consciousness can physically move within the MWI.
  • It is ONLY when it is in particle form that the consciousness can control the navigation.

So, [1] to navigate you need a starting world-line; the one that you occupy at that moment. Thus your consciousness is in particle form. [2] Your consciousness can only generate thoughts when it is in wave form. So your thoughts are basically generated entering and leaving a reality.

In Wave Form...
You generate thoughts. 
You move on the MWI.

In Particle form...
You occupy a world-line.
You navigate to the next world line.

Combined together, the ONLY way to effective navigate through the MWI off the pre-birth world-line template, (or to extreme points upon the pre-birth world-line template), you must do so by directing while in particle form.

Thoughts alone.
You move and navigate at the same time. 
You can only do this upon a Pre-Birth World-Line Template.

Verbal Affirmations.
You do this while in particle form, upon a world-line.
You program the physical reality by your actions.

Thus, thoughts (in wave form) cannot alter your course vector substantively. Only your actions while in particle form can.

In short, when you are in the physical form, you are operating the levers that control the body via quantum particle forms. You MUST perform physical actions to navigate. This usually means thinking while you are doing something physical. Thus reading affirmations out loud.

Now, let’s talk about making REAL and SUBSTANTIVE changes to your life…

Performing a “Slide”

A “slide” is a complete movement off and outside of the pre-birth world-line template. And what defines it from the “verbal affirmations” are two primary characteristics.

  • You navigate in a similar fashion to “verbal affirmations” AND…
  • You establish a completely new world-line template terrain geometry.

This new world-line template replaces your pre-birth world-line template.

The smart MWI traveler would define the new world-line template that he/she would travel upon. And he/she would make sure and provide safeguards to guarantee that accidental world-line template geometry wouldn’t be accidentally created.

How to generate a replacement template to travel upon

It’s actually rather simple.

The “devil is in the details”.

Scene from “Breaking Bad”. Be careful about what you wish for. It might not be what you really want.

Or, in other words, you must verbally create the new replacement world-line template that you will follow. But of course, there are many unknowns doing this. You might think that you are creating one new reality for yourself by constructing the template, only to discover that you have “created a monster” and other unexpected events, and consequences have cropped up and appeared “out of the blue”.

Let’s use the following as an example…

You live a nice, but boring life. You have a small pizza business in a small town. You are pretty happy doing it, but you hear and read about how everyone else is getting rich investing in the stock-market and in bit-coin. So you decide to completely replace your pre-birth world-line template with a template of your own design.

You perform your normal verbal affirmation campaigns, but you specifically state that you have slid off the pre-birth world-line template and on to a a new template of your own geometry.

You describe the new template as a life of wealth as a big important businessman, with factories making frozen pizza that everyone loves. You describe your rich cars, fancy mansion and tons of money in the bank.

What you fail to realize that these possessions, when they manifest, all come with other attachments and events. many of which you do not like at all. Such as a divorce, arrest for tax evasion, and medical problems. And while you might try to alter the manifestation of these side effects, many cannot be helped.

You see, the illusion that a 20-something beauty queen can be a world famous scientist, knows kung-fu, and live in a mansion is just Hollywood nonsense. The real world does not work that way. Do not try to replicate that fantasy. It will not work the way you intend.

A slide to a new world-line template can come with all sorts of unintended consequences.

There are numerous techniques and methods to slide off your pre-birth world-line template. This is just an overview. Keep in mind that I would advise careful thought be given to this decision. Any slide, no matter how well intentioned, WILL come with unanticipated consequences.

Conclusion

You must verbalize and write down your verbal affirmations for them to work. Thoughts alone are ineffective in world-line navigation. As I have stated in my answer to the above question…

The act of talking involves a wide range of activities. More than just thinking.

Consider thinking about eating Lasagna. Now, I love the stuff, but it’s very difficult to get in China. I’d have to make it myself or have my wife order the ingredients, learn how to make it, and then present it to me as a meal. Yet, I find myself thinking about this luscious dish often. Yet is doesn’t appear.

Why?

Consider worrying about paying a bill. And you worry and worry how you are going to come up with the money. You think about strategies, and your mind goes off in all sorts of tangents related to the debt that just sits there festering. Yet nothing is resolved.

Why?

Thoughts alone are not associated with the physical reality. They are just creations of your consciousness, and the only… the ONLY exposure those thoughts have with anyone or anything else is the consciousness that generated them. That’s it.

But, if you connect those thoughts to the reality that you inhabit, they leave the wave form, and enter the particle form. That is how thoughts are able to influence the physical. They are created by the consciousness, and transmuted into a form that the reality can accept. The techniques for this to occur include speech, sounds, writing, actions, etc. Physical activity must occur to connect the thoughts to the reality that you inhabit.

Thus worrying and fretting but not speaking, or writing about it results in no effect. Nothing happens. But if you speak about the worries (in such a way that they are resolved) the solution and navigation within the reality that you navigate manifests.

YOU MUST WRITE and/or SPEAK thoughts out for them to manifest within your reality.

Sanity Check

This is easy enough to check.

Generate two sets of affirmations.

  • One set you read aloud and read what you have written down on paper.
  • The next second set is a picture that you will look at and think about what you want.

Watch and record which thoughts manifest sooner.

I hope that I was able to clarify some key points and added some understand on how the mechanism actually works. There will be more posts and articles on this in the future, as there will probably be many more questions generated by this discussion.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Affirmation prayer Campaign Index here…

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School Lunches from around the world; a look at the differences in society and culture

One of the problems with a social media “echo chamber” is that you are unable to compare things.

That’s what an “echo chamber” is.

It’s talk and “news” about what you want to hear, and fences and barriers to what you do not want to hear.

You listen (day in, and day out) all about how great you are, and how bad everyone else is. And you know, there are no REAL comparisons. Just “rah, rah for us“. And those “other guys…” Well, “they are bad because of [place reason here].”

It’s a problem with all social media. And all these efforts to get rid of “hate” and other opinions that might offend tends to further strengthen the walls that surround these echo chambers. Eventually, all you and your friends within the chambers here is what you want to hear.

Well, we are going to make some comparisons to illustrate the dangers of echo chambers. Whether it is alt-right, or alt-left. And we are going to do it using something neutral.

Let’s look at school lunches.

We will start with a nation that is doing it right. We are going to talk about France. On a scale of 0 to 10, I rate them a 9. Why a 9? Well, they used to serve wine with the school lunches, don’t you know. But stopped doing so in the 1970’s.

