Ugh.

People! We are at peat transition. I have no idea how long this plateau will last but we are most certainly at peak.

Consider Africa. Niger is kicking the colonial powers out, and they refuse, and so the rest of Africa bands together to throw the bums out. Three nations, under proxy control, plan to invade Niger. What happens? Grass roots military coups though the “puppet masters” out.

Consider Oliver Anthony and how his music resonates.

Consider what is going on in Ukraine right now. Not the narrative. But the actual happenings. Where the EU went to Putin and started to make demands, and he dismissed them. They are P-O-W-E-R-L-E-S-S.

Consider the strange “fire” in Hawaii and the conspiracy theories behind it. And the fact that the entire area is now under wraps and fully blocked off doesn’t help the speculation. WTF is going on?

Japan radiation from the power plant. The cheapest solution, my ass. This water can be purified. But it isn’t. Some one (read USA) wants a conflict and wants a lot of Asians to die.

Look at San Francisco. First the orgy of riots. Then the store closures. Then the tenants move out. Followed by a ghost town. Now the “town counsel” has plans to bulldoze all the historic buildings down town and put up a gigantic football stadium surrounded by parking lots.

The insanity is off the charts!

Meanwhile China plugs on and on. Huawei P90 is coming out. 7nm chips. All Chinese made and manufactured. Full 5G capability, and the West loses out…

Genocidal, Zionist Israhell has expunged all historic Arabic names in Palestine for a reason. 

Algeria is removing French from all their street signs. 

Russia and China are switching English signage to phonetic and Pinyin, respectively. 

Words are powerful things. 

Jeff 

Enough… today’s post…

DEVICES FOUND ON RAILROAD TRACKS TO DERAIL TRAINS!

Police have revealed that devices like the one pictured above, designed to derail trains, have been found — and are being found — on railroad tracks all over the United States.

Police warn that they could lead to train derailments and the death of passengers. The devices have been found all over the country, from the West Coast to the East.

It now seems self-evident that America is literally under attack – from within.

More details as they become available.

UPDATE 7:53 AM EDT —

Additional information has come in regarding the device shown above.   What is pictured is a standard railroad siding derailer. It is designed to derail a car with dangerous materials from going on the main line and becoming a run away (bomb).

While it is good to hear this is a known safety device, this explanation does NOT address why police are reporting finding these devices on mainline tracks all over the USA.  This would seem to indicate people within the railroad industry, with ready access to such devices, have begun misusing them.

More if I get it.

What is an experience you had at a gas station you’ll never forget?

Sitting out side talking to a friend of mine and all of a sudden a loud bang made me jump. Turned to see a van had run straight into this little car. I was able to catch the plate number. I ran inside asked for a pen and paper quickly and jotted it down. Cashier looked so confused. The woman whose car it was was at the counter finishing checking out. She went outside and came back in saying someone hit her car. I was able to give her the plate number and bought her a coke. Waiting with her till her husband and then the cops showed up. Her whole frame was bent couldnt open the driver side door. The cops were able to ID the guy very quickly and this wasn’t his first accident in the year. Not his second either. The husband was so grateful for how I treated his wife during the incident he insisted on giving me twenty bucks. That twenty went to into getting my Mother a Christmas present. Caught up with them a few months later. She thanked me again and his insurance ended up paying for a new car for them. He (the driver) had to pay his insurance back.

Many Chinese economists, including Chinese scholars, acknowledge that China’s economy is getting worse and worse as of August 2023. Why do the Chinese on Quora insist that China’s economy doesn’t have any problems?

Every Economy has problems

China is one of the few who acknowledge their problems and correct them

Others talk about China and bury their own problems

• US and it’s monstrous $ 33 Trillion Debt as a Global reserve currency
• The West and it’s record shrinking of Industrial Production
• Record Inflation in the Western Nations of almost 6% with a near 11% increase in Food Prices
• India’s unemployment of almost 9% against China’s 5.5% and India’s stock market being larger than China’s albeit a GDP barely being one sixth

Thats the difference

Its why China always wins in the end

Take the top 35 economies in the world and guess how many have become better than their 2019 period

Guess?

Four

Exactly Four

Russia, Iran, Nigeria and Algeria

31/35 Economies are doing worse than they did in 2019 and that too many after 3 years of everything

China has come out of a 3 year lockdown barely 7 months ago and still grew against a very hostile situation presented to the it by the West

So like always the basic question

“Has a Chinese soldier killed your father or Has a Chinese boy cheated and dumped your sister?”

No other reason why you blindly ignore reality and keep focusing only on China

China Punishes U.S Military By Imposing Ban On Drone Export To The U.S And Europe!

Yes. China is stepping up to the plate. You all want to fuck with China, China will fuck your right back.

Why do so many people defend China?

I am an American who resides in the United States.

I defend China because of history. The United States, England, France, Japan and Europe colonized much of the planet between 1800 and 1960. China was a victim of this aggression.

China continues to be a victim of American aggression. Since 1949, the United States has provided weapons and military support to the losing side in the Chinese Civil War, i.e. Taiwan. This is a continuation of 200 years of colonialism.

The United States is aided and abetted in its WAR against China by the Western media. Like others posting here, I view the Western media as propaganda, created by persons in the United States who want to sell weapons at the expense of China, Russia and the Middle East.

I believe that it is important to stand up for the truth, and to put an end to America’s endless wars for profit. The United States should not be a nation of endless war.

The present leaders of the United States have tarnished the nation, and caused it to be condemned in the eyes of the world. This is a very dangerous situation, for the United States. America is dependent upon credit and imported goods from the rest of the world.

I recognize that unchecked power in China could be a problem, when the United States is weakened due to its debt. However, the United States brought that problem upon itself, by closing two-thirds of its industrial base. The balance of power will correct itself.

Hopefully, America’s leaders will wake up soon. Power is about to be taken from their hands.

The Origins Of The Neocons And Their Lunatic World View

Linda’s Easy Lasagna

This is my favorite lasagna recipe because you do not cook the lasagna noodles first. I have always disliked cooking the lasagna noodles, so this is a great solution for me. This turns out perfect every time.

Yield: 12 servings

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 pounds ground beef or turkey or Italian sausage*
• 1 jar spaghetti sauce or homemade sauce
• 1 can tomato sauce
• 1 tomato sauce can water
• 2 pounds ricotta or cottage cheese, mixed with 4 eggs
• 12 ounces lasagna noodles, UNCOOKED
• 4 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
• Grated Parmesan cheese
• Garlic powder
• Salt

Instructions

1. Brown meat. Drain.
2. Add sauces and water.
3. Spoon a small amount of sauce onto the bottom of a lasagna pan or a 13 x 9-inch baking dish.
4. Place a layer of UNCOOKED noodles (overlapping slightly), one-third of the cottage cheese mixture, a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese and one-third of the shredded cheese.
5. Pour about one-third of the sauce over the top.
6. Repeat twice more. Cover with more cheese.
7. Bake, covered and sealed with foil (DO NOT LET THE FOIL TOUCH THE CHEESE), at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.
8. Uncover and bake 15 minutes longer to brown the top.
9. Let stand for 15 minutes before cutting.

Notes

* Remove Italian sausage from casings and crumble as it cooks.

I usually make this with Italian sausage, but I have also used sliced cooked meatballs. It’s yummy whatever you decide to use! Of the two spaghetti sauce options, if you have time, go with the homemade sauce!

You can also bake for 1 hour without the cheese on top, then put the cheese on top and bake 15 minutes longer uncovered.

What is the most inappropriate thing you’ve ever witnessed from a co-worker?

I’m a retired accountant.

Friend, who works for a financial broker, calls me, says she needs a break from work. Could I come in and be a receptionist for a week so she can take a break? I would be on the payroll.

OK. So, I do the week.

Then she says that I’m doing great, can I stay the month? Hmmm, OK. The extra money is nice.

At the end of the month. she says, “I am off on vacation for the next three months. Have fun.”

I didn’t know this, but she does NOT tell the broker. It is only a two-person office, and the broker is a sweet guy who does not deserve to be dumped on like this.

She never comes back.

I worked there two years until he sold the company and retired.

China’s cancellation of Germany’s $100 billion car order sends Europe into a panic!

Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake

Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions –  “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.” 

“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”

Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to keep my mouth shut.

I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally irrepressible. I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble. It didn’t matter that I often turned out to be right. It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.

American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.

Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase: “That’s not gonna work.”

Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative, with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts, timelines, proposed budgets, yadda-yadda, and everything is going great until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says “That’s not gonna work.”

And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to, that furthermore it is his job to make it work and that failure is not an option, he opens his mouth again and says “That’s not gonna work either.” And then it’s time to avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.

I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.” And then, sure enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those not at all responsible for any of it. Flushed with victory, they, in turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the cycle would repeat.

It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of corporate yes-men and yes-women.

Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.

The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers, creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few non-yes-sayers. However, this only seems to work in the smaller, hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar tactics. Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their folly.

It is much the same with governments, except here the situation is even worse. While the smaller, hungrier governments, and those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not have the luxury of lying to themselves, the larger political agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically significant periods of time.

The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats gnawing through the rafters. The EU has been able to ignore the fact that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests of the native populations throughout. And the amount of self-delusion that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large subject.

Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs. This event results in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.

It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. I have a very strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the EU and the USA.

But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.” However, I’ve said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.

Internationally, for example:

• Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction. Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.

• Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.

• Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to further enhancing the heroin trade.

• Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous other sectors.

All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.

In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.

The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar. As I write this, the next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three: robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.

Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case: the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently, for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its greatest defender.

The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.

And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.

The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable. It’s a nice slogan as slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged prostates.

Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.

France, ECOWAS Armoured Vehicles Land In Nigerian Port As They Move To Invade Niger

Worst Things You Can Say to Your Kids

Stacey FeintuchUpdated: Jan. 25, 2023

Why words hurt

We’ve all said the wrong thing at times, leaving our kids feeling angry, hurt, or confused. Words can be eternally damaging, especially coming from parents who are supposed to be safe and supportive figures in their child’s lives. “Parents’ support and approval are essential for kids’ well-being,” says Jill Whitney, LMFT, who practices in Old Lyme, Connecticut and blogs about relationships. “The words you use can be constructive or destructive to kids’ developing sense of self. If they’re negative, they can negatively color our self-image for decades.” Find out the worst offenders and what to say instead.

“Hurry up!”

