Things are very serious now

Well, we all have been dealing with a host of disturbing Geo-Political actions originating out of the USA for decades. And over the last few years they have become more brazen, more outrageous and more daring. It’s been building up to a crescendo.

This build-up has triggered actions from the rest of the world, and the most notable being Russia, and China.

China and Russia has laid down “Red Lines”.

The United States ignored them.

The United States Has no idea…

Alex Krainer:

Western powers seem to have largely lost institutional brakes on waging war.

Someone cries “human rights,” and we seem prepared to obliterate entire nations with hardly any debate, discussion, or any long-term plan.

The consent for war, or “kinetic action”, is simply contrived by myriad think-tanks, often directly or indirectly funded by the military-industrial complex.

With unhindered access to the media, these organizations produce rhetoric that rationalizes hostility, demonization of targeted adversaries and justifications for war.

Today, as tensions with Russia have escalated to a boiling point, some of them draw historical parallels between today’s Russia and Nazi Germany. Among others, Victoria Nuland and Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger have recently invoked Britain’s 1938 policy of appeasement that caused the destruction of Czechoslovakia and empowered Hitler.

The insinuation is that today, Ukraine is Czechoslovakia, Donbas is Sudetenland and that Vladimir Putin is Hitler.

If the parallels were valid, they would imply that we should pay almost any price to avoid repeating Neville Chamberlain’s errors of judgment that plunged Europe into the tragedy of World War II.

Of course, the parallels are entirely false, but unfortunately, this is not widely understood.

Things are serious now…

Then Russia forced the United States to comply and answer their concerns in [1] writing and [2] in public about placement of nuclear weapons on the Russian border.

When it did get an “answer”, it was told to keep it secret. Which fell outside the Russian “demands”.

The content of the US response on security guarantees allows you to count on a serious conversation, but on secondary topics."

"There is no answer to the most important question – about the non-expansion of NATO to the east.”

“Our President will now decide on the next steps.”

-Lavrov

You know, over the last two months, the expression on the faces of Lavrov and Putin remind me of a scene from “The Sopranos”.

It’s very serious.

Pictures

For some perspective…

And his counterpart in the Ukraine that NATO and the USA embrace…

And now, let’s look at the military…

And here is what you have in the Ukraine…

And the NATO troops that will take on Russia…

The course of action

A “white tent” was set up and ignored.

Now the “red tents” are up.

From now on in, things are going to get very ugly. It is no wonder that all of Asia is very somber and serious right now.

They remember history. They know what needs to occur…

I won’t let what happened to my father happen to me.

The Sopranos

As I said, the expressions on the faces of Putin, Lavrov, and the generals are very serious. The color is drained out of their faces, and they seem gripped with steeling determination and dangerous determination. It well reminds me of a scene from the television show “The Sopranos”.

The Sopranos crew.

In it, the (mob boss) Tony had to kill a beloved cousin, and a long time childhood friend to prevent a massive gang war. He didn’t want to do it at all, but he knew that if he didn’t, many people would die.

This was the death of Tony Blundetto (Buscemi).

In that case, Blundetto killed Joey “Peeps” from the Leotardo crew (a different mob).

This was really a very, very bad thing to do and very serious.

Since Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) was intent on making Blundetto’s death the most painful event in recorded history, Tony did him a favor by making it quick.

In the blink of an eye — and the blast of a shotgun — Tony spared his cousin the torture he would have received in Leotardo’s hands.

So reluctantly, but determined, he got his shotgun and killed his childhood friend. Then he called the other mob boss where to find the body.

He hastened the death of his cousin, and prevented his long-drawn-out torture. He also prevented a long ongoing mob war.

You Tube

 

Scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9lbju1WpsQ

Scene on MM here

video 22MB

Tony Blundetto Dead – The Sopranos HD-2022-01-28_06.50.32

Conclusions

I am absolutely convinced that what ever “leadership” is directing things behind the scenes in the United States and in Europe, they have no fucking idea what they are dealing with.

Maybe it’s the notorious American “echo chambers” where they believe their own propaganda.

Or maybe it’s all the power, wealth and drugs that got into their heads.

Or, as late John Kenneth Galbraith noted,

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage”.

 

Whatever the root cause…

…It doesn’t matter. It’s now too late. The “white tents” were rejected. And the “red tents” are out.

Well…

This isn’t what anyone thinks it is, and judging from the American “news”, all the collective West are setting themselves up for some horrible things. Maybe America will endure. Maybe America will survive. Maybe America will emerge unscathed as the rest of the world burns. Maybe Jesus will come forth and protect all Americans because of their inherent worthiness…

But I will tell you this…

When cold-blooded killers believe that they need to hurt you, and hurt you bad, you need to RUN

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.

New Beginnings 3

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I had a farm in Africa…

This is one of my personal stories. It’s a true one, as all my writings are. And it relates to an adventure that I had back in the late 1990’s when I lived in Massachusetts. And at that time, I was able to buy a farm (in Zambia, Africa), staff it, and set it in motion using the pitiful amount of money that I collected and saved from my “day job” as an engineer.

This is the story of that adventure.

Some background

At that time in my life, I was living with a girlfriend in Wrentham, Massachusetts.  She was African-African. Meaning, of course, that she was not a hyphenated African-American woman, but a real, honest to goodness traditional (and lovely) African woman.

She was a traditional, conservative, family-oriented girl, and we both “hit it off” and got together great! In short order, don’t you know. We were living together.