Many parents would place one alcoholic drink of their choice in the child’s basket to take to school. Often half a litre of wine, cider, or beer depending on the region. Where there were cases of head teachers disallowing the drink be given to children, it’s said that some parents encouraged the children to drink their wine before they go to school, over breakfast.

...

As recent as it may seem, it was only in September 1981, shortly after the election of François Mitterrand, that alcoholic drinks were banned from high schools once and for all, when water became the only drink encouraged at the table. “In canteens and school restaurants, no alcoholic beverages are to be served, even if water is cut off,” said Alain Savary, Minister of National Education at the time.

-Culture Trip

So it’s a 9, not a 10.

France used to allow schoolchildren to sup wine in between lessons, which is almost unbelievable compared to today’s society. In fact, before the 1950s, French children were not only allowed to drink wine, beer or cider in the canteen, but they were encouraged to do so.

-Why French Schoolchildren Used To Drink Wine Between L…

France

Maybe no one is drinking wine, but they do actually have nice lunches and a generous amount of time to enjoy and savor them.

School lunch in France at a country school.

Even the approach to lunch is different. For instance, a typical school lunch in France includes “courses”, including an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert, accompanied by water or milk. On any given day, a French school lunch could include: A Typical School Lunch in France. Fresh bread and salad; Veal scallops or baked fish with lemon sauce

-French vs American School Lunches - Bistro Chic

French school lunches are very different from those in most other countries, especially those in the U.S.

French children are in school all day, even in the maternelle (roughly equivalent to U.S. kindergarden) and in the pre-school before that. Education covers life at large, including nutrition and meals.

For the French, learning how to eat a meal and appreciate diverse foods is like learning how to read, write and do arithmetic. It’s not an after-thought, or a thing that you must do as you rush from task to task, as is done in America today.

Another typical French elementary school meal.

Lunch is the main meal of the day for children. In French schools this meal has four courses:

  1. Vegetable starter: leafy green salad or sliced or grated vegetables.
  2. The warm main dish, which includes a vegetable side dish.
  3. Cheese course.
  4. Dessert is fresh fruit four times a week with a sweet treat on the fifth day.

The Ministry of National Education requires that the children sit at the lunch table for at least 30 minutes, in order to eat a civilized meal.

The municipal government is responsible for operating the cantine, now more appropriately called the restaurant scolaire, and adhering to the national nutritional requirements which include:

  • Within any four-week period (20 meals), only a maximum of four main dishes and three desserts can be high fat.
  • Similarly, fried food is limited to four meals per month, likely the same four high-fat main dishes.
  • Ketchup can only be served once per week, typically with the once-per-week fries, and only a limited amount provided with the meal. Many school simply don’t serve the high-sugar high-salt ketchup at all.
  • No sweetened and flavored milk, water is served.
  • No daily menu may be repeated within a month.

The municipal government can set prices within the constraints of the national law’s maximum limit and sliding scale.

The result is that, on average, a school lunch costs something like €2.30–2.80. The very wealthiest families might pay €5.40 per meal while those with the lowest of incomes pay €0.15 and free meals are available for those who can’t pay.

A typical lunch meal at a school in France.

American expats have been commenting on how different the rest of the world is compared to America “the best nation”. And they are very angry at being so “hood winked” and lied to.

Growing up, I never really paid attention to the nutritional content in my school’s  lunch program. But now, after having  children of my own, I’m concerned about what food they are eating at daycare, and eventually, what they will be eating in their elementary school.

The US standards for school food are extremely low. Much lower than that of some European countries, particularly France.

Let’s just say if there was a World Cup for school lunch nutrition, France would be kicking our tails right now! When you compare French and American school lunches, it is quite apparent why childhood obesity rates are growing in the US. 

American schools serve lunches that consist of highly processed foods, loaded with sodium, calories, saturated fat, preservatives, etc. And very little of what they serve even resembles real food.

Typical French elementary school lunch.

I walked into the dining room to see tables of four already set—silverware, silver breadbasket, off-white ceramic plates, cloth napkins, clear glasses, and water pitchers laid out ready for lunch. 

I was standing inside my children's public elementary school cafeteria, or "cantine" as the French call it, in our local town near Annecy, France. As part of my research into why French kids are better able to support healthy weight, the local city council gave me a tour of the public school's cantine and kitchen and let me ask any question that came to mind.

There are many theories as to why French people, and French children in particular, do not suffer from weight problems, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension like their American counterparts. 

Eating moderate quantities of fresh and freshly prepared food at set times of the day is definitely one of the most convincing reasons why. 

Daily exercise, in the form of three recess periods (two 15-minute and one 60-minute recess every day) and walking or biking to and from school, is another.

So what do French kids eat at school?

Menus are set up two months in advance by the cantine management staff and then sent to a certified dietitian who makes small "corrections." 

The dietitian might take out a small chocolate éclair and replace it with a kiwi for dessert if she thinks there's too much sugar that week. Or she may modify suggested menus by adding more or fewer carbohydrates, vegetables, fruits, or protein to keep the balance right.

Almost all foods are prepared right in the kitchen; they're not ready-made frozen. 

This means mashed potatoes, most desserts, salads, soups, and certainly the main dishes are prepared daily. Treats are included—the occasional slice of tart, a dollop of ice cream, a delicacy from the local pastry shop. (Check out these photos of a school lunch being prepared on premises.)

Of note: French elementary school students don't go to school on Wednesdays, so that's why there are only four meals.

Another plus for France. Wednesdays are off.

Conversely, in France all school lunches are freshly prepared with real food, not prepackaged. Even the approach to lunch is different. For instance, a typical school lunch in France includes “courses”, including an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert, accompanied by water or milk. On any given day, a French school lunch could include:

A Typical School Lunch in France…

      • Fresh bread and salad
      • Veal scallops or baked fish with lemon sauce
      • Fruit and yogurt
      • Water or white milk

Compare that to…

A Typical School Lunch in the US…

      • Frozen cheesey bread
      • Frozen chicken fingers or fish sticks and fries
      • Fried apples or chocolate pudding
      • Flavored milk, juice, or soda

Furthermore, a typical school lunch in France lasts about an hour, reinforcing the French tradition of eating slowly and savoring your food.

In the US, children get roughly 20 minutes to finish their meal and socialize with friends, reinforcing the habit of eating fast and not really recognizing what your eating, let along the signs that you’re full.

French elementary school lunch.

Obviously, school lunch programs are not only to blame for childhood obesity rates and unhealthy childhood eating habits.

Children learn from their family and friends and even from television what is “good” and what is “bad” in regard to food and nutrition.

Still, what they learn in school and from their classmates about nutrition can stay with them for the rest of their lives…

Americans in Walmart.