Your child may be slow as molasses getting dressed in the morning when you’re trying to head out the door to school and work. Pushing her to get a move on, though, will only make her more stressed. And while you may be making her feel guilty about running late, your screaming won’t motivate her to move any faster. Instead, look for calm ways to speed things up, like making getting out the door a game by racing to see who can get dressed first. “By making it into a ‘we event,’ you’ll teach your child the importance of collaboration,” says Paul Hokemeyer, PhD, a clinical and consulting psychotherapist and author of the forthcoming Fragile Power: Why Having Everything is Never Enough.

“Leave me alone”

Every parent needs a break at times. Yet, you shouldn’t be telling your kids that, otherwise, they’ll think that you’re brushing them off and that there’s no point in talking to you. “Kids like to be acknowledged and heard; in fact, it can help cut down on meltdowns and tantrums,” says Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD, a pediatrician, the creator of Pediatrician in Your Pocket, spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, and assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “Answer in a way that is age-appropriate and give them specific tasks to do while they wait for you,” she says. You may instead say, “I have to finish one thing. I need you to play with your cars for just a few minutes. We can play outside as soon as I’m done.” “Just make sure you then follow through with whatever you promised you would do together afterward,” says Dr. Trachtenberg. Some compliments can actually be hurtful to kids, too.

“Why can’t you be more like your brother or sister?”

It’s natural to compare your kids, but you shouldn’t let your kids hear you doing it. When you ask kids why they’re not more like their sibling, it promotes unhealthy competition and kids may not feel like they’re good enough. You’re implying that you wish your child was someone else when you compare him to his sibling. Besides, the comparisons aren’t likely to change the behavior, says Dr. Trachtenberg. You’ll only be pressuring a child to do something he doesn’t want to do or isn’t ready for, undermining his self-esteem. Instead, encourage and inspire your child about what he can do and praise him when he does something good, such as, “Thanks for telling me you had to use the potty” or “Wow, you zipped your coat up all by yourself.” “Each child is an individual with his own strengths and weaknesses,” says Dr. Trachtenberg. “Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool to help shape other wanted behaviors. Remember to encourage and praise the child for the actions they succeed at instead of harping on what they can’t do.” Besides, you’ll want to stop sibling rivalry before it starts.

“Practice makes perfect”

“There is no such thing as perfect; being perfect isn’t a good goal as it doesn’t exist,” says Betsy Brown Braun, child development and behavior specialist, author of two best-selling parenting books, and founder of Parenting Pathways. “You’re sending the message that she didn’t train hard enough if she made a mistake.” Instead, acknowledge how frustrating and hard practicing can be and give some examples of things she practiced and did improve. “I like to give the example of babies learning to walk. They try and try, fall down, and try and practice, over and over,” she says. “Then they become good walkers, just like you did.” Explain that doing something repeatedly teaches you how to do it, says Brown Braun. “Nobody can do something well unless she has done it a lot,” she says. “Some things take a lot of work; some take less.”

“Let me help”

It’s natural to want to give your child a hand as he is finishing a puzzle or building a tower; after all, you don’t want to see your child struggle. But if you jump in too soon, you can undermine his independence. “Allow your child to complete a project to build his self-esteem and core competence,” says Fran Walfish, PsyD (aka Dr. Fran), a child, couple, and family psychotherapist in private practice in Beverly Hills and author of The Self-Aware Parent: Resolving Conflict and Building a Better Bond with Your Child. “Each disappointment is a golden opportunity for your child to develop frustration and build coping skills to deal with life’s inevitable daily ups and downs.” Constantly helping prevents him from getting the satisfaction of learning to do it for himself and teaches him to always look to others for answers. Instead, wait for him to ask for help first. Then, ask him questions to help him solve the problem. “Should the big piece go here? Why? Try it yourself.” Is your child faking illness to stay home? Here are some of the most common reasons why kids hate school.

“I’m on a diet”

If you’re watching your weight, keep it to yourself; talking this way about physical appearance can lead to your child developing an unhealthy body image. If they see you’re struggling with how you look, they may feel that they need to look a certain way, too. “Obsessing about your weight or appearance isn’t delivering a good message,” says Elizabeth Berger, MD, a child psychiatrist and author of Raising Kids with Character. “Children need to feel that their parents are in control of their own lives.” Instead, say “I’m eating healthy because I like how it makes me feel.” Promoting positive body image like this is one of the tiny ways you can encourage your kids every day.

“Don’t cry”

When you tell a child she’s fine as she’s bawling over a scraped knee, you’re invalidating and discounting her feelings. Kids will think they have to brush off their emotions and that can lead to more explosive outbursts. Dr. Walfish suggests you say instead, “You got hurt and scared. It’s okay to say ‘Ouch! That hurts!’ Mommy sees you’re scared and hurt, and I’m right here with you.” Or give her a hug, acknowledging and verbalizing her feelings. “That was a scary fall.” That can help give her the words to express herself. “This is what I call empathic narration,” says Dr. Walfish. “This style of compassionate attunement to your child’s feelings will help her feel seen, acknowledged, validated, and accepted—flaws and all. The attuning narration also teaches your child to be a kind and empathic person to others.”

“I could do that when I was your age”

Kids all develop at different rates. So expecting your son to ride a two-wheeler by age seven as you did will only make him feel like he disappointed you. “Parents are under a lot of pressure to make sure that their children meet a long list of expectations, and some of this anxiety tends to be passed on to children,” says Dr. Berger. Still, you as a parent should appreciate your child’s efforts, regardless of what they are. “A calm attitude towards ‘success’ helps children get over their own sense of shame when they haven’t met their own—and social—expectations,” says Dr. Berger. Dr. Berger says you can say, “Wow, I can see you’re making a lot of progress; keep it up!” or “Don’t worry—you’ll get there.”

“Because I said so”

When you’re in a rush, it can be easy to fall back on this clichéd parenting phrase, but avoid this empty phrase in favor of one that’s more thought out. “As parents, one of our most challenging tasks is to convince our children to do something they don’t want to do,” says Janie Feldman, PsyD, a licensed psychologist in New Jersey. You can say something like, “I know you want to play outside today. But you have to finish your homework first. How about we play outside after?” Dr. Feldman says you can offer an incentive to promote interest in completing the task. “It would be a great help to the family if you raked the leaves. If you rake them for us, you’ll earn ___.” It’s not guaranteed they’ll help, but they may be more interested. “In our society, we do work for incentives such as our salaries, vacation time, and other benefits,” says Dr. Feldman. “Offering an incentive can not only motivate our children but also socialize them to recognize the value of their efforts.” Beyond your children, find out more things you really shouldn’t be saying to the people in your life.

“I do everything for you”

You may feel like you do everything for them—cooking, cleaning, and chauffeuring them. But you know this isn’t true. “Do what you do for your kids with an open, generous heart or don’t do it,” says Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD, a psychologist based in Princeton, New Jersey and author of Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem. “Don’t expect that you’ll be repaid with effusive gratitude or even good behavior,” she says. She says you can help teach your child gratitude and good manners by mirroring them yourself with your spouse, family, friends, and others. Say something like “What a delicious dinner! Thank you so much, Daddy!” “Your kids will probably pipe in with their thanks,” she says. Or point out someone’s efforts made on their behalf, along the lines of, “Grandma went to three stores to find the yellow paint you need. Remember to thank her when you see her tonight.”

“It’s not that big of a deal”

It may not be a big deal to you that your daughter wasn’t invited to Mary’s party, but it’s a big deal to her. Telling her you disagree with her invalidates how she’s feeling, making her ashamed or embarrassed. “When our kids are upset, we want to reach for empathy,” says Kennedy-Moore. She says that a useful formula is: “You’re feeling ___ because __.” “It bothers you when___.” “It’s hard for you when ___.” “You wish___.” “Don’t interpret or judge, just describe the feelings you see,” she says. “We adults tend to want to skip the feelings and go straight to the solution. But when kids don’t feel heard, they tend to get louder. Wrapping kids’ feelings up in words makes them seem more understandable and more manageable.” When your child feels heard and understood, it will do wonders. Beware of these other things parents say that ruin kids’ trust, too.

“You’re a liar”

Even if your child did take money from your wallet, that tone will only make him feel like he’s being personally attacked. Find out why he lied instead of being accusatory; then start an open dialogue about why it’s not okay to lie. Edward Kulich, MD, is a pediatrician who provides house calls in the New York area with his practice KidsHousecalls. He says you can say something like “Hey bud, I just wanted to let you know that I’m always here for you if you need anything or if you have a problem. I noticed some money is missing from my wallet. I’m not mad but I think we need to talk about this.”

“Be careful”

These words can have the opposite effect, making your child more likely to fall as she’s attempting the monkey bars. You’re distracting her from what she’s doing, so she’s losing focus. Instead, quietly spot her in case she falls. Dr. Kulich says you can say something like “You got this.” He says if your child is more hesitant, you can say, “I saw you do this yesterday. I know you can do it.” These compliments your kids really need to hear also help to build self-esteem and foster a loving relationship between the two of you.

US Forces Combat in Niger is a Nightmare

Talk WITH People, Not AT Them

One of the insidious things about trying to judge our own social skills, is that if an interaction went well for us, then we assume the other person thought it went well too. While you’ve probably never consciously thought about it, if you had a good time talking to someone, you think they felt the same. But this just isn’t the case. It’s very possible for you to walk away from an interaction feeling grand, while the other person walks away feeling annoyed, bored, or burdened.  

What usually happens in these lopsided engagements is that you talked a lot about yourself and your interests, an act which is enjoyable and makes humans happy. We like to talk about ourselves! But, the other person didn’t get to talk much about him or herself, and thus left the conversation without a corresponding level of elevation.  

While dominating a conversation simply by talking a lot is almost guaranteed to be a charm-killer, the worst kind of one-sided interaction is when you talk at someone, rather than with them.

Talking At Vs. Talking With

Valerie White and (former AoM podcast guest) Ann Demarais, doctors of psychology and authors of First Impressions, define the “talking at” dynamic as “forcing others to react rather than interact.” It manifests itself when one party takes on the role of teller/entertainer, and the other is forced into the role of audience.

While being part of an audience can be enjoyable when that is what one is expecting and desiring (e.g., watching a movie), people do not expect to be an audience member during face-to-face social interactions. Feeling like a spectator in this context is dull and irritating, because the role is so passive. A conversation is a cooperative, almost artistic endeavor — much like symphonic music — in which each person gets satisfaction from engaging, contributing, creating. They don’t want to watch and clap.

Demarais and White describe 4 common forms that “talking at” takes, each of which can be flipped in a way that gets you “talking with” your social partner:

Lecturing

When you’re in lecturing mode, you’re imparting facts in a very one-sided way. You want to tell someone something, but you’re not expecting or eliciting a real response. They’re the passive audience for your knowledge dump. Lecturing feels great for the lecturer — you’re amped up on the status you get from feeling in the know, and sharing information you hold as uniquely yours. But your listener is likely to see you as boring and self-important.