She was a lovely woman, and both of my parents absolutely LOVED her. She was kind, sweet, intelligent, and practical. She also had a “rocking” body.  She had the most beautiful eyes and lips that I have ever experienced, and her skin was so soft… as were other parts of her magnificence.

And she could cook. OMG! Could she cook!!!!

I have never tasted steak the way she made the steaks. They were absolutely amazing.

Zambian steak.

And she treated me like a king, too. Formal sit down meals, and she would dress up just to be at home. Multiple healthy dishes. Real meats, with breads, cooked fresh vegetables, and desserts. Almost every day.

Saturdays were the day of house cleaning, and she kept our place spotless. My God!

We lived in a little cabin on Lake Pearl. It was rumored to have once been the home of Helen Keller. But I don’t know this for sure.

Lake Pearl in the Fall.

It was a rural and rustic location. It greatly resembled a scene from the movie “On Golden Pond”, and my many cats loved that environment. And you all should know, that Massachusetts is very, very beautiful.

We lived outside the town, and it was a little cul-de-sac that ended on a hillside bluff that overlooked the lake. It was tucked away and secluded. It was very woodsy.

Busy downtown Wrentham, Massachusetts.

We had a wood burning stove, an open kitchen, a little bedroom, and a great view of the lake. It was one of the most memorable places that I have ever lived, and to this day, when I remember those days, they are filled with the fondest memories. I consider those days… my “salad days”.

A house in Wrentham, Mass.

How it came about

We were eating in a diner, as we tended to do when we were washing our clothes in the local laundromat. The diner was down the road in Plainville, it was named “Don’s Diner” and my regular meal at the time was country fried steak and eggs.

Don’s Diner

The meal was something like this. And I would eat it with a nice cup of coffee. (My girlfriend really hated my habit of standing up to leave, and then (while standing) take a final sip of coffee. She thought it wasn’t gentlemanly.)

Country fried steak and eggs.

And of course, the food… well, it was delicious.

At the time, we were talking about (one of her) older sisters back in Zambia. Her (sister’s) son had just graduated from an agricultural college and was looking for work. He got great grades and had a real “nack” for farming and animal husbandry.

So we go on chatting away, and somehow the idea materialized that we could set up an egg farm. Her family had some land growing fallow, and he had the knowledge, and her other relatives had connections and all told, it looked promising. He could raise chickens and sell the eggs to the supermarkets and small stores in and around Lusaka, Zambia.

Lusaka, Zambia

What was involved.

At that time, the United States dollar could buy a lot in Zambia. 1 USD was equal to about 6000 Zambian Kwacha. Today the value is around 20.

Zambian Kwacha.

For a handful of dollars you could buy a bunch of apartments, buildings and land, and labor rates were insanely low.

So what I did was invested around $20,000 USD. (In gradual installments over time.) And ended up buying some land, hiring people to build some basic buildings and structures and allowing the relatives to set everything up. In this role, I was the financial partner, while my girlfriends’ family handled operations and marketing.

I owned a chicken farm in Africa.

And that’s the way life is.

When you see an opportunity, you take it with the resources you have, and give it all that you can. You try to be realistic, and hopeful, but you realize that many things can go wrong.

Getting it set up.

When you go into these kinds of ventures, you either commit fully or you walk away from it. You cannot be timid. You must commit.

As they say…

Consider a plate of ham and eggs. The Chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.

And so, I did my part, and provided the funding and watched the budget.

The entire system came together rather quickly and about 8 to 9 months later, we had a fully functional chicken egg farm (not for meat), we produced eggs and sold them. We had customers and some were large chain supermarkets.

Now, of course, the profit was small, and miniscule, however we plowed the profits back into the enterprise, and the operation grew and grew again.

Counting money.

And collapse.

Then something happened.

After about two years of operations…

No word or reports from our budding, young operations director. All was quiet, and we didn’t know what was going on.

One full month passed by.

When the family went over to investigate, they found the farm abandoned and the chickens starting to die off, and everything locked up and abandoned.

What we discovered, was that  our young operations manager was pocketing the profits, taking the investment moneys and pocketing all the profits and running up enormous bills.

Then he skipped town and went to South Africa.

!!!

We tried to hunt him down. We tried to  resolve things, and tried to keep the venture alone, but without him, and his skill set and everything else, we were forced to abandon the entire project.

We gave up hunting for him, and wrote the entire project off as a big failure and a lesson learned.

Lessons learned.

The big thing, and the big lesson, is that you really are taking a risk when you put a young person in charge of your operations without vetting them. And the employment of a relative is perhaps a compounding mistake that can make things go from bad to worse.

I hate to say this, but it is true. Many, but not all, young people seem to believe that there is an endless stream of opportunities ahead of them in life, and that they can jump from one to the other without consequence.

If they are in the right place at the right time, they do not appreciate the great nugget of opportunity that they have so early on in their life. They seem to believe that it is just one of a long series of gold nuggets.

Us older folk realize the truth.

The young African dream.

Maybe other opportunities came his way, but chances are that they didn’t. He had one great break early on, and like a typical 20-year-old, blew it all on the belief that bigger and greater things were in his future.

Like a shooting star, he shined bright and then dimmed into obscurity.

For me, I learned a lot.

Seriously I did.

And in the decades that followed, the many lessons continued. Many were quite painful. Almost all were financial failures, but I did end up meeting interesting people, going to strange new lands and experiencing life in broad brush strokes.

But, you know what?  I have no regrets.

For,  you must understand…

… I actually owned a farm in Africa.

Not the historical notion, but the real experience.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness section here…