In elementary and high school, my family could never really afford the daily school-provided lunches, which included sloppy joes, French fries, and chicken fingers. At the time, I really wished that I could afford the hot lunch so that I could be like everyone else.

But what I realize now is how lucky I am that I did NOT eat those lunches.

Instead, I would brown bag my lunch with a salad or a sandwich and whatever fruit or dessert we had in the house. By doing this, I not only saved money, but I learned the basics of healthy eating at a very young age and how to differentiate processed food from real, nutritious food.

Fast forward 50 years and I am nearly disgusted to think about what was served to my classmates back then, and even more disgusted that they still serve such unhealthy food in schools today.

I understand that American schools and districts have certain policies about food and that any food is better than none for kids whose parents can’t afford to feed them. But there’s no reason why we can’t serve our children healthy and real food.

From preschool through highschool, the meals served at school cafeterias (les cantines) in France usually consist of five-course meals. An appetizer, main dish, salad or vegetable, cheese or yogurt and dessert. Bread may or may not be an option depending on the meal. (Pictured above is a school lunch from a high school).

"All our fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat are sourced locally, some of them from local farms," according to Dany Cahuzac, the city counselor in charge of school matters, including the cantine. The local bakery delivers bread, a staple of every French meal, every morning. And every two days, there is at least one organic item on the menu. Once a month, an entirely organic meal is served. The only drink offered at lunchtime is filtered tap water, served in glass pitchers.

If you’re not from France, you might be surprised to learn that the cafeteria meals in French schools are normal meals a French family might serve at home. French fries are also a popular food item in France but is not served more than once or twice a week as part of a school lunch.

Another French school meal…

French school lunch.

In the U.S., Time magazine’s “School Lunches in France: Nursery-School Gourmets” seems to have been one of the articles that drew significant attention in America to French school menus.

Consider the CBS News story “Why my child will be your child’s boss”, which explained how Swiss school children are regularly taken into the forest and allowed — no, required — to use saws.

Or the Lenore Skenzay’s book Free-Range Kids describes how a U.S. high school principal threatened to suspend a group of seniors (that is, 18 years old, in their final year of school) for the “dangerous act” of riding their bicycles to school, and a group of parents protested because their 17- and 18-year old children were sent home from school on a train without an adult supervisor.

Meanwhile Swiss children as young as three are given saws to play with, and their kindergarten system advises parents to let 4- and 5-year-old children walk to school alone.

As the children come streaming into the cantine, they sit down at tables of four that are already set and wait for older student volunteers to bring the first course to their table. The child who sits in the designated "red" chair is the only one who is allowed to get up to fetch more water in the pitcher, extra bread for the breadbasket, or to ask for extra food for the table. After finishing the first course (often a salad), volunteers bring the main course platter to the table and the children serve themselves. A cheese course follows (often a yogurt or small piece of Camembert, for example), and then dessert (more often than not, fresh fruit).

"Eating a balanced meal while sitting down calmly is important in the development of a healthy child," adds Cahuzac. "It helps them to digest food properly, avoid stomachaches, and avoid sapped energy levels in the afternoon."

Then there are American school lunches and the concept of ketchup as a vegetable and frozen pizza as a vegetable.

Ronald Reagan’s FY1982 budget proposed US$57 billion in spending cuts, This budget was modified and passed as the Gramm-Latta Budget, cutting US$1 billion from the school lunch program while significantly increasing military spending.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture or USDA was then tasked with the impossible task of maintaining nutritional requirements for school lunches despite the loss of a billion dollars in funding.

On September 3, 1981, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture announced a joint proposal by the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration to reclassify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables.

Public outrage led to the eventual retirement of this specific proposal. However…

By 2011, USDA standards accepted just two tablespoons or 30 ml of tomato paste as counting for a full serving of vegetables. This allows a slice of cheese and meat pizza to also count as a full serving of vegetables.

Under American rules, this counts as a serving of salad.

The USDA wanted to change this to require at least a half-cup or 118 ml of tomato paste before counting it as a full serving of vegetables, also requiring more green vegetables and limiting the amount of potatoes served to one cup per week and thus significantly cutting back on the amount of French fries.

But…

The U.S. Congress would have nothing to do with that healthy nonsense, and quickly passed a bill barring the USDA from changing its existing nutritional guidelines.

This was an enormous victory for manufacturers of pre-processed French fries and frozen pizza!

The American Frozen Food Institute is a trade association that lobbied heavily and successfully on behalf of frozen pizza manufacturers including ConAgra and Schwan Food Company, and French fry manufacturers McCain Foods Ltd and J.R. Simplot Company, the last of which was already a supplier to McDonald’s.

Typical Americans.

Meanwhile the actual French people, including their school children, eat only a tiny fraction of the amount of “French fries” consumed by their American equivalents.

So what DO American school children eat?

United States

I suppose that this picture is the IDEAL American lunch meal…

The ideal consists of processed meat, pre-processed instant potatoes with sugar-laden ketchup, a sugar cookie, dessert of canned fruit in a sugar sauce, and a serving of vegetables.

The IDEAL, that is.

American schoolchildren, in general, aren’t as accustomed to eating the same fresh, healthy meals as some of their global neighbors. In the photo series above, the American meal includes chicken nuggets, peas, mixed fruit, mashed potatoes, and a cookie. While that satisfies certain federal guidelines for nutrition, there’s plenty here (preservatives, processed sugar) that’s less than ideal.

Still, the meal doesn’t look that bad.

Of course, as anyone who went to US public schools knows, the meals are rarely this aesthetically appealing.

Plenty of them look like this…

 

“Today, class, we’ll be having brown.”

For an explanation of the #ThanksMichelleObama hashtag, read this piece by Vox’s Libby Nelson.

Throughout the United States, the classic milk carton of white milk is served to the children; The classic milk carton.

"Unfortunately, the variety served at the schools my children went to in the U.S. was usually a rotating menu of burgers, burritos, and tacos. Some middle schools and high schools in California even served  McDonald’s."

Complaining about school lunch is a time-honored tradition. But teens on Twitter have found someone new to blame, tweeting photos of tiny and/or disgusting-looking school lunches with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama:

Because healthy eating, particularly for kids, is one of the Michelle Obama’s signature issues, it makes sense that she’d be associated with changes to the federal school lunch program.

But those changes actually started with Congress and were put into place by the US Department of Agriculture.

An “improved” lunch meal served to American Children in the United States. Milk, vegetable, meat. Viola!

Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010, requiring the federal government to issue school lunch guidelines based on recommendations from the Institute of Medicine.