How to share knowledge with your social partner. Talk about subjects in which you and your partner are mutually interested, and watch for signs that they’re engaged — “Uh-huhs,” nodding, saying things like “That’s interesting.” In the absence of such cues, stop your monologue. And even when they are manifested, pause intermittently to see if the other person wants to respond, or add something, or has a question. If they don’t interject anything, you should probably wrap it up and change the subject.

Additionally, how you introduce a subject matters, as Demarias and White explain:

“A hallmark of a lecture is the speaker’s implicit ownership of the information.

When you present something as your own, you may intend to appear smart but actually may appear bombastic and egotistical. On the other hand, when you mention where you learned your information—as in ‘I read an editorial in the paper that said…’—or the genesis of your idea—as in ‘I saw something on TV, and then thought…’—you show an open mind and a more modest assessment of your own intellectual value.”

When you say, “I heard/read X the other day,” people don’t feel like you’ve already fixed your opinion about it, but rather that you’re opening up a dialogue on the subject, making them more likely to offer their own thoughts and engage with you.

Storytelling

The great paradox of stories is that they can be both the most compelling and the most boring form of communication. A good story can entertain, engage, and build connection. But as Demarias and White observe, stories can easily go wrong when they’re “long, detailed, and about people your conversational partner doesn’t know.”

How to share stories with your social partner. Bad storytelling is an easy trap to fall into, because the characters and plots in our anecdotes seem so interesting and salient to us. We know our friends, and children, and boss — they loom large in our own lives, and we can vividly picture their facial expressions and have all the context to understand why their behavior is so adorable/comical/outrageous. It’s subconsciously difficult to realize that other people, who lack this context, won’t find these people and places equally compelling.

But they don’t. The difference can be likened to the way you’re interested in a story about your favorite NBA player, but have no interest in news about a professional Chinese athlete you’ve never heard of. Unless a story connects to universal aspects of the human experience (training for a race; dealing with an incompetent boss; getting in an accident) or intersects in some way with the other person’s life, it’s going to be Dullsville.

Even if a story does include those elements (touches on shared human experience; connects with the other person’s life), you should still keep it short and to the point. Dole out the story in small chunks, watching to see if the other person shows interest and asks things like, “What did you decide to do?” or “How did he respond to that?” before continuing the tale.

When a story of any kind goes on too long, you turn your social partner into an audience member who passively spectates instead of actively engages.

Sermonizing

Sermonizing occurs when you’re trying to persuade someone to your point of view. The subject matter is usually something around morality, religion, or politics, and while this kind of conversational mode can be okay in the company of long-time friends and family who enjoy spirited debate and verbal jousting, it’s a turn-off for new acquaintances who don’t know you well enough to put your opinions into context and to realize there’s more to you than a zeal for some particular issue. They’re likely to get defensive or disgusted or just plain annoyed.

How to have a weighty discussion with your social partner. You don’t have to rigidly follow the old adage about avoiding talk of politics, religion, and money, even with new people, as long as you follow a few guidelines we’ve offered here, the gist of which is to strive to have adiscussion rather than an argument. A wise writer put the distinction this way:

“in discussion you are searching for the truth, and in argument you want to prove that you are right. In discussion, therefore, you are anxious to know your neighbor’s views, and you listen to him. In argument, you don’t care anything about his opinions, you want him to hear yours.”

When you’re aiming a sermon at someone, Demarias and White note, “The implicit message is ‘you’re wrong and I’m right.’” When you’re having a discussion with them, in contrast, you seek to understand how they’ve arrived at their convictions, where your positions differ, and the common ground you share.

Telling Jokes

A great sense of humor is one of the most charming of qualities. But too much humor reaches a tipping point where it stops adding to the collective “music” of the conversation and becomes a one-sided performance, turning the speaker into an entertainer and the listener into an audience. Instead of getting to interact, the latter is forced to simply react to the constant stream of quips and witticisms — a role for which they soon grow bored.

How to share humor with your social partner. Jokes serve better as the seasoning of a conversation, rather than its main dish. Instead of interspersing everything you say with a quip, just pepper them in here and there between sustained stretches of neutral talking and showing sincere interest in the other person.

When it comes to being socially adept, Demarias and White note that “how you talk about topics matters more than what you actually talk about. You can make a fascinating ethical issue boring if you simply lecture someone about it. On the other hand, you can turn your model airplane hobby into a stimulating conversational topic if you talk about it in a fun and engaging manner.”

To avoid your conversations turning into one-sided monologues where you simply talk at people, toss out subjects of reciprocal interest and see what people bite on; like volleyball players, hit the ball back and forth over the net. Show that you’re curious, open-minded, and interested in other people’s experiences and perspectives. Interact rather than making the other person solely react to what you say and do; create a little theater/dialogue/symposium/comedy together, rather than having them watch you from the gallery.

Create something special with the people you meet.

China’s Dumping Dollars For Gold & They Won’t Stop!

China just ramped up their gold purchases, buying for a 9th straight month! As the world gets de-globalized, we are seeing an acceleration of de-dollarization towards alternative stores of value like gold. Even JP Morgan is calling for record gold prices in 18 months. Here’s what you must know about this historic monetary shift.

The More Options You Have, The Happier You Are

Over the years, I’ve experienced a direct correlation between the number of options I have in life and my happiness.

The more options I have for my career, the better work I can do. The more options I have for spending my free time, the less I cling to people and activities.

In short, if I can choose what to do with my time at any given moment, I’m happy. It doesn’t necessarily matter what I do. What matters is that I have a choice. 

The importance of this concept is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about happiness in the modern age. 

I recently read Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by Gordon Livingston, who was a seasoned psychiatrist. In that book, he talked about why it’s so important to have options:

“Mental health is a function of choice. The more choices we are able to exercise, the happier we are likely to be. Those who are most unwell or discouraged suffer from a sense that their choices have been limited, sometimes by external circumstances or illness, most often by the many ways we restrict ourselves.”

Fewer options restrict us. That gives us a sense of dread. We feel like there’s not much we can do in life. And that makes us unhappy. But you can turn that around by creating options for yourself. 

The paradox of risk

The most important thing about career options is that there’s a paradoxical relationship between risk and reward we need to understand first. Before I came to terms with this, I never had many options.

Here’s the issue. As humans, we’re naturally risk-averse. We fear loss more than we desire a potential gain. That force usually keeps us where we are. That’s why most people remain in the same job or industry until they get fired or retire.

The paradox is that most people assume it’s risky to change. But in reality, the reverse is true. The more stagnant you are, the more you’re at risk of loss.

When I pursued a career as a full-time writer, I had to take risks. I left my well-paying corporate job in London, left the city, moved back in with my parents, and took a step back from our family business.

I went from earning about $80K a year to almost nothing. My blog and online courses generated about $5,000 of income in the first year. The risk is wasting your time and the loss of your salary when you make a move like that.

Livingston recognized the importance of getting comfortable with risk as well. He said the following about the relationship between options and risk:

“The primary variable in this regard is tolerance of risk. If we take counsel of our fears, particularly our fear of change, it is hard to choose a life that makes us happy. Is it anxiety or lack of imagination that restricts us?”

This is hard to accept. Unless you get comfortable with your fear of change, you will not have a happy life that consists of many options. 

Remember that no matter how dire your circumstances are, you’re never out of options. You can always do something. This is the most important belief in human hope and progress. As long as we’re alive, we have a choice. 

How I create career options

Let’s look at how you can create more career options. Since your work takes up the majority of your time, it’s important to get this straight. When you have options and happiness in your career, you automatically become a better person.

How many of your personal problems are related to work? How often do you allow the stress of work to change your mood? And how often does your mood create problems at home?

To say that your career is important is an understatement. Work is not just something you do on set hours. It’s the single biggest factor that determines what your life looks like on a macro level.

So how do you make sure you have a good career? Not by having a great job. This might sound weird to you if you’ve been raised thinking every person needs to have one job.

That’s an old model that no longer works. We don’t need jobs. We need skills that we can apply to multiple jobs and industries.

Here’s how I approach that. I always prioritize learning over short-term goals like money, bonuses, status, or any other benefits that I can get in my career. 

The more universal skills I have, the more opportunities I have. For example, if you’re good at persuasion, you can work as a copywriter, account executive, stockbroker, recruiter, or work at a retail store. 

If you know how to code, you can work at any company that develops software, in any industry.

Another thing I focus on is building good relationships with experienced people. I’m not a fan of networking with hundreds of people or forming “mastermind” groups with people who are not top-performers. On a social level, it’s wonderful, but professionally, you won’t learn much. 

If you do want to network, at least connect with people who are more established in life and don’t have much to prove anymore. Professionals like that can point you in the right direction if you don’t know what to do. They can help you to see options you didn’t see before.

Be willing to pay the price or move on

I was once talking about this concept of career options with someone in their twenties. The person said they also wanted to be in a similar position as I am today. 

And I said, “Look, I’ve given up a lot of things when I was your age to be where I am today. I sacrificed relationships and leisure. But I don’t see it as bad because I’ve always been happy to pay that price for happiness. And I still am.”

And the person said, “I don’t think I can do that.” 

That’s the end of it. “Then you should accept your life the way it is and that you’re always at the disposal of other people,” I said. If some people are not willing to pay the price, they should just accept whatever is and not complain about being unhappy.

The truth is there are always options. We just can’t expect that they come for free. Everything in life has a price. If you’re willing to pay, you won’t get disappointed.

Why is the US doing such a bad job countering China’s rise?

Oh Simple

Every Nation has a certain threshold beyond which it’s rise can’t be contained

The Threshold is Economic and Political and Military based

I believe that China could have easily been contained or throttled in 2010 or even 2012

Luckily the 2008 Crisis helped China and gave it 6 years or so beyond which throttling it became tougher and tougher

Today?

Economically China is a giant not just because of the $ 19 Trillion GDP but because of an Industrial Output that exceeds US,UK and Europe combined

Militarily they can sustain a war for almost 4 years without cracks in their economy. They have enough food and energy independently for that.

Hence attacking China would result in worse weakening of the West especially by US

So all US can do is OPTICS or PR

Make it look like it’s containing China

Use their media to exaggerate every one of Chinas failures by 1000 and suppress all of Chinas achievements by either not publishing it or using the narrative “BUT AT WHAT COST”

Riling up neighbors of China

Essentially acting like a Pimp Bully instead of a Direct Head on Face to Face talk with China

And Why?