Based on the photos above, the act might not always be living up to its name. Let’s look at what is going on in some better detail…

Why the American federal government changed school lunches

The regulations from the US Department of Agriculture require school lunches to meet higher nutritional standards. Which is a good thing.

Meals are now supposed to have more whole grains, less meat and less sodium than in the past, and they have to include at least one fruit or vegetable.

Schools also have to offer a wide variety of vegetables — in one week, they have to offer starches (such as potatoes), dark green vegetables (spinach, kale, and other greens), red or orange vegetables (such as carrots or beets), and beans or peas.

If students refuse to put a vegetable or fruit on their tray, the school isn’t reimbursed for that meal.

Thus it results in all sorts of strange looking meals…

Why American school lunches look so gross

Anybody who went to school can tell you that gross-looking school lunches aren’t new. But the new school lunch guidelines sound like they should lead to healthy, whole-grain rich meals — not the pizza, chicken nuggets, and hamburgers that were mainstays of school lunches in the past.

But…

But…

Why hasn’t it worked out that way?

Partly it’s because school lunches need to be cheap.

When California began a pilot program of serving fresh, local food one day a week, one district learned that two free-range chicken drumsticks for a high school student would cost 80 cents, more than the 60 cents they’re supposed to spend on an entree.

Healthier meals also require equipment that school kitchens, set up to reheat and serve batches of processed foods, sometimes don’t have.

That's correct, boys and girls, the modern schools have kitchens that do not make and cook food. they are designed to reheat pre-processed synthetic food elements.

Districts are also allowed to make agreements with food companies to turn the raw ingredients they get from the US Department of Agriculture into processed foods…

… ensuring they have a constant supply of chicken nuggets.

Schools didn’t stop offering pizza at lunch, a study in the journal Childhood Obesity found: they just started offering healthier pizza, whatever “healthier pizza” means. (It probably doesn’t taste as good.)

Does anyone know what a “healthier pizza” is?

A “healthier pizza” meal in an American elementary school.

Why American school vending machines are empty

Why are the kids emptying out the vending machines, and throwing away their lunches?

#ThanksMichelleObama is almost accurate here, if you can imagine Michelle Obama standing in for the US Department of Agriculture. (It is part of the executive branch!)

For the first time, the USDA now regulates foods that schools sell outside of the school lunch program — the sweet, salty snacks in vending machines and a la carte lines.

A fine American school lunch of Doritos with salsa, plain rice and milk. Yum! And people wonder why I am not sending my Children to America for an education!

American students are used to eat a lot of unhealthy food during the school day.

In the 2005 school year, the USDA says, students drank 452 million sodas, 26 million diet sodas, and 864 million fruit drinks. They ate 763 million candy bars and 1.4 billion desserts.

On average, high school students who ate those foods consumed an extra 277 calories a day, the majority of them empty calories from foods without much nutritional value.

To compensate, we can see the great healthy meals that are offered in the American school dining halls…

Delicious salt and fat laden hot dog, ketchup (it’s a vegetable don’t you know), a small tomato, apple and milk. Yum!

But beginning this school year, everything sold in schools — even outside the national school lunch program — has to meet nutrition guidelines.

Snacks must be under 200 calories, and foods must have some nutritional value — rich in whole grains, or have fruit, vegetables, protein, or dairy as a main ingredient, or contain 10 percent of the recommended daily value of important nutrients.

Sounds good.

But when you have a central bureaucracy dictating everything and bureaucrats deciding adaptation of policy guidelines, along with the toxic influences of big-food, big-education, and big-unions you end up getting what we see here.

So it’s not just Michelle Obama to blame — in fact, technically, she had nothing to do with the regulations.

But that’s the way America is today.

And that is why we see Americans are they are today.

You are what you eat. America today.

Summary of the American nutrition system

The comedy Idiocracy has shown us the way…

From AlterNet…

The 2006 cult comedy Idiocracy is having its moment in the sun. Written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of “Beavis & Butthead,” Idiocracy envisions a future corporate American wasteland where Costco is as large as a small city, the food pyramid consists entirely of fast food, and the president of the United States (Terry Crews) is a five-time "Ultimate Smackdown" professional wrestling champion and ex-porn star. 

“So you’re smart, huh?” President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho says to hapless time traveler Joe “Not Sure” Bauers (Luke Wilson), an Average Joe chagrined to discover he’s now the smartest man in the country. “I thought your head would be bigger,” Camacho bellows. “Looks like a peanut!”

Donald Trump's political ascendancy has made Idiocracy seem like prophecy. (Or, per a viral tweet by the film’s screenwriter, a “documentary.”) 

As satire, however, Idiocracy is uneven, precisely because recent events have already exceeded its most trenchant bits of lunacy. In the fictional Idiocracy future, Congress is full of idiots who do nothing but yell, “You’re a dick!” at the president. 

But those antics pale in comparison to stunts pulled by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Trump, a billionaire real-estate developer and reality TV show star whose foreign policy proposals include telling China, Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent! 

In 2009, Trump purchased the rights to pro-wrestling show “Monday Night Raw” and then sold them back to the previous owner “for twice the price,” according to the World Wrestling Entertainment website. “Since then, the WWE Hall of Famer [has] focused on his ever-expanding real estate empire, his Emmy-nominated reality television show ‘The Apprentice’ and running for president of the United States.”

Mike Judge may be a funny guy, but his mind isn’t exactly subtle. A decade ago when Idiocracy was released, he was already treading well-worn ground by envisioning a future where being unable to pay debts is a crime (see: the return of debtor’s prison), the Violence Channel dominates the networks (see: all of cable), and a plotless film about a farting white ass wins Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards (see: Swiss Army Man, starring Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse).

To be sure, there is more than a grain of truth in Judge’s worry that educated people sound like “fags” to a population that speaks “a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts.” 

But in order to get the laughs, he went for low-hanging fruit, using eugenics as a plot device, romanticizing the effects of social engineering and coming perilously close to validating the dubious notion of IQ as a social sorting tool.

The film opens with a voiceover explaining that rampant breeding among the dimwitted has undone civilization. After 500 years of exponential idiocy, corporate America has responded by catering to the lowest common denominator. 

Thus, future Starbucks offers hand jobs. 

Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers. Fox News is anchored by pro-wrestlers. Costco gives out law degrees. And the company behind the energy drink Brawndo owns the FDA, FCC and USDA. 

But the film got the power dynamic backward, thereby softballing its critique. As Adam Johnson pointed out on AlterNet, it decided to highlight “the problem—in this case political ignorance—without addressing its primary culprit: the consolidation of media into large corporations, a PR-fueled think tank industry fed by billionaires designed to promote toxic right-wing canards… and a decades-long corporate assault on K-12 and postsecondary education.”