Why is the West so alarmed with China’s Rise?

Because they feel China will invade and conquer the US?

Nonsense

Because they feel China will become the numero uno hegemon

Nonsense. The US hegemony is too well entrenched to be removed in a year or two. It will take 30 years minimum. Well after the current leadership has been dead and buried

Because China would become wealthier?

Naah. Luxembourg and Singapore are wealthier than US and US doesn’t give a damn

It’s because China isn’t a democracy and it’s proof that a One Party Meritocracy System can do better than a Democracy if the vision and policies work to that effect

That breaks the so called “Democracy is God model” that the West has been floating for nearly 100 years

That’s why the West is so terrified of China’s rise

The First and Only Photos From Titan, Saturn’s Largest Moon – What Did We See?

Oh. This video is REALLY cool!

Why are Just Stop Oil waging war on motorists?

This is the best selling vehicle in the United States

The Ford F Series. Currently, the F-150 is the production model.

Not the best selling “truck”. The best selling “vehicle”.

In Canuck speak, it uses anywhere from 11–15 liters of fuel per 100km travelled. By contrast, a Honda Civic uses about 7.1–8 liters of fuel to travel the same distance.

Vehicles like this are rarely used to haul cargo or for towing. They’re mostly used the same way other vehicles are used – commuting and errands. If cycling were safe in the United States, which it mostly isn’t, about 50% of trips taken by an F-150 could be done by bike.

It’s not even a good pickup truck. It has a pitiful amount of cargo room.

Vehicles like this make it difficult for people to travel by any other mode of transit that doesn’t use petroleum, like walking and biking. Heck, this behemoth even makes it impossible to get around in vehicles like the Civic which could do 99% of the trips this thing can because in a collision between this and a Civic the Civic owner is probably in for a bad experience.

It it safe? For the occupants, yes. For anyone not in it, no. You can’t see a 5 foot tall child standing directly in front of it for one thing.

America Tells Saudi Arabia To Keep Using Dollars – You Won’t Believe This!

The U.S. is pushing back against BRICS and China with a deal for Saudi Arabia. However, the terms will include the continued usage of the US dollar in oil sales. Will MBS take the bait and is this a win for America? Here’s what you must know!

Linda’s Pepper Steak

I’ve been making this delicious pepper steak for about 50 years.

Cook: 25 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

• 1 pound round or flank steak
• Kosher or sea salt and pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, diced large
• 1 red or orange bell pepper, diced large
• 3 beef bouillon cubes, dissolved in 1 cup hot water
• 1 can diced tomatoes
• 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 2 teaspoons soy sauce
• 1/4 cup water

Instructions

1. Cut the steak into thin slices (this is easier to do if the meat is semi-frozen).
2. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
3. In a large skillet heat the oil.
4. Add the steak and onion and cook until meat is browned on all sides.
5. Add the bell peppers and bouillon water. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
6. Add the tomatoes and simmer for 5 minutes.
7. Mix the cornstarch, soy sauce and water and stir into meat mixture. Cook, stirring, until the mixture has thickened.
8. Serve with hot fluffy rice or noodles.

It’s Never About The US President, It’s About The US Empire – Caitlin Johnstone

We talk about US presidents all the time — Obama did this, Trump did that, blah blah blah. But really it’s never the president doing those things, it’s the empire. The president is just the face of the operation, the name they put on the door that they change every few years to create the illusion that the US government is responsive to the will of the electorate.

Really if you look solely at the raw data of the US power structure around the world (where the weapons are going, where the resources are going, where the money is and isn’t going, where the diplomats are and aren’t going, etc), you can’t tell from year to year when the White House is changing hands. You can’t tell from that raw data what political party the current president belongs to or what platform he campaigned on, and you can’t tell when he’s replaced by someone from the other party with another platform. The raw data of the empire keeps moving in basically the same way without any meaningful interruption.

So it’s not really true to say “Obama did this” or “Trump did that”; really they’re just the face that happened to be on the operation when it was time to kill Gaddafi or begin the Pivot to Asia or sanction Venezuela or start arming Ukraine or whatever. They’re not leaders leading the US government in various directions based on what they think the best policies are, they’re empire managers who are responding to whatever the needs of the empire happen to be each day — using whatever justifications or partisan leverage they can muster in that moment.

And Americans don’t get to vote on any of that stuff. They don’t get to vote on what will have to be done to facilitate the needs of a globe-spanning empire, or if there should be a globe-spanning empire at all. The behavior of the empire is never on the ballot. The only things that are ever on the ballot are issues which stand no possibility of ever interfering in the operation of the empire, like whether the president will appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion or support gun control. And the voting populace is continually kept at a 50/50 split on as many of those issues as possible to keep both sides tugging on the rope with all their might so they don’t look up and notice that the real large-scale behavior of their government is completely unaffected by the small back and forth gains and losses of the tug-o-war game.

Really the only reason to talk about US presidents in terms of “Obama did this” and “Trump did that” is to highlight this point. To highlight the fact that Obama continued and expanded all the most malignant policies of his predecessor, and that Trump continued and expanded all the most malignant policies of his. To disrupt all the dopey partisan narratives about things getting better under Biden or worse under Trump or that Obama was a progressive or Trump was a peacemaker.

By pointing out the horrible things that happened under each administration, regardless of party affiliation or platform, the illusion that Americans are controlling the behavior of their government using their votes can be worn away. You can in this sense use the illusion to fight the illusion — use people’s intense interest in presidents and electoral politics to draw them into the insight that it’s all a performance designed to keep the eyes of the masses away from the inner workings of the machine.

And then the possibility for real change opens up. The longer Americans are convinced that they can vote their way out of problems they never voted their way into in the first place, the longer they can be dissuaded from using the power of their numbers to force real material changes by real material means.

EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia’s

Two reasons: complexity, and too much money

Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.  

So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?  

As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of “defense” contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)

First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.  

We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.  

(America’s latest fighter which has turned into a spectacular technical failure and massive  ($1.5 trillion!) expense  – see our super-popular article about how this plane stacks up against the Russian competition- edit)   

Just consider the most basic item, the M-16. 

The M-16 Assault Rifle

My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.

God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission.  In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment.  And why?  Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault tolerance.  

Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped.  Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can openers to spray lead under any conditions.  In other words, the M-16 is so sophisticated that it doesn’t work well.

It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)

The M-1 Abrams tank

Another great example – this can be a real dog.  The engine is a gas turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance.  (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?)  Of course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue.  But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar “power packs” had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside.  

Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the field.  All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense.  At the height of the Iraq adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it.  

Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.  

But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.

The Basic Problem :  Excessive Complexity

I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance.  This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces.  After all, every military reflects its own society. 

Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.

But so much for American equipment per se.  Let’s talk about Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices – edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.

The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale

It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s being extremely conservative.)  Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays meet performance or survivability expectations.  Besides the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.

Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter, an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped.  That’s right, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit!  

Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes?  Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint presentations?  

My brain cannot even wrap around this.  Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?  

However, even that pales before the Army’s cancelled Future Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of “Roomba” vacuum cleaner fame.  In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough about it.)

As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem, nor even necessarily the biggest.  

Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.

US intelligence agencies have the same problem

This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t expect…”  In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.  

As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass.  (The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)  

Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s website or at its briefings?  Apparently not!

Bureaucratic bloat

On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing nothing. 

The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home) waiting for the next contract.  (I have seen this many times in Washington.)  

Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved

So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole.  We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it. 

Really?  How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?

Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Corner, etc.  

Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built (this was about 50 years ago.)  

How did they do it?  

Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) – had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce.  Luckily, most of those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not exist.  Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.  

Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.

No hope for change going forward

So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.  

Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a. integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the U.S. is tapped out.  

And you know what?  Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse. 

The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny office buildings will go up, but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.  

John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still don’t have enough funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace.

Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony.  Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time anyway.  

But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China’s little islands which had the sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country’s imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures. 

In fact, I would say we are at that point already.  Not to mention, the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable.  (At this point, Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)

So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money being thrown into the breach.  That’s simply what the machine does; there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly.)  

But all that money may as well be flushed down the can. 

The threshold has been reached and it’s all downhill from here.

Pluto Really Is a Weird Place! These Are the Strangest Things Found on Its Icy Surface

Successful Kids and 10 Habits of the Parents Who Raise Them

Jenn MorsonUpdated: Apr. 12, 2023

Raising successful kids

We’re always checking out other people’s parenting skills in an effort to raise successful kids. Should we make their bedtime earlier? Should we insist on piano lessons? We rounded up the parenting moves that do seem to spur kids on to greatness.

Give children chores

When children are made to complete chores, they are shaping a work ethic from early on. Not only does this give them a chance to contribute to family life, but it also demonstrates that they play an integral role in the successful day-to-day functioning of their family. Chores for kids also teach them valuable skills that will be necessary when they head off to college and start their adult lives.

Set high expectations

Parents of successful kids set high expectations for their children as well as themselves. More often than not, it encourages children to rise to the occasion. If college is the expectation, students will work toward that goal more readily than if a parent doesn’t bother mentioning it. What’s more, parents help their children succeed by modeling high expectations of themselves and demonstrating how to work hard to meet goals. It’s important to make sure that your expectations of your kids are realistic, however—they shouldn’t be led to believe they have to qualify for the olympics, graduate as valedictorian, or even keep their rooms clean 24/7—as the pressure to meet overly lofty goals can cause anxiety and ultimately backfire.

Get yourself educated

Statistically speaking, parents who have completed high school or college are more likely to have children who do the same. Parents who have not achieved higher levels of education might consider pursuing these educational goals in order to provide a good example for their children. As a bonus, studies show that higher education lowers blood pressure.

Show them the good life

If you want your child to follow in your footsteps—getting a steady job, making a nice home, and having a family—it’s helpful to make it look appealing. That doesn’t mean never ever complaining or hiding the truth about real life from your children, but there’s something to be said for modeling a life that motivates your children to want to achieve success. If they see your hard work is paying off, and that it seems meaningful, they will be more inclined to invest in their own futures. Avoid these things that parents say that ruin their kids’ trust.

Make friends with numbers early

Teaching math at an earlier age is not only an indicator of later success in mathematics but also in reading. Preschool now places a stronger emphasis on math skills in order to prepare students for the rigorous math expectations of elementary school and beyond. Giving your child a leg up on these skills will set them up for later success. We did an algorithm to ensure that these math jokes will make you smile (just kidding).

Make time for bonding

Children who have a secure foundation with their parents are more successful than those who do not, regardless of socio-economic status. That doesn’t mean you have to take them to Disney World or to the movies every week, but you’d do well to read a book together at bedtime, share meals whenever possible, and generally make yourself available when they need you. By nurturing a strong bond with your children from birth, you’ll help them feel grounded and secure—and secure children are more likely to become successful adults.

Teach troubleshooting

Parents of successful children give their kids the tools they need to solve problems, whether it means asking them how they think a word is spelled before dictating the answer, or prompting them to suggest solutions when problems arise. These moves help children develop the habit of trying to solve problems themselves, which leads to feelings of competence and confidence—invaluable skills for navigating adult life. These quotes about parenting are sure to make you laugh.

Accept and recognize their feelings

Emotions are tough for a lot of people, especially kids. So it can be particularly helpful to teach kids how to recognize and verbalize their emotions. When children are young, attach names to their feelings, so they can speak about them intelligently. You might say, “I see that you’re feeling very frustrated,” or “I know it must be disappointing to have to miss your friend’s party.” Giving children the space to explore their emotions and helping them process those emotions will contribute to their becoming successful adults. Don’t miss the signs you’re raising an emotionally intelligent child.

Try to chill out a little

Stressed out parents make for stressed out children. Learn to manage your own stress levels in order to provide a stress-free home for your children. Stress is contagious—don’t pass it on.

Read to them

Reading to your child, even in infancy, demonstrates how communication works and elevates their verbal skills as they enter formal schooling. What’s more, reading with your child helps them build empathy and decision-making skills. Build up your reading this with 25 of the best children’s books ever written.

The Niger Crisis and the Global Threat of War

August 14, 2023

By Thomas SCRIPPS

The impoverished West African state of Niger is the latest flashpoint in the struggle by the imperialist powers for a redivision of the world. The issues involved in the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine—a fight for territory, strategic resources and regime-change—are erupting all over the globe, in China and Taiwan, and now in the Sahel region of Africa.

Though stalled for the moment, what would be a devastating war led by the most powerful country in the region, Nigeria, to oust the coup leaders in Niger and reinstate President Mohamed Bazoum is under active preparation. At a summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the Nigerian capital Abuja Thursday, leaders agreed to activate a standby military force and threatened that “no option had been taken off the table.”’

They agreed a new round of sanctions on Niger, which has been plunged into blackouts by electricity cut-offs and seen food prices rise 60 percent amid a blockade and the freezing of assets and trade.

A conflict would draw in the entire region. Senegal, Benin and the Ivory Coast have already pledged to send troops to aid Nigeria. Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea have declared for the military coup leaders in Niger.

Behind the proposed ECOWAS action stand the imperialist powers, who are intent on blocking Russia and China from further penetrating a continent whose strategic significance is growing rapidly. The long-term decline of France’s economic position in its former West African colonies—culminating in the last three years in a dramatic collapse of its military presence in Mali, Burkina Faso and now perhaps Niger—has thrown open the Sahel region to intense geopolitical competition.

Bazoum was considered an important Western ally. The US and the European powers have responded to the coup against him by cutting aid to Niger supposedly provided on “humanitarian” grounds—on which it relies for 40 percent of its annual government budget. They are determined to secure their interests whatever the cost.

Speaking Tuesday after “difficult” talks with the coup leaders, US Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland—veteran of the US-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine—threatened, “We’ll be watching the situation, but we understand our legal responsibilities and I explained those very clearly to the guys who were responsible for this and that it is not our desire to go there, but they may push us to that point.”

Caution over a proposed military intervention by ECOWAS has centred on concerns that such action has not been properly prepared and would spark mass opposition throughout the region. A misjudged war could explode the social powder keg in Nigeria, where the US and Britain are heavily invested politically and economically.

A great deal is at stake. The United States currently has 1,500 soldiers of its 6,500-strong declared African deployment stationed in Niger across two bases—one of which is the regional hub for drone missions. France has 1,100 troops in the country, Italy 300 and Germany around 100.

Niger is a major uranium producer, providing a quarter of Europe’s supply. It is due to start exporting oil and plays a central role in policing migration out of Africa to Europe. It has become a frontline state in a battle for economic and military pre-eminence in West Africa and across the whole continent.

Africa is home to an estimated 30 percent of the world’s mineral wealth, including 90 percent of its chromium and platinum—crucial to the green energy transition. Another such mineral is cobalt, of which 70 percent of the world’s supply is produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the end of the century, Africa could also account for a fifth of the world’s lithium supply.

The continent also produces 65 percent of the world’s diamonds and is home to 40 percent of its gold reserves, 12 percent of its oil and 8 percent of its natural gas, while Morocco alone is home to 75 percent of the world’s phosphate rock, crucial for fertiliser.

In terms of markets, Africa’s consumer expenditure is on track to grow from $1.4 trillion in 2015 to $2.5 trillion in 2030.

The US and Europe are concerned not to let Niger be another loss to the claims made by China and Russia on these riches and opportunities.

Russia’s Wagner group (headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin) is operating in Mali, to Niger’s immediate West, Libya, to its North East, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Sudan—providing armed forces for their governments in conflicts with local rebel groups. In the CAR and Sudan, Wagner also runs private gold and diamond mines.

Russian President Vladimir Putin inaugurated a Russia-Africa summit in 2019 promising to help push back against “an array of Western countries [that] are resorting to pressure, intimidation and blackmail of sovereign African governments.” The second, far less well attended, summit held under conditions of anti-Russian sanctions and the war in Ukraine, took place last month, where a special effort was made to court Burkina Faso’s “interim leader” Colonel Ibrahim Traoré.

Russia has sought to leverage its relatively meagre resources to gain allies and the occasional lucrative venture, but China is throwing enormous economic weight behind securing control of Africa’s resources markets. It has controlling stakes in large swathes of the continent’s mining industry—including the bulk of uranium mines in Niger, plus its oil industry—forming part of a total FDI (foreign direct investment) stock of $43.4 billion in 2020, a 100-fold increase in 17 years.

China is Africa’s largest bilateral lender, loaning $153 billion in the two decades to 2019, and its second largest trade partner after the European Union, bigger than any other single country.

Both Russia and China are also major arms suppliers to sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 26 and 18 percent of sales respectively in the last five years, above third-place France at 8 percent, and the US at 5 percent.

In 2019, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) launched a five-year plan to “deter” what it called “Chinese and Russian malign action.” Former head of AFRICOM, Marine Corps Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, told Congress that year that both were after “access and influence to our detriment,” and that, within the decade, China could gain the capability to inhibit US military access and operations. The policy has remained unchanged since Trump’s Republicans were replaced by the Democrats under Biden.

Colin P. Clarke, former RAND analyst and current director of research at the global intelligence and security consultancy The Soufan Group, bluntly explained to Newsweek the implications of the Nigerien situation.

“This could take on the dimensions of a regional proxy war, with Western countries supporting ECOWAS and Russia supporting Niger—and Burkina Faso and Mali, if they joined in—with muscle from the Wagner Group.

“What’s happening in the Sahel is not a sideshow to great power competition, it is great power competition. The events unfolding are not doing so in a vacuum. The US, France, China, and Russia each have their own vested interests in Sahelian countries.”

Workers and the rural poor in Niger and West Africa are confronted with the catastrophe warned of by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) at its 1991 Berlin Conference of Workers against Imperialist War and Colonialism, held in response to the Gulf War.

The manifesto announcing that conference explained: “This ongoing and de facto partition of Iraq signals the start of a new division of the world by the imperialists. The colonies of yesterday are again to be subjugated. The conquests and annexations which, according to the opportunist apologists of imperialism, belonged to a bygone era are once again on the order of the day.”

Based on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, the statement warned that the struggle “against imperialist oppression cannot be waged successfully as long as the working class remains under the political domination of any wing of the national bourgeoisie.” It is inseparable from a fight against national ruling classes which have overseen the continued gruelling exploitation of the African masses, kept in power by militaries trained and funded by the imperialists.

Niger must above all serve as a warning to the working class all over the world of the urgent need to oppose the predatory war aims of the imperialist powers. As the ICFI and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality insisted in calling for the building of a worldwide movement against the NATO-Russia war:

The war in Ukraine is not an episode that will soon be resolved and followed by a return to “normalcy.” It is the beginning of a violent eruption of a global crisis that can be resolved only in one of two ways. The capitalist solution leads to nuclear war, though the word “solution” can hardly be rationally applied to what would amount to planetary suicide. Thus, the only viable response, from the standpoint of securing the future of mankind, is the world socialist revolution.

If the Taiwanese people join China by their own free will, what would happen?

USA will not allow it to happen. Why do you think all 3 Taiwan candidates needs to appear in US for an interview. They will be questioned on this issue and make their pledges this will not happen.

Scott Ritter Scrubbed From Youtube

Declan Hayes

August 14, 2023

Scott Ritter will survive. But over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have not survived the carnage that is a direct result of YouTube’s censorship of omission and commission.

The best place to begin a discussion of b scrubbing Scott Ritter from its public arena is with former English football international Matt Le Tissier, whose footprint can be still found all over social media.

In his interviews, Le Tissier comes across as a nice, well-balanced guy, who exudes the abundance of confidence which he himself admits made him such a formidable spot kicker for Southampton FC, which he loyally served for an impressive 16 years, despite getting much better offers from Spurs and other big clubs.

Retiring from football, Le Tissier became a successful pundit before being blackballed over his views, which he continues to express in the most moderate of terms, on censorship and overall state repression. Even more to our point, Le Tissier said that, as a pundit, he described the action from the point of view of a spectator and not as a manager or, in his case, a lethal forward, and that he left the complex strategic analysis and accompanying diagrams to others. In other words, even as a pundit, Le Tissier was a team player, who could see the overall picture and the best role he could play there.

The point here is that, whether we are looking at football or at NATO’s Ukrainian war, we should try eliciting views from many informed quarters, those like Ritter, with a modicum of relevant experience, included.

Although NATO would agree with that, they insist that military pundits must only express the views of Team NATO and no one else, as all else is mis-information, Putin propaganda and so on. Because Ritter not only differs from NATO’s narrative but actually admits to sometimes working in consort with informed Russians, NATO must have him gagged, for what possible benefit could there be for NATO in giving a Russian, any Russian, a fair hearing? As someone who wouldn’t go out of my way to listen to Ritter’s punditry or, for that matter, that of Le Tissier, that is still fundamentally wrong and, in the case of Ritter, dangerous.