In my opinion, Idiocracy is one of the great science-fiction films of the past decade. When most people think of science-fiction it’s an action packed Star Wars or Star Trek style space opera with space ships, robots, lasers and lots of action. While these films can be extremely entertaining, the actual “science” part of the equation is somewhat lacking. In my opinion the the most interesting science-fiction films are those based on an event or series of events occurring on Earth and the impact of these events on society.

What makes this form of science-fiction particularly interesting is that a memorable world is set up to allow the film to provide an insight on our current society.

Idiocracy vividly creates a future version of a polluted America where a handful of corporations seemingly run all commerce and social services, advertising is all pervasive and the media is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Idiocracy is a very funny film, but also one that asks a lot of uncomfortable questions about where society is heading…

U.K. school lunch

Now for comparison purposes let’s look at one of the “five eye” nations. This is the United Kingdom. You see, the group of five nations share culture, intelligence, society and other aspects of life with some minor differences (as long as it is permitted by the Untied States leadership).

These nations are;

  • United States
  • Canada
  • UK
  • Australia
  • New Zealand

So you would assume that these nations would have a similar lunch menu, but exercise some degree of autonomy in it’s selection…

And that is exactly what happened.

UK Lunch in schools.

A fine copy of American lunches, only with greater portion sizes, less sugars, and less salt. I am going to go out on a limp and say that the UK is on the right path, and following the right direction. No it’s not perfect. But they are trying. They do care.

Other nations have been revamping their school food programs with more nutritious, sustainable food for the better part of the past decade.

Years before Jamie Oliver did his thing, East Ayrshire, Scotland launched a pilot program called Hungry for Success. That program went far beyond boosting nutrition. It also focused on nutrition education; trained cooks; put organic, local food in school meals; and made the cafeteria a cooler place to hang out.

So how’d it go over? A Worldwatch Institute report says 67 percent of the town’s children said school meals tasted better.

It was later adopted nationwide, and elements of the program were later picked up by the UK.

Granted it is much better than what is offered in the Untied States, but it is still heavily laden with salts, sugars and other unhealthy elements and typically devoid of fruits and raw vegetables.

Let’s look at Japan.

Japan

In response to growing obesity rates among children, Japan passed The Basic Law of Shokuiku in 2005. It requires kids to get nutrition and food origin education at all public schools.

Japanese school lunch.

Fittingly for a country with its own rich traditional cuisine, Japan takes its catered elementary school lunches very seriously.

More than just a meal, lunchtime is considered on par with school lessons in its educational importance. It also helps create a bond between schoolmates in a way that perhaps only sharing a meal can do.

Tokyo school lunches are planned by the school’s nutritionist and cooked onsite by a group of staff hired specifically for that task. They prepare big pots of soup and rice and such, which the students on lunch duty retrieve from the kitchen, wheel into the classroom on a big trolley and then dish out to their classmates—it’s a bit like a portable canteen. Outside Tokyo, school lunch centers will make and distribute the food to schools.

Japanese school lunch.

The students on lunch duty dress for the part, in a white kitchen cap and a long white smock-style apron. They also don a regular, flu-use medical mask. As the other students pass by with their trays they accept a bowl of each dish from the lunch-duty kids and take them back to their desks.

Utensils are also provided.

When the children return to their seats, they place their tray on the luncheon mat that they have brought from home and laid out on their desk. Also on the desk should be a pocket pack of tissues, a small hand towel and a cup. Students bring these items from home daily in a little bag that they usually hang off the side of their backpacks. Recently some schools are asking students to bring a toothbrush, too, for a post-lunch brush-up. Teachers eat the same kyuushoku catered lunch at their desks along with the students.

So what do they eat?

Most often rice, soup, a salad and a meat or fish dish.

A 200-milliliter bottle of milk is included daily, but once or twice a month coffee milk or a yogurt drink is served instead.

Japanese school lunches.

The rice dish is rarely plain white rice. Instead it will have something such as mushrooms or wakame kelp mixed through it. It also gets served as fried rice or pilaf. Occasionally the kids get noodles instead. Bread appears as the staple about once a month and almost certainly is sweet. Dessert is served once or twice a week, most often as a piece of fruit, but occasionally as a jelly or pudding.

The soup is most often miso soup, but a variety of soups are served, including other Japanese soups, such as the clear sumashi jiru, as well as Western-style pumpkin soup and Chinese-style egg soup, which make regular, monthly appearances.

Salads appear most days and come in a wide variety—wakame salad, bean sprout salad, French salad, potato salad—but all ingredients, even cucumber, are cooked to prevent an outbreak of stomach virus.

Meat dishes are often served atop rice as a donburi.

Fish is the main dish on average about once a week.

Typical Japanese school lunch.

This is a rough guide, though, as the menu and the frequency of each type of dish differ according to the menu plan arranged by each school’s nutritionist.

The meals often reflect various festive events—both Japanese ones, with pumpkin served at the winter solstice, for example—and non-native ones, such as with a chocolate dessert on Valentine’s Day.

Parents pay for their children’s school lunches, but they don’t pay much; about ¥250 a meal in first and second grade, just under ¥300 in fifth and sixth grade, and midway between those in the middle years.

In line with broader Japanese society, schools here have become very aware of food allergies. The school entrance paperwork will include your child’s allergy information. Schools will likely cater for an allergic child by preparing her lunch without the allergic ingredients and placing it upon the kyuushoku trolley with her name on it.

Japan’s school-lunch system is said to have begun in Yamagata prefecture’s Tsuruoka city in 1889 when a priest-run elementary school served rice balls, grilled fish and pickles to students too poor to bring lunch to school. The move was widely recognized as a good thing, and schools across the nation began to follow suit.

The school lunch system teaches children etiquette, serving and clearing up skills, and aims to teach them to make healthy food choices and positive lifelong eating habits.

Japanese school lunch.

Since it also aims to have students try a wide range of food, teachers have traditionally encouraged them to eat all the food served to them.

Anecdotal accounts from sempai moms include a teacher insisting a student complete his lunch and him sitting there in front of it all the way through the post-lunch playtime and into the next lesson. Even back then the strictness to which the “please eat everything” rule was enforced varied according to the teacher, and today—in line with a shift in wider social values—such an extreme example is unlikely to be found.

Ideally, sharing a meal should be an enjoyable experience that unites a class by helping classmates get to know each other more intimately and understand one another better.

When Japanese parents reminisce together about their own elementary school days, talk of school lunches invariably emerges and, although spoken of fondly, the tastelessness of the dishes is usually the main topic.