It is dangerous because listening to echo chambers on Ukraine or any other war zone is not only dangerous but potentially lethal as well. This can now be seen in the case of Ukraine where, following the collapse of the much-vaunted Ukrainian Army that Ritter, Douglas Macgregor and other informed pundits long ago consistently predicted, MI6 agent Zelensky, a term I borrow from Ritter’s prior excellent work, is now pretending to clean up Ukraine’s rampant corruption, which Ritter repeatedly previously drew attention to.

Not only has NATO lied to us about every aspect of their Ukrainian war, just like they have lied to us about every single other of the countless wars they have waged since their inception but they want to muffle and ban every authoritative voice that might present us with a contrary view.

This is not to say that all views are equally valid and legitimate. They are not. Le Tissier was a pundit because he was an excellent and articulate player and Ritter, as he constantly reminds us, was a senior officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, which I would put on a par with Hitler’s Wehrmacht, many of whose generals, such as Erich von Manstein, provided valuable post-War insights and more of whom, such as Franz Halder, who served as Chief of Staff of Nazi Germany’s High Command from 1938 to 1942, was subsequently showered with medals and awards of appreciation by President John F Kennedy for perpetuating the myth of the “righteous war the clean Wehrmacht” fought against the Red Army’s Soviet Homeland, whose civilians remain NATO’s primary military target to this very day.

NATO has, of course, countless other targets, many of whom are like Gonzalo Lira, where Ritter has singularly missed the mark. Lira is, or rather was, our man on the spot, just as Nazi Party member John Rabe was our much better informed man on the spot during Japan’s Rape of Nanking for which NATO relentlessly pilloried investigative journalist Iris Chang until she suicided.

Scott Ritter, like Matt Le Tissier before him, is strong and resourceful. He will survive. But over 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers have not survived the carnage that is a direct result of the censorship of omission and commission YouTube and other NATO mis-information portals have spewed out. Though each of those soldiers had a story to tell, many of them, who could not afford to bribe their way to safety, came from the poorest strata of society, from mountainside hovels without even a window, never mind any semblance of what we might regard as the barest comforts of life. Instead of letting them be, Zelensky’s thugs kidnapped them and threw them into the meat grinder where they died unlamented, except by those who loved them and depended on them for their subsistence.

When we take Ukraine’s dead, wounded, orphaned, widowed, trafficked and abandoned into account, Zelensky and his YouTube and other NATO censors must have destroyed the lives of well over 4 million Ukrainians and that is without even looking at the Russian side of the lines.

But, because Lira and even Ritter may be our current men on the spot, historians in future years will probably thank them, just as the more honest amongst them previously thanked Rabe, for giving posterity the first draft of why so many millions of lives had to be blighted so low life porno actor Zelensky could accumulate his portfolio of mansions to house his impressive stable of mistresses.

Ritter and Lira, like Rabe before them, might well be just very minor footnotes to all this carnage. But the main authors of this carnage, criminals like Victoria Nuland and John Bolton, are not. Their self-serving threats against the International Criminal Court notwithstanding, all NATO curs like them have very serious questions to answer, the sort of charges Frank, Frick, Jodl, Kallenbrunner, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and Streicher all swung for in Nuremberg.

These NATO curs have repeatedly said that rough justice is for others, for those like their former Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein whom they lynched in 2006, or Gadaffi, whom they sodomised and murdered in 2011. But then there is also Stepan Bandera, who met his Maker in 1959 to settle, in part, vendettas these NATO gangsters continue to this day. And, though Ritter, Lipp, Lira and Assange are immaterial to settling such scores, until they are settled, there can be no justice and no peace because justice demands that NATO’s war criminals pay with their lives for their crimes and, as even the blind can see, as long as Nuland, Bolton and the rest of NATO’s swamp creatures remain uncaged, there definitely can be no peace.

15 Months On Mars: Ingenuity Finds Eerie Spacecraft Wreckage

WTF? Cool.

Through the Western lens

Through the Western lens means 3 things:

1. Ideological bigotry — liberal democracy is superior; China’s political system is evil, autocratic, repressive.
2. Western projection — Western colonialism has dominated the world for the last 500 years; therefore, China will also try to dominate the world similarly, either militarily or economically.
3. Fear of losing hegemony — China threatens the global hegemony of USA, UK and EU. China must be stopped.

Viewing China through this lens yields:

1. Anti-China propaganda to smear China’s reputation, turn world opinion against China and hopefully cause the world to decouple from China.
2. Economic and tech sanctions against China, depriving China of 5G market, semiconductors, FDI.
3. Military intimidation — naval exercises in Taiwan Strait, adding more military bases, selling arms to Taiwan.

The Western lens is blind to 3 facts:

1. China has fought no wars in over 40 years, since 1979, making China the most peaceful world power to have ever existed.
2. Outside of USA, UK and EU, the rest of the world holds a favorable view of China. The University of Cambridge published a study in October 2022 called, “A World Divided: Russia, China and the West.” It surveyed 137 countries representing 97% of the world’s population to uncover the favorability of Russia and China to these countries. It found that 70% of the world, excluding the Western countries, had a favorable view of China. Only 23% of Western countries thought well of China.
3. Evil, autocratic, repressive China has the most trusted and satisfactory government in the world. According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, 89% of Chinese trust their government compared to 56% for France, 51% for Canada, 47% for Germany, 46% for Italy, 42% for USA, 37% for UK, 36% for Spain, and 33% for Japan.

A November 2019 Ipsos survey shows that 94 percent of Chinese believe their country is on the right track.

According to the Global Happiness 2023 survey from Ipsos, China is the happiest country in the world at 91% compared to 76% for USA, 74% for Canada and France, and 70% for UK.

According to Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School in 2020, 95.5% of Chinese are satisfied with their government.

A 2019 UC San Diego study shows a high level of satisfaction among the Chinese across a range of aspects up to 95 percent.

According to Latana’s Democracy Perception Index 2023, China is the 6th most democratic nation on earth, well ahead of Germany, Spain, Canada, Italy, UK, USA, France, and Japan.

Use Google search to verify all of the above. Don’t take my word for it.

Western democracy is a failed model. US democracy has degenerated into a plutocracy. UK democracy is a mess. Indian democracy is a mess.

We have bozo leaders like Biden, Trump, Trudeau, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Scholz, Modi, Zelensky, etc.

Western democracy allowed millions of people to die needlessly from the pandemic.

Western democracy allowed UK and EU to f*ck up their economies thanks to Russian sanctions.

USA is in very sad shape because of a totally incompetent government…

• $32 trillion national debt
• crumbling infrastructure
• homelessness
• unaffordable health care
• rampant gun violence
• mass incarceration
• fentanyl crisis
• increasing poverty

The list is endless.

India can’t get a handle on ethnic strife and human rights issues. It has poor education and poor infrastructure. China’s economy is 5.2 times larger by nominal GDP and 2.5 times larger by purchasing power parity when, by rights, India’s economy should be roughly on par with China’s. Thank India’s democracy for this.

The West is a waking up…

The US obsession with China is 100% a “they hate us cuz they ain’t us” situation.

Forty years ago, the Chinese were living in rice fields. Now, they’re all super rich and living in cities that look like the Mars Base from Total Recall.

Last time I was there, I was so shocked by the affluence of the general population that I literally made this face:

They had to give me tea to relax.

But seriously, I’m thinking of making a trip to China and making a documentary proving that it is a much better country.

A Chinese friend invited me. He’s not even really rich, and he was like “yeah – you can stay at my place. You can sleep on the couch. It’s not a problem – I have 200 couches.”

A Litany of Lies

by Arch Bungle
Lifted from an off-topic comment.

Being a catalogue of the lies I have imbibed through by means of torturous exposure to Anglo-American Newspapers and the rumor mills of Continental Europe.

See the examples below:

1. The Russian MIC cannot manufacture semiconductors. All their semiconductors are obtained via the black market from western sources. Or Iran. Or China. Or North Korea (all of whom are themselves under sanctions!).
2. The Russian microchip industry doesn’t exist (But the Russians can build things with black market American chips that even the Japanese can’t build)
3. The Russian microchip industry has collapsed (How something that doesn’t exist “collapses” I am not sure, but there you are)
4. Putin is a Dictator. He micromanages every single aspect of Russian Society up to the frontline battles (The Surovikhin Line should actually be renamed the “Putin Line”. But russian military bloggers and even military staff are criticising him on a daily basis without apparent consequence, and outspoken media figures are allowed to hurl an endless stream of criticism against Putin and his conduct of the war).
5. Putin is Russia and “Russia is Putin” (And that one aging bureaucrat alone is enough to terrify the West )
6. Russia / Putin is Isolated from the global community (Because everyone knows the “International Community” consists of white folks plus some honorary members like the Japs and South Koreans (whose membership may soon be up anyway))
7. The Russian economy is insignificant and smaller than Italy/Texas/France/etc. (it’s only the biggest economy in Europe by PPP, and nobody cares about PPP)
8. The Soviet Union was an Empire and Russia is seeking to restore it’s imperialism
9. Putin is a “Thug” and a “Murderer” (Because he bombed all those Afghan weddings, blockaded the starving people of Yemen and stated publicly that 500 000 Iraqi children were a worthy sacrifice to Mammon)
10. Russian military operations are at a disadvantage at night due to inferior night vision (The AFU on the other hand has access to the best NATO night vision technology)
11. Russia is starving the world by withdrawing from the grain deal
12. The Oil Price Cap, defying all laws of economic gravity, has been surprisingly effective in strangling Russian oil revenues
13. Russia is running out of artillery/drones/tanks/men Russia is salvaging microchips from dishwashers
14. Putin is dying from Alzheimers/Parkinsons/Cancer
15. Russia is stealing millions of Ukrainian children and abducting them to Russian territory
16. Putin eats brains cooked by Prigozine
17. Prigozine was Putin’s Chef (literally)
18. Russian army is demoralised and bordering on mutiny
19. Putin’s inner circle is plotting a coup against him (It’s going as slow as the SMO because they also believe in the slow grinding approach)
20. [Counter-Narrative character assassination] Putin was responsible for the Moscow Apartment Bombings
21. Russian army is incompetent and poorly trained
22. Russian satellite coverage of the battlespace is poor, so poor large swathes of Ukraine are completely invisible to them
23. Russian army has poor targeting precision. So bad that even a large CEP and a salvo won’t help
24. Russia is deliberately targeting civilians
25. Ukraine is not targeting civilians (deliberately)
26. Putin is preparing to colonise Africa (The Africans will be given a choice of Russia, China, The EU or the US for their new colonial masters)
27. The Wagner group is involved somehow in the coup in Niger
28. Russia has been making extensive use of cluster munitions since the start of the SMO (Extensive evidence of this to be found in Bucha, Mariupol and Kherson)
29. Ukraine has an artillery advantage over Russia (July/June 2023)
30. NATO tactics are superior to Russian battlefield tactics (Specifically the training provided by the Brits, those eternal masters of battlefield tactics going back to the charge of the light brigade)
31. Putin has a poor grasp of strategy (As compared to Biden, Sunak, Boris Johnson, Olaf Scholtz, Jens Stotenberg, Milley, Von der Leyen and Borell who are strategic geniuses)
32. The Sanctions Are Working (Just like they worked against Iran, Cuba, North Korea, the Houthi, China, Vietnam …)
33. The HIMARS Missile system will be a “game changer” (It’s impossible to shoot down a hi mars round, and not a single Himars system has been destroyed)
34. American drones will be a “game changer” (especially the little spy ones)
35. The AFU has “semi-encircled” the Russian forces in Bakhmut/Artyomsk
36. Byraktar will be a game-changer (Because somehow the Turks managed to evolve from kebab makers to advanced drone manufacture. Who do they think they are, Iranians?)
37. F16s will turn the tide of the battle in Ukraines favour
38. X wonder weapon will “turn the tide against Russia” (I thought the tide was already in Ukraine’s favour from the start?)
39. X general/commander has been fired/sacked/discipled
40. X and Y generals have a personal rivalry that is affecting Russian battlefield performance
41. The Russian army is dependent on decrepit Soviet-era equipment (e.g old Soviet Hypersonic missiles)
42. There’s nothing special about Ukraine’s neo-nazi problem since neo-nazism is a worldwide problem.
43. There are no weapons bio-labs in Ukraine operated by the Pentagon
44. The weapons labs operated in Ukraine by the pentagon are not a threat to Russia
45. Russia Attacked Ukraine Unprovoked (The bombing of civilians in donbas was no reason to go in guns blazing. R2P is the divine right of Europeans only)
46. NATO made no commitment (written or otherwise) to not advance on Russia’s borders (Gorbacheff was drunk and hallucinating at the time)
47. The SMO has nothing to do with the NATO advancement in Eastern Europe
48. The SMO has nothing to do with the 8-year killings of ethnic russians in donbas
49. Cluster munitions are acceptable in Ukraine’s case since they’re in dire straits
50. The Russians invaded Ukraine in 2014 (“Little Green Men”)
51. Russian tanks are inferior to American tanks (Even Shermans.)Russian tanks are inferior to German tanks (Even WW2 tiger tanks)
52. Russian tanks are inferior to French tanks (Especially in reverse)
53. The Russian army is the second most powerful one in the world (Second most powerful in Ukraine, which means the AFU is the most powerful army in the world)
54. Putin is a Crypto-Jew (Because there are some photos of a Putin-looking dude wearing a weird cap)
55. Ukraine cannot be a NAZI state because it’s president is Jewish
56. [Counter-Narrative Character Assassination] Alexander Mercouris is a convicted criminal
57. [Counter-Narrative Character Assassination] Scott Ritter is a convicted paedophile
58. “X” pro-russian commentator has never been right (non of his predictions has come true)
59. “Y” pro-Russian commentator is a convicted x,y,z (character assassinations)
60. The sanctions will work if we only apply enough rounds of sanctions!
61. The Russian economy is in tatters!
62. Putin is losing the political support of his people: Protests breaking out all over Russia with a possible cooler revolution brewing
63. The Ukrainian Counteroffensive (June/July/August 2023) is/was/will be successful
64. Russia is firing S300 missiles into Poland (over Ukrainian airspace)
65. The Russo Ukraine war started in 2022
66. The Russian Army is using Human Wave attacks (wagner’s HR department must be the most efficient on planet earth – a revolution in HR affairs for sure)
67. The Russian Army is targeting civilians (And yet the Russians have poor targeting ability?)
68. The Russian army is using cluster munitions since the start of the war (with not a single mention in the media until the US decided to suggest using them?)
69. Putin wants to expand the Russian empire into Europe (including such useless basket cases like the Greeks, Italians, French and Spaniards and those malevolent psychopaths the Germans)
70. Ukrainian Grain is key to solving world hunger (But the EU frequently rejects the grain due to toxins?)
71. ‘International Law’ says x , y , z about the SMO (the same international law that has no enforcer or single legislative body acknowledged internationally)
72. NATO is a defensive organisation (Except when it comes to brown people in non-european countries, or yugoslavs, who may be bombed with wild abandon)
73. NATO is limited to the “North Atlantic” (Libya is a north atlantic country of course, everybody knows THAT)
74. NATO has greater military power than Russia (An organisation made up mostly of countries who got their asses kicked by the Wehrmacht or paid Russia to do their fighting for them are now suddenly the most powerful military force on earth)
75. Putin is in league with the Russian Oligarchs and therefore targeting the Oligarchs harms Putin (which explains why they’re fleeing Russia for London)
76. Ukrainian attacks on civilian infrastructure are justified (but Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure are not. All Ukrainian attacks on civilians are unintentional, including the couple killed on Kerch bridge orphaning their daughter)
77. The Russian Tank Autoloader is inferior to the manually loaded western tank loader (Because a meat-bag on captagon can outperform automation in any era)
78. The Ukrainian offensive is stalling because NATO is drip-feeding weapons to the regime’ (But still Ukraine is winning!).
79. Current hostilities between the AFU and the RF are “stalemated” (Even in Kupyansk)
80. Current hostilities between the AFU and the RF are “stalled” (but Ukraine is making ‘incremental gains’, but Russia is not making ‘incremental gains’)
81. The Tochka missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station was perpetrated by Russians using an old Soviet missile from Ukrainian stocks.
82. The Russian people are collectively responsible for Putin’s war on Ukraine (So they need re-education and De-Russification)
83. The Ukrainian Industry is continuing as normal despite the war. It’s glorious industrial machine pumps out tanks, shells, missiles, semiconductors, fuel and grain at impressive levels, supplying The World and their own army with important commodities (Motorsich is running fine producing tanks for the AFU, jet engines for the Ukrainian Airforce, the neon/argon production facilities have not been captured by Russia, oil reserve facilities are untouched).
84. Life in Ukrainian cities is continuing as normal despite the war. All is well. Pool parties and street celebrations are commonplace. (Millions of Ukrainians have not fled for Europe, it was merely the tourist high season, hospitals are not filled with the casualties of war, funeral hearses in their thousands are not seen in the streets, WW2 cemeteries are not seeing a capacity problem …)
85. If the west only gets rid of Putin Russia will collapse and the West will be victorious. (This short, balding, 70-year old bureaucrat is the only one standing between Victoria Nuland and “World Domination”).
86. The use of nuclear weapons by Russia will end the war and the world will be at peace thereafter (or some variation thereof).
87. Ukraine should be grateful to the West for supplying the Ukrainian Army (But the West owes Ukraine nothing for fighting their wars for them?)
88. General Gerasimov was killed on the battlefield.
89. Putin is dead and what we’re seeing is one of his many body doubles (The body double is somehow as worthy of hatred as the original and as capable of running Russia as the OG Putin (anybody watched Foundation Series lately?))
90. Russia is the last bastion of the “white, straight, christian male” and is fighting this war in the name of White Christendom (not the chechen muslim, tengrist buryat, buddhist tuvan, shamanist Yakhut … no they’re all just immigrant labour shipped in for their “white” masters)
91. The Ukrainians should never have surrendered their USSR nuclear weapons (the ones they never had control of to begin with)
92. If you were against the invasion of Iraq by the USA you should be equally against the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (During which Vasiliy Nebenziya stood up in the UNSC waving a vodka bottle filled with Novichok as evidence the Ukraine was using chemical weapons against “it’s own people”)
93. The Ukrainian Counteroffensive (June/July/August 2023) is/was/will be successful
94. The USA is able to fund the Ukraine war on Russia indefinitely (because “infinite money printer capacity” = “infinite manufacturing capacity” and all this manufacturing capacity can be restored to the US in the space of a few months, just like 9 women can birth a single baby in 1 month if working in parallel)
95. The Ukrainians are winning because they’ve taken back 50% of the territory Russia took from them in a fraction of the time Russia took to take it (at the cost of more than 50% of the Ukrainian army, and just not the part Russia truly cares about. The other 50% of the land will cost another 50% of the AFU probably)
96. The Wagner Coup’ (Because a 10 minute speech by Putin is enough to stop a coup right in the tracks)
97. the Wagner Mutiny (Because somewhere there was a ship involved)
98. The Wagner Protest (Minus the protest placards)
99. The Wagner Insurrection (Because a couple of clowns barreling down the road with some stolen artillery can take on the entire Red Army)
100. The Wagner Invasion of Poland (Because “why not”?)
101. The Russian people would rise up and overthrow the Putin regime if they could only just receive CNN, BBC, MSNBC (Because they’re all nostalgic for a repeat of the 1990s)
102. The West has unparalleled media freedom (as long as you don’t watch RT, Sputnik, Iranian Opress-TV, Al-Manar because those are obvious propaganda, because we think so)
103. Putin intends to invade Moldova (skipping on right past Lvov because “Stretch goals: we can do better!”).
104. Putin is “weaponising” hunger by forcing the West to impose grain sanctions on Russia (“I made you hit me in the face to hurt your hand”).
105. The Wagner ‘insurrection’ left Putin weakened politically (So weak he had to deliver an entire 10 minute speech including pauses to shut the whole thing down completely).
106. US Patriot missiles in Kiev shot down Russia’s hypersonic Khinzal missiles without sustaining significant damage.
107. Ukrainian Air Defences are capable of shooting down Khinzal hypersonic missiles (but by their own admission cannot defend against Onyx, probably because Onyx beats Dagger in trading card games)
108. …

Posted by b on August 14, 2023 at 17:45 UTC | Permalink

To add a handful more on top of my mind…

108. Journalist Julian Assange raped women and it’s only normal this journalist is locked up in high security prison Belmarch rotting away with psychopaths and murderers
109. The West is not a party to the Ukraine conflict
110. Putin/FSB bombed Nord Streams, Kerch, Kashovka dam in a 5D chess move
111. Putin/FSB murdered Darya Dugina/Vladlen Tatarsky in a 6D chess move
112. Russia would never use nukes against the West so there’s absolutely no risk in ever escalating the war
113. Russia would only use nukes against Ukraine, never the Western war participant so never mind upping the ante
114. The Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 case was carried out by Russians and directing the flight route over the most active war zone of that time as well as lowering the flight altitude from the usual 10 km to 8 km is just imagination
115. To let the war finally end, more weapons payed for by Western tax payers are necessary… war is peace
116. RT, Sputnik News and so many more information streams need censoring to protect our freedom… ignorance is bliss
117. Europe is now totally free of Russian hydro carbons
118. …

Posted by: xor | Aug 14 2023 19:21 utc | 14

Europe is FINISHED as NATO Bleeds Dry in Ukraine w/ Brian Berletic

Vladimir Zelensky, Russian Hero

2023-06-07

During his tenure as president of (what remains of) the Ukraine, Zelensky has wrecked the Ukraine, but has achieved many great things… for Russia. Here are his main achievements in no particular order:

• By being elected with the promise of ending hostilities, then immediately proceeding to escalate the conflict in the east, he thoroughly compromised what was left of Ukrainian democracy. He further demolished the Ukraine’s civic realm by banning all public media except for one government channel, banning all opposition and all Russian news sources and, in effect, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship.