It is a palpable bond for them.

Today’s school lunches have improved in taste, with both teachers and students praising them.  It is amazing what happens when parents, and local administrators work side by side and maintain tradition and healthy care for the future of society.

And let’s look at China…

China

In China, the kids eat well, healthy food. The portions tend to be gargantuan. Seriously, but you are not going to get fat on rice, vegetables and fish, are you?

Chinese school lunch.

Chinese school lunch. Notice that the portions are enormous!

Dave took his China images at a college cafeteria in Chengdu. It was school holidays and the campus was nearly deserted, but the cafeteria appeared fully operational. And we were astounded to find at least 30 items -- not including mantou (steamed bread) and rice -- on offer.

Fifteen yuan (a little over two US dollars) bought us the two meals above. With rice and mantou it was far more than we could eat. Mantou (which got hard as soon as it began to lose its heat in the unheated cafeteria) excepted the dishes were all quite good, delicious even. The stir-fried egg and tomato -- slightly sweet and very flavorful -- cauliflower (perfectly crisp-tender and touched with chili heat) and the baby bok choy (also perfectly done, tangled with tender strips of pork) were the stand-outs.

If I were in Chengdu and keeping to a very strict budget I'd be frequenting university dining halls. Think of it -- a day's worth of well-prepared and decently healthy meals for about U$3.

The Global Times ran a nice photo collage on the meals that children eat throughout China it’s a pretty good essay. From the article, (and all credit to the writer)…

Brazil School Lunch

And Brazil…

Brazil’s school feeding program, the second largest in the world feeds 42 million of the country’s school children. Part of Brazil’s Zero Hunger Program, the school lunch program has not only helped reduce child hunger and malnutrition, but it has also started to change how children relate to and understand food, while promoting local agriculture.

Brazil’s constitution requires that 30 percent of the ingredients for school meals be sourced from local, family farms. In so doing, the country has helped some four million of the country’s small farmers and promoted rural development.

As do many countries around the world, Brazil has the double burden of malnutrition and obesity. Poor kids without access to sufficient, nutritious food have a growing access to junk food, and, as a result, obesity is on the rise. Public schools in Brazil are trying to tackle the problem—one of their most effective tools is school gardens. Kids grow their own food and decide what produce to use for their daily school meals, all while building a better understanding of their food and what it means to eat healthy.

Brazil school lunch.

The Brazil lunch program has been praised the world over. Here’s some “take-a-ways” from The Tyee…

Lesson 1: Delegate decision-making power to local governments

For most of its history, Brazil’s school feeding program was run from the capital, Brasilia. A federal agency bought the food and distributed it using large food service companies. Menus were more or less the same across the country.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the federal government decentralized the program. It provided dedicated funding to states based on the number of students. State education departments control this account, and the purchasing of food. But school cooks and principals get to craft menus (according to state guidelines and with help from state nutritionists) and report back to the state on the quality of food received.

In the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, local producers have begun to enrich their bread with vegetables, including beets, carrots and cassava, a tuber native to South America and an important part of the traditional diet in the region.

“We want to rescue traditional and healthier eating habits,” explained Andrea Bruginski, co-ordinator of student food and nutrition for the state’s education department. “Cassava, for example, is a traditional food that also offers more fibre, more vitamin B and complex carbohydrates.”

“Different schools have different menu requirements, depending on what grows in the region, depending on what the culture of the school is like, depending on what students are used it,” said Bruginski. “For us as nutritionists, we feel students should be familiar and comfortable with what they’re eating.”

Brazil school lunches compared to American school lunches.

Lesson 2: Craft policies to support small farmers

Brazil has a long history of agrarian activism rooted in the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) — Landless Workers’ Movement — that emerged in the 1970s to fight for the rights of rural families pushed off their land during years of military dictatorship. The movement is known for bold direct actions, like the massive demonstrations it has organized, but it’s also an effective political force.

In the mid-1990s, it pushed to ensure small farmers could benefit from agricultural policies — like loans, insurance, price stabilization and market access — already enjoyed by big agribusinesses. The government responded with the National Program to Strengthen Family Agriculture — and created a separate ministry for small-scale farming, the Ministry of Agrarian Development. The ministry and the MST were crucial stakeholders in drafting the law mandating 30 per cent local purchasing.

The law has provided an incentive for farmers to organize in co-operatives so they can meet schools’ demands for large quantities of high quality produce.

The AOPA co-operative in Paraná sold about $2 million worth of produce to 382 schools in the state this year. The co-op works with 400 farmers in Paraná and three neighboring states.

Brazil school lunch. This is a vegetarian meal that is provided to elementary school students.

José Antônio da Silva Marfil, the co-op director, told me it has been able to “expand and access more and more opportunities” because of the new demand from schools. The co-op has been able to build new cold storage facilities at its warehouse, and the office now employs a full-time staff of five, including two administrators, two bookkeepers and a floor manager — the people who “make the wheels go ’round.”

“What’s important is that the administrative organization is polished,” Marfil told me. “That’s what makes us work.”

Lesson 3: Regional and local government commitment means more success

Although the PNAE is a national program, state and municipal governments are responsible for implementing it. All states are expected to supplement funding for food (which they do, to varying degrees). Some municipal governments also contribute. State education departments are responsible for food purchasing and maintaining cafeteria infrastructure.

So the program’s level of success depends heavily on how much state and municipal governments consider student nutrition a priority.

In Paraná, for instance, state officials can brag about having one of the highest rates of local food purchasing in the country (40 per cent of food served to students is from local farmers and processors) and one of the highest rates of organic food purchasing. In 2011, they delivered nine tonnes of organic produce to schools; now they deliver 2,414 tonnes.

Brazil school lunch.

Buying local required a big shift on the part of farmers, nutritionists and school administrators here. The two biggest challenges for farmers who wanted to participate in the program were getting through the application process (which consists of about 28 different forms) and then figuring out distribution logistics. Although non-perishable items go to a central warehouse, perishables must be delivered by the producer directly to schools once or twice per week.

In response, program administrators tried to simplify the process. They revamped regional boundaries to better match participating farmers with schools near them. They created YouTube videos to walk farmers through the application process. And they adjusted produce prices monthly, instead of annually, to better reflect market rates.

Lesson 4: Change can be slow, but will pay off

Brazil’s legislature passed the 30-per-cent local law in 2009. Implementing it required a major logistical shift for state education departments that were used to working with large food manufacturers and distributors. Farmers had to become accustomed to the paperwork required to do business with the state.

Even in states where progress has been slower, the school food program is having positive effects. Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, has not met the legislated goal of purchasing 30 per cent of food from family farmers — last year, it was around 20 per cent. But the year before it, it was only six per cent.

Eleneiole Alves Cordeiro is the manager of a farmers’ co-op in Bahia, Arco Sertão Central, that launched three years ago and now has 47 members producing everything from cassava and papaya to bread and the tapioca crackers that are so popular in the region. She said that although the prices offered by the state government through the program are too low, “it is opening doors for our product, spreading our products and interests in different markets.”

And this exposure is proving that small agriculture can produce good quality processed products — the kind of value-added products that can make farming more profitable.

“This spread, this growth, is breaking a paradigm… the stereotype that people believe that family agriculture does not have good products,” said Cordeiro. “That’s a lie. We know we are able and capable of producing quality products, good, dignified products that can contribute to the school feeding program.”

Lesson 5: There must be broad public support

When Brazil created its national student nutrition program in 1954, it was out of dire necessity. At the time, more than half the children in the country suffered from malnutrition. Much of the food used in the program was a commodity donated by USAID and other wealthy countries. For much of its history, the focus was on feeding kids, not feeding kids well, according to Daniel Silva Balaban, director of the World Food Program’s Center of Excellence Against Hunger.

Brazil school lunch.

Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began reforming the national school meal program in the early 2000s as part of a much broader vision for food security known as Fome Zero (Zero Hunger).

By then, Brazil had become an economic powerhouse. Industrial agriculture was booming and there was a rising middle class, but many Brazilians, particularly in rural areas, weren’t seeing much improvement in quality of life. Hunger, although not as prevalent, was still a big problem. People were hungry for change — hungry for a more equitable distribution of resources.

Taiwan (elementary school)

School lunch in Taiwan.

On the left: mushroom and minced pork, in the middle: Chinese chives stir fry with tempura, on the right: eggplant (probably stirfry), soup with radish and pork, and steamed white rice.

Singapore

Singapore school lunch.

The Singaporean school lunch looks very appetizing with the colorful plate. Singapore, a multicultural society where diverse cultures, languages and religions coexist, has its strength when it comes to food choices and quality. Although Marina Bay Sands is often recognized as the city’s modern landmark, Singapore is also known for its delicious street food.

People buy meals from outside food courts, and Singaporean students enjoy their lunches in the same way. Students in a Singaporean school go to a tuckshop, a collection of different stalls rented to a private cook, and choose between Singaporean and Western food.

Spain

From Medideas… Titled “School Lunch in Spain vs. School Lunch in the US” (all credit to the author)…

My memories of cafeteria food from public school in North Carolina are less than glamorous. I recall plenty of fish sticks, powdered mashed potatoes, questionable ground beef, and the occasional cup of bright green sherbet.

But at Colegio Santa María del Bosque, lunchtime is a very different experience. Every meal consists of two courses, served family-style in huge metal bowls.

Some aspects of school lunches in Spain are similar: the never-ending noise, the barely contained chaos, and the long tables reminiscent of those I used to sit at as a student. However, at lunchtime in Spain, there are no lines, no trays, and definitely no neon dessert.

Not to mention the fact that a team of sweet, smiling women prepares and serves the food. Indeed, these women take pride in feeding the army of kids and teachers that descends upon them each day; a far cry from the perpetually grumpy lunch ladies of my childhood.

What Are Spanish School Lunches Like?

On my very first day of school, I sat down with the other teachers at a table across the room from our students. I was entirely unsure of what to expect, as it was my first school lunch in Spain.

Within a few minutes, one of the lunch ladies brought out a heaping dish of paella: steaming yellow rice dotted with carrots, peas, potatoes, and tender pieces of bacalao (cod).

Of course, this wasn’t the same as the version I’d eaten in Barcelona at a touristy waterfront café; no cast iron skillet, no plump prawns, no mussels or clams, or sprigs of parsley. And I’m sure it bears little resemblance to the authentic delicacy you can only truly taste in Valencia, where the dish originated.

But on my first day of teaching, after trying to keep a group of exuberant eight-year-olds under control for an hour, this paella could not have tasted any better.

Typical School Lunches in Spain

In the months that have passed since that first day, school meals in Spain have rarely been disappointing. Generally, I enjoyed the food laid in front of me each afternoon. I have feasted on the simplest “tortilla española” in all its greasy delight; and warmed my soul with “solferino” and “crema de calabaza”, thick and hearty vegetable soups. I have stuffed myself with salty slabs of thinly sliced pork atop lettuce and tomatoes drowning in vinegar and olive oil. 

I have been introduced to “cocido”, the classic “madrileño” comfort food consisting of broth, noodles, stewed chickpeas, garlicky cabbage, various meats, and chunks of pure fat. And I have ended every meal with a piece of fresh fruit: apples, bananas, mandarin oranges, plump green grapes, and slices of juicy melon.

This alone is enough to forever cement in my mind the superiority of school lunch in Spain. Who needs powdered chocolate pudding when you’ve got good old-fashioned produce?

The Not-So-Great Side of School Lunch in Spain

Of course, there have been a couple of dishes that even I—a fairly adventurous and open-minded eater—have regarded with suspicion. Hard-boiled eggs covered in mayonnaise? Maybe not.

Pasta salad with tuna and black olives? Not my personal favorite.

And there’s no doubt that one would enjoy some of the typical Spanish dishes at my school more if they didn’t prepare them in industrial-sized batches. However, I am determined to give all of it a try, at least once.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my time in the comedor (cafeteria), it’s that sometimes the most delicious and satisfying meals are truly found in the most unexpected of places. Namely, on plastic plates at a kid-sized table in an underground room filled with dozens of shouting children. ¡Buen provecho!

Thailand

From Thai School Life, and credit to the author…

Today I want to talk a little about the steps students go through to eat at school. As you can see in the top picture, the students are all lined up to receive a bowl of rice soup from one of the serving ladies. What makes this a little different to Western countries is that the students will “wai’ and say thank you before they take the bowl of food. This is ingrained into the students. They must always “wai” first before receiving anything.

Thailand school lunch.

Other schools, particularly the secondary schools, are a little different to us. They might have lots of little stalls in the canteen and the students can choose what they want to eat every day. At my school, the menu is set and there is a four week rotation. In total we have 20 meals which I will tell you more about later. So, the students all eat the same. No-one brings food in from home. By far the majority are Buddhists and maybe only a handful are Muslims.