• By relentlessly shelling the civilians in the now Russian Donetsk and Lugansk regions, then, in the spring of 2022, threatening them with a genocidal assault, he provided Russia with an ironclad reason to start the Special Military Operation: to save civilian lives. By so doing, he helped to expand Russian territory by four very valuable provinces (Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) and set the stage for the eventual addition of, among others, Nikolaev, Odessa, Kharkov, and Kiev regions.

• He squandered $150 billion in foreign aid (much of it by the simple expedient of stealing it), expended a huge amount of military equipment and ammunition with nothing to show for it, and killed off 350 thousand Ukrainian soldiers (many of them Nazi war criminals), with possibly twice as many wounded.

• He shrunk his country’s population by almost half, some of it moving to Russia, becoming Russian citizens and integrating productively into the Russian population while rest went to the European Union, becoming a major burden for the welfare budgets of EU countries.

• By ordering Ukrainian troops to shell schools, kindergartens, hospitals and apartment buildings in universally recognized Russian regions such as Belgorod and by launching drone attacks directly on the Kremlin, he declared his government to be a terrorist organization, foreclosing any possibility of forcing Russia to negotiate a peace that would not be entirely on its own terms.

• He demonstrated the superiority of Russian weapons and military technique over NATO’s, most recently with Russia’s destruction of one of the Patriot missile batteries provided by the US. Almost every bit of equipment the West has been able to provide to the Ukrainians has been shown to be inferior to its Russian counterpart.

• He gave the Russian army ample opportunities to perfect their techniques for defeating NATO forces, venturing into new areas of drone warfare and battlefield surveillance from geostationary satellites. This will no doubt be very useful both in opposing NATO and in boosting future weapons sales to non-Western nations that wish to be free from Western oppression and meddling.

• He sold some of the weapons he received from the US to Mexican drug cartels, leaving US officials with no other choice than closing their eyes and pretending that this did not happen. Perhaps they will also be forced to look the other way as these cartels make use of these weapons to take over more and more of US cities and towns.

• He played host to many high-ranking Western officials, whom, on their to visit to Kiev, he presented with lavish presents such as suitcases of foreign aid money he had laundered, which these officials then brought home in diplomatic baggage, thus collecting blackmail material on all of them.

• He set an example for other Russian Jews whose bad luck had caused them to end up in the Ukraine rather than in Russia by resettling his parents in a posh neighborhood in Israel. But he kept his wife by his side, where she did a good job demoralizing the Ukrainian population by squandering more money on a single European shopping spree than most Ukrainians see in several lifetimes, all paid for by the US taxpayer. She also worked hard to gaslight Western officials by making them accept at face value and repeat ridiculous tales, such as the one about Russian troops being issued viagra, for them to better rape Ukrainian women.

• Zelensky is sometimes incautious; for instance, he got caught appointing operatives from Russia’s Federal Security Service (former KGB) to sensitive posts within the Ukrainian defense establishment, although it is unclear whether what’s left of the Ukrainian judiciary will be capable of prosecuting him.

• One of his greatest achievements was in placing the US and NATO in a zugzwang. This is a chess term for a situation in which a player has a choice of several moves, all of which lead to defeat. The US and NATO can either continue supporting the Ukraine, or they can stop supporting the Ukraine; in either case, they will lose.

• Perhaps his greatest achievement of all was in helping Russia turn away from its hostile neighbors in the West and toward friendly countries in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America, cutting its economic, financial and cultural ties to the West and freeing itself from Western influences. His unwavering support for Ukrainian Nazis, whose emblems, insignia and slogans are styled after Nazi Germany and whose heroes are Nazi collaborators, coupled with the lavish support they received from the West, whose leaders chose to turn a blind eye toward their fascist proclivities, cemented in view of the Russians the view of the West as their existential enemy: a fascist, racist entity determined to destroy Russia but too weak and cowardly to do the job themselves.

All of this begs a question: Whom does Vladimir Zelensky serve?

More…

Why does the whole world dislike Chinese?

Only 15% of the world’s population dislikes China; they make up the G7. They dislike China because it is a threat to what they think is their monopoly on global influence.

They call themselves “the world” because western-owned media has global influence.

The other 85% of the world either likes China or doesn’t care.

Putin: NO WAR In AFRICA

How would Italians react if a Chinese made dog pizza and sold it?

Hi, SJ-Z . Thanks for your very interesting question!

I guess Italians would be super surprised at just how much the Chinese spoil their pets.

Recently, 网易天成 (NetEase Tian Cheng), a subsidiary of 网易 (NetEase, the Chinese internet technology company) that specializes in medium-to-high-end pet food, partnered with 必胜客（Pizza Hut) to come up with a “Chinese-made dog pizza” that is safe to be consumed by dogs (and cats!).

The dog pizza is the brown disk thingy in the picture below:

This is what the “Chinese-made dog pizza” looks like in promotional material:

In the close up below, you can see that on the top of the pizza box, written in Chinese:

宠物零食
冻干生骨肉珍享比萨

This translates to:

Pet Snack
Freeze Dried Raw Bone Meat Premium Pizza

To be honest, to me, it doesn’t look at all appetizing.

But then again, it’s made for dogs and cats.

Maybe dogs and cats don’t take visual aesthetics into account when it comes to their choice of nosh:

This pizza is part of 网易天成 & PizzaHut‘s “人宠同吃” (Pets eat together with us) promotional marketing campaign.

Basically, you buy a package deal at Pizza Hut that includes:

– a set meal for the humans
– the “Chinese-made dog pizza”
– Pet items/plushies

More marketing collateral from the campaign:

So, SJ-Z , at the end of the day, I guess it’s whether the dogs (and the cats) are actually going to eat this “Chinese-made dog pizza”.

I mean… you know how fussy some dogs and cats can be with their food…

I checked out Chinese social media platforms, and it appears that there are dogs (and cats) out there who will consume a “Chinese-made dog pizza”.

I guess, while it may look unappetizing to me, it’s tasty enough for them:

816 views

Which incident did you consider to be an absurd hoax but later found out to be crazily true?

Many, many years ago I received a letter in the post. It was a recorded delivery and I had to sign for it to confirm delivery. I was intrigued and opened it immediately. It was a summons to appear in our local small claims court. I was being sued for £6,000. There were no details about the charges or any explanation of what the case was about other than the name and address of the complainant. I was mystified as I didn’t recognise the name. Lets call him Mr Smith.

In the three weeks before the stated date I convinced myself that one of my sons was playing an involved joke on me. I quizzed them all mercilessly but nobody would admit to knowing anything about it. As the date drew closer I determined to go to court just to find out which of my boys was the perpetrator of this rather involved joke.

Court day arrived and I went into the court building and presented my summons to an attendant, still expecting to be told it was a forgery. I was wrong. I was politely directed to a small waiting room and told my case would be called in 10 minutes. I was stunned.

When I was escorted into the courtroom the Sheriff (a lay judge in Scotland) asked me if I had a legal representative. I explained how I thought that the summons was a joke and I had no lawyer. He said that I could ask for a deferment to get legal advice if I choose but he didn’t think that was necessary. I sat down still stunned and confused but by now rather scared.

The Sheriff now asked the other side to outline their case. I listened in stunned amazement as the story unfolded.

Apparently some 6 months previously I had sold Mr Smith a tenpin bowling ball and drilled the ball to suit his hand. I had explained to him the need to keep the ball clean of lane oil on a regular basis. Mr Smith had taken me at my word and had left his bowling ball soaking in a bathtub of hot soapy water overnight. Feeling that the finger and thumb holes were wet when he fished the ball out of the bath in the morning he had decided to dry out the ball. Fifteen or twenty minutes in the microwave should dry it out nicely.

Some time later the ball had exploded. The force of the explosion was enough to destroy the microwave and send the door of the microwave flying upward with enough energy to punch through the ceiling and the floor of the room above his kitchen. Unfortunately the room above his kitchen was his neighbours bathroom. The microwave door not only punched through the floor but punched through the actual bath. Really unfortunately the poor woman was taking a bath at the time.

She was suing Mr Smith for the damage to her bathroom from the flying microwave door as well as the water damage to her carpets from the bath full of water. She wasn’t suing for the shock of a microwave door suddenly puncturing her bath although it must have been a terrific shock.

Mr Smith was suing me for the same amount on the basis that I had sold him a bowling ball without specifically telling him not to put it in the microwave.

By this stage several people in the gallery were laughing and the sheriff was definitely smiling. I was still worried but feeling considerably less scared. We all sat politely until Mr Smith’s lawyer had finished. The Sheriff then drew himself very straight and without a trace of a smile said that he was here to apply the law of the land and not to educate idiots. Case dismissed.

What happened that made you walk out of the courtroom and think, “That did not just happen”?

So there I was, sitting in traffic court to plead for a reduced fine and or a payment arrangement. The courtroom was packed, it would appear there were many traffic law criminals in the small town I was appearing in.

So I sit and wait my turn.

And wait…

and wait…

After most of the morning had passed, there were only 15–20 of us left. The judge however stopped calling cases. He was busily doing his after-court paperwork for a good ten minutes. Finally, he looks back out to the courtroom and asks “Why are you all still here?”

The response from more than one of us was we had tickets and were here for our day in court. The judge looked quite unhappy as he side-barred with his clerk. When the conversation was over he looked out at us and said “It would appear my office was not prepared for you all to come today. Since the city cannot see fit to be ready for your legally required court date I am dismissing every one of your cases. Please give your name to the clerk as you exit. Also please accept my apologies for the City’s inability to do its job.”

I am of course paraphrasing, it was long ago, but that is the gist of what happened. As we all filed out we were entertained by the Judge’s not-so-discrete chewing out of his staff.

BRICS prepares to destroy the USD