On most days, there will be a tray of condiments which the students will use to make their meal more tastier. In some ways you have to be a bit of a scientist to get the proportions right of sweet, sour and spicy. But the students know what they are doing and some like adding chili until the soup runs red. Actually, this is one of the good things about eating noodle soups in Thailand. What the vendor will give you is bland and not spicy at all. It is then up to you to add the different sauces to your own satisfaction. I will go into more detail another day.

Back in the classroom, the students wait for their friends to sit down. We now have too many students and it is easier for everyone to eat their lunch in the classroom. Once everyone is sitting down, the students will then say a kind of grace. This is not really religious but more ethical. It is reminding them that they should eat properly and that they should be grateful to the people who provided them with the food. The following translation of the grace was done by Gor when he was my Primary 6 student a number of years ago.

“During the time that we eat lunch, don’t speak or say things that aren’t good. Don’t make a noise. Take enough food for only one mouthful. Chew the food into little pieces so that you can digest the food properly. Before you get up from your seat, clean up your desk. Put the plate or a bowl orderly into the enameled basin. You mustn’t waste any food. You must eat it all. There are many starving children in the world. Pity all of the children that don’t have anything to eat. All of the food has a worth. When you eat food you must have good manners. Don’t chew the food loudly. Don’t talk when you are eating and don’t say something that is bad. Don’t laugh when you are eating. Thank you to our teachers that take care of us and all of the cooks that make us the food we eat. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

After that they then start eating. Everything is done very orderly and the students eat quietly. When they have finished, they put any waste food in a plastic bucket and their plates in an enamel bowl. Students who are on duty for that day will clean the classroom and then take the dirty plates and waste food down to the kitchen. Waste food is later fed to the stray dogs.

Thailand school lunch.

The plates are washed by the kitchen staff. However, the spoons and forks (they don’t use knives or chopsticks) are washed by the students on duty. After they have finished eating, many of the students then go to brush their teeth.

This is what the students eat over a four week period. There are actually three different menus: kindergarten, junior school and senior school. As there are some repeats I will just give you the menu for the older students. Not everyone eats the same thing at the same time. There are 1,800 students (and one small kitchen) so not everyone can have a rice based meal at the same time. So, half of the school have rice while the other half have some kind of soup.

–Thai School Life

Czech Republic elementary school lunch

Lunch usually consists of soup and a main course. Usually, there is a salad or some sort of fruit along with something sweet for dessert. There is always tea and water with sweet syrup on tap and cacao if sweet buns are for lunch.

Most of the kids eat at the school canteen (cafeteria). It’s convenient and cheaper for many parents.

Finland

In the beginning of the 20th century Finland developed an incredible social innovation: free school meals. Many of its other national success stories have been made possible thanks to our education and school meal system. Its goal is to make the world’s best school meals even better and help others in their work.

During 70 years, Finland has come a long way to become the international forerunner we are today. There is now a versatile and unique food education agenda that has grown around the school lunch. The basis has still remained the same: to each equally, during every school day.

 

Potatoes and sausage bites with gravy, rice & corn tuna salad, Iceberg lettuce with tangerines and dressing. Served with a slice of bread, butter and skim or low fat milk.

The Finnish government (like most European nations) provides children with free school lunch. Finnish children have been receiving free food for over 60 years, and some cities extend free food service to people who can’t afford for the adequate nutrition intakes.

Food is very important for child development mentally and physically, and Finland obviously knows how to take a wholesome care of citizens. There is no wonder Finnish kids exceed academically among those in other countries. In general, the winter in Finland may be colder than your cities, but those people are big-hearted.

South Korea

School lunch in South Korea.

The Korean lunch looks very healthy, as expected. Korean people are very health-conscious, and this well-balanced lunch explains it well. The menu contains raw vegetables, spicy marinated pork, soup and rice. At a Korean restaurant, you are often served with Banchan, small dishes of food in the middle of a table to share. This lunch reflects the idea of Banchan: small portions of everything.

Sweden

Swedish school lunch.

Swedish lunch is typically served with a warm main dish, like a stew with potatoes, with a side dish. The side dish contains “knäckebröd,” the famous Swedish crispy bread, and salad or cooked vegetables. Students can choose to drink water, milk or lingonberry juice, which is known as mountain cranberries or partridge berries in North America. Swedish students get more than 2000 school lunches during their years of compulsory education.

Ukraine

Malaysia

To get his Malaysia photographs Dave talked his way into the cafeteria at an elementary school in Brickfields, more popularly known as one of Kuala Lumpur’s Little Indias. I didn’t accompany him on this adventure, and Dave didn’t taste the food; he remembers each lunch costing around 2 ringgit, or about 60 US cents.

The meals look decent enough, though the roti — which Dave notes wasn’t freshly made (he did arrive close to the end of lunch hour) may be a bit tired. A bowl of asam laksa makes for a fairly well-rounded meal … but candy bars and super-sweet pink drinks?

Both of these lunches say much about what figures large in the local cuisine. In Sichuan, as we found at humble restaurants in Chengdu, rice (or other starch) is still an important part of the meal, and is eaten in great quantities. Vegetables too — not just because they’re cheap, but because Sichuanese love them (and do wonderful things with them). Chilies are present in decent quantities in two out of four dishes, and when there’s meat it’s pork.

In Malaysia eating chilies from an early age is a given, and strong flavors too (but not alot of vegetables). How many American kids would opt to eat a spicy, fish-based noodle soup if they had a choice? And the Malaysian palate, viewed through these two randomly chosen school lunches at least, is truly multi-cultural — a southern Indian bread and a noodle soup with Malay and Chinese culinary roots.

Italy

Conclusions

Yeah. It appears that the United States has the unhealthiest meals for its’ children, managed in such a way to allow for massive graft and corruption, and distant unmonitored control.

The idea that there are “nutrition experts” concocting the meals at American schools is ludicrous.

What we see when you step out of the United States Pro-America “echo chamber” is a world where America appears pathetically inept, to a point of being cruel. And we can see this.

Obviously since this has been going on for decades and any efforts to change the system has failed.  It appears that the entire system is beyond redemption and must be scrapped and changes implemented on the local level with no external influences or input.

The only way that this type of innate and obvious criminal activity can be allowed to continue for so long, with so little change, implies that the leadership controlling these system are themselves corrupt, corrupted, or being lead by greedy psychopaths.

There is no way that a reheated salt and fat laden hotdog with a dab of sugar-saturated ketchup qualifies for a “healthy nutritious” meal.

And when you see enormously obese Americans riding government supplied electric carts to buy 24-packs of soda, you can rest assured that the American leadership wants this situation;

They planned for it, and they created it. It’s intentional. It is impossible for this condition; this situation to be accidental.

The only way out…

…is to nuke from orbit.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Life and Happiness Index here…